Tech Easter Eggs: 4 Ways To Add Magic To Your Product

I’ve written 76 blogs on this website as of time of writing, and the vast majority of them are lionising technology as the 21st century cornucopia that can provide for all, if implemented in the right way.

But there’s a problem. 

Much like Peter Pan in the film Hook, tech has lost its magic in recent years, and become a bit corporate and stale. 

There’s a great article on how the ‘internet used to be a place’, but it fails to scratch a certain part of my brain that flares up when considering the ‘selling out’ of the Internet : how do we make it better?

When considering this, there are objective truths we have to consider, namely that tech = money, and wherever there is money, a certain level of corporatisation is to be expected. But that doesn’t mean it has to be the same as the ‘old ways’ of making money. In the words of Barry Speck from the overtly mediocre mid 2000s comedy film Dinner For Schmucks : ‘you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not’.

This blog is meant to highlight ways tech companies have incorporated a little bit of magic into their products, so you can learn how to spin these into your own worlds too.

Chrome’s dinosaur game

Everyone knows this one.

If you can’t connect to a website, instead of a standard 404-style error page,  you’ll instead see a little pixelated dinosaur, that upon pressing the spacebar, you can make run a gauntlet in a fun mini game.

The psychology behind this is fascinating. Google took something that’s objectively the platonic non-ideal output for their product, i.e. their web browser can’t browse the thing you are looking for, and they turned it into something fun.

That’s the core takeaway here. Think of what the worst thing your product can do, usually a 404 or 500 error, and build a way for the end-user to at least get some enjoyment out of it. 

Netlify does this with the time it takes to host a React application on their service. What would usually be a boring 5-10 minutes whilst you wait for your app to inevitably fail to render because you ballsed something up (I may be projecting here), becomes a fun game of Pairs.

Again, this isn’t just a random fun little game. 

It A) keeps you on site and B) minimises the amount of time you perceive to have passed between clicking Go and getting your end result, as gaming has been shown to distort time perception in clinical studies. If you can’t make your load time better, or prevent the dreaded 404, introduce some joy and magic to reduce mental damage to your brand.

Google’s Doodles

Google’s UI is enviably simple. It’s just an input bar, literally something you learn to build in Coding 101. 

This gives them tonnes of room to experiment with artistic styles and designs without sacrificing functionality. And this is exactly what they do with their now eponymous Doodles.

Usually used to commemorate a specific event or person, Doodles are one of those bits of tech magic that reach through the screen and embed themselves in your memory. 

I still remember when they built a fully functional game of PacMan into the Google home screen, and I imagine my year 8 teacher remembers it as well, due to us all incessantly playing it for the entire class.

Do you have incredibly functionally competent areas of your site? Do you want to spice them up? Add some character to them, and watch as users flock to them and share them via word of mouth for a compounding effect.

Whoops message to competitors

As someone who has worked in startups for around 6-7 years now, I understand one thing.

Being the underdog is fucking fun.

Being a small group of people tackling a faceless corporate monolith is exhilarating, and you want to know what’s even better, that feeling is contagious.

Customers and onlookers can feel when something truly disruptive is happening, and it’s pure magic. That’s what made old school Facebook so much fun. That’s what made Dall-E fun.

That’s why I got so pumped up when I saw this picture from Whoop CEO Will Ahmed. It’s the circuit board for their wearables, and in it it contains a message to ‘Amazon etc’. 

If the fact that the Rocky franchise spans 9 movies teaches us anything, it’s that the power of the underdog is magical. Use it.

PlayStation’s microscopic level of detail

I have written previously about my love for PlayStation’s approach to developing magical consumer tech. 

When looking at something like a game console or piece of software, it’s very easy to forget that a group of human beings (or in rare cases, like this website, a single person) built it with their own two hands. 

That’s why I love things like the fact that the PlayStation’s DualSense controller contains microscopic versions of their ubiquitous button symbols.

If the PlayStation team wanted to create a sandpaper like feel for their controller, they could have very easily just used default lumps and bumps, but instead they decided to create a magical experience that 99.9% of the population would never see.

In the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, Job’s father was described as a man who, when building,  ‘spent as much time on the back of a cabinet as the front’. Taking this level of care and detail to your tech product can help build such a strong brand affinity and create magical moments for your users.

And there we have it! A bunch of examples of magic in tech and how you can take the lessons and apply them to what you’re building. Did I miss anything? Do you have any other examples of times you have felt the magical pull of technology? Drop a comment below 👇