Pokémon Go, Amazon Dash, and the Future of User Interaction

Sustainable success requires the right touch; sustainable digital success requires the right touchpoints. Already the fastest-growing mobile game in US history, Pokémon Go’s astonishing popularity highlights how profoundly touchpoints — any interaction between your customer and your offer — define and design user experience. Much of Go’s global appeal comes from an augmented reality sensibility that literally and figuratively transforms real-world environments into digital playgrounds. Touchpoints brilliantly coalesce into “touch surfaces” and “touch constellations.”

But Pokémon Go’s accelerating success shouldn’t obscure that touchpoint transformation is becoming a transcendental design driver for UX across industries.Traditional UX definitions barely mention — let alone describe — “touchpoint design.” But it’s increasingly clear that touchpoints are becoming platforms in their own right.

Amazon’s Dash buttons offer a superb minimalistic example. Individually, they’re simple, dedicated and disciplined to a specific outcome. Collectively, they represent both a platform and portfolio of options and outcomes for easy and convenient purchase. With apologies to Nintendo’s Pokémon designers, Dash buttons similarly augment physical reality.

As one reviewer insightfully observed, “Dash is really an augmentation of existing hardware. Rather than plucking down ten of these in a column, like a control panel, they go where they make sense. The one for ordering more coffee goes on your coffeemaker. The one for ordering more laundry detergent goes on the front of your washing machine. Put the battery one on the gaming console, and the Red Bull one on the mini fridge.” Touchpoint form follows touchpoint function.

My current favorite example comes from Net-a-Porter reaching out to my wife. The company had been running a sale and sending her several colorful promotions encouraging her to shop one more time. Nothing clever there. But the last mobile message came with a touchpoint inviting her to look at what goodies were left in her size. In other words, this touchpoint encouraged and facilitated a bespoke search. Of course she checked.

Simply calling this a clever promotion or thoughtful UX or engagement marketing misses the (touch)point. My wife received a highly specific, highly targeted, contextually relevant invitation to touch something that could save her time as well as money. Of course, it’s part of Net-a-Porter’s larger UX but, in the moment, what’s perceived and experienced is a value-added touchpoint.

Four concurrent Ps make touchpoint transformation work. Touchpoints become:

Purposes: Networked digital technology has turned the touchpoint from a “point of contact” to an explicit “point of purpose.” The focus is on a desired or desirable outcome. Something happens that matters. Like Lego and Raspberry Pi, targeted touchpoints easily assemble into platforms that can deliver personalized results. This holds as true for Tinder as for Snapchat filters.

Prompts: They nudge, encourage and invite the user to touch them, to take a specific action. Please swipe me/press me/click me and something good will happen. This is as true for augmented reality games as new Jimmy Choos.

Probes: Touchpoints let users access more information and insight about the larger experience. Ideally, users learn just enough to decide whether they want to do – or play or order – more. (Note that an individual Amazon Dash button isn’t a probe but that the Dash Button platform/portfolio surely is.)

Perspectives: Touchpoints provide novel perspective; that is, they enable users to see and/or experience the service from different views and angles. These perspectives can be visual or informational. Pokémon Go’s augmented reality and Snapchat filters are perspective creators. They make it easier to appreciate or understand the probe and/or prompt the touchpoint proffers.

Aligning these four Ps – or turning them into a virtuous cycle of touchpoint personalization and customization – will increasingly become one of digital media’s important UX design challenges. This will prove as important for mobile devices as for home/office/workplace environments. Successfully creating and enabling simple micro-interactions that generate macro results should inspire next-generation design and designers.

My own curiosity and concern around purposive “purposes-prompts-probes-perspectives” centers on the chatbot future. Chatbots – whether spoken or swiped – represent precisely the kind of medium where clarity and simplicity of touchpoints will prove essential to quick, high-impact interaction. How machine learning and artificial intelligence will sculpt and shape those touchpoints remains a great unknown. But, as Pokémon Go’s success overwhelmingly suggests, humans will want bots who make touchpoints playful and play touching.