Driving and Dragging Loops
Your design counts for nothing if no-one can be bothered to experience it
Why do some experiences draw you in, naturally unfolding, while others feel like homework? An experience designer creates a space that people are drawn toward, where they can explore and realise their potential. Deep down people want to play, even in the most mundane moments. In my work on indie games and creative tools, all the hardest problems stem from the psychology of teaching and learning.
Imagine your users as eager heroes-in-training, rushing ahead with unearned confidence. When we design, we are coaching them. This means primarily designing with the mind in mind, not the concrete artefacts. Experience design is more about dynamics than statics. Which way is this trending? What feelings does this create? What are the flow-on incentives?
Design can seem like a craft of fixed points—fonts, colours, palettes—but on closer inspection reveals itself as something more subtle: the art of drawing people in and keeping them invested. Your design counts for nothing if no-one can be bothered to experience it. The end product is the felt experience that people have, not the one you imagined for them.
Learning to Dance
The early stages of an experience are fragile. It’s embarrassing to learn to dance, even without an audience. To draw people in you need:
immediate demonstration of value
clear purpose behind each imposed task
a few, easily cleared, hurdles to gain confidence on
A single moment of wondering "why am I doing this?" or, worse, "I feel like I'm doing this wrong!" can lead someone to give up completely. It’s important to go over the first few steps of your design with a fine toothed comb, as many times as you can stomach, forever. The early stages aren't just fragile—they're where most users spend most of their time.
Once you clear the early hurdles, the macro trend starts to matter more than the small frictions. Are your loops driving users forward or dragging them back?
People will work for tangible rewards, but they need help starting the engine. Whenever you ask someone to understand something new, the difficulty spikes. This is expected, the key is how it spikes. We should step up our training in small steps, a spike followed by a relief... then a new challenge. The ideal is a challenge that you think you can complete, despite never having completed it before. Repeated failure will discourage anyone. Unobstructed progress is boring and makes any experience seem trivial.
"Intuitive" to Who?
What do we mean when we say something is "intuitive"? In practice, it often means something matches our past experiences—and sometimes that experience gets in the way.
Consider how web devs talk about modern Javascript being "intuitive," or how object-oriented programming "just makes sense". What are they really seeing? Once you've absorbed certain patterns, you're changed by them. An experienced engineer might look at a spreadsheet's raw formulae and dismiss it because it "doesn't scale"—but what are you missing?
Perhaps the sweet spot is keeping users in partial pattern-matching mode, where understanding feels just within reach. For newcomers, make things inductively discoverable. For experts? Either match their expectations perfectly or break them immediately—and show them why it's worth the leap.
Is it me?!
When you ask a user to make a leap and they can't see where they'll land, it often becomes an identity crisis: "I understand reasonable things, so if I don't get this, something must be wrong with it… or else something is wrong with me." This logic is obviously faulty, but it's the status quo when anyone onboards into anything. It’s easy to trigger a self-conscious response and send a user spiralling.
Good designers are like good coaches, or perhaps the systems they create are "coaching systems". We design systems that help users feel like they're catching on at just the right pace. Setting achievable goals and building momentum to keep them in the flow channel.
Driving vs. Dragging
When users can see where they're going, they don't need faith. They can feel themselves getting closer, each layer building naturally, each answer leading to better questions.
They can also feel when friction is dragging on them. Over time, they’ll fall out of step with the rhythm and lose the sense of reward. People abandon most tools they try. Look at the graveyard of PKM and 'tools for thought'—only the stubbornly determined make it through the battle with complex tools.
Great experiences are like great music: layered curves of tension and release playing around one another. Small wins that resolve in minutes, medium challenges that span hours, and larger arcs that might take weeks to complete. When these rhythms align with users' natural reward systems, progress feels inevitable. Each summit reveals the next goal, and users find themselves moving forward almost without thinking.
Design isn't about eliminating friction—it's about knowing your users and creating dynamics that let draw them into a driving feedback loop. Once they those first uneasy steps, the drag fades and the driving force takes over.
Design lives in this orchestration of felt momentum. Not in the static qualities—"intuitive," "familiar," "logical"—but in the interplay of challenge, skill and flow. Great experiences don't just teach; they invite discovery at precisely the pace each user can sustain.
Ben ✌️
P.S. WizardChess 1.0 has a release date! After 1000 years, I am almost free from the curse of the Roguelike Deckbuilder.