UI/UX Design: The Casino Effect
By: Nick Lawrence
Tags: Ui Ux Design

Overview

It’s no secret; as UI/UX designers, we have to help craft products that keep our users coming back.

Today, I’m going to share with you a simple, but effect tool that you can use to engage with your users, and increase their desire to come back to your product, even if they’ve been away for a while.

The Casino Effect

This particular phenomenon is a combination of several psychological effects that can occur in tandem within the human brain, but most notably occur within the setting of a casino, hence the name.

Crucially, it is a combination of: reciprocity, commitment, consistency, loss aversion, scarcity, and social proof that drives the potency of this effect.

Let’s take a look at how it works and how you can use it in your product.

Show user how many people are already using or will be using your product (social proof) Give a user something of value just for signing up (reciprocity) Ask user to talk about the things they like and want (commitment & consistency) Offer a limited-time, personalized deal just for them (scarcity) Give it to them for free for a time, and then let them know that if they don’t want it anymore, it will be cancelled automatically (loss aversion).

There are countless applications that use this patterns, most notably services like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Netflix to name just a few.

But how does this work, and is it ethical?

The mechanics of the Casino Effect

We have to understand that its called the casino effect because it replicates the casino itself, not necessarily the gambling.

Casinos do several things exceptionally well:

They offer their guests a whole lot of things for free or “on the house,” to encourage continuous play.

They take down your name, personal info, and certain information at check-in when you get your chips.

They sometimes offer free chips to get you started.

They will normally offer you some type of personalized deal after you’ve been a few times that has an expiration date.

They will almost always give you special treatment (bottle service, free buffet, etc.) for “premium” or “platinum” members, and then let you know that you need to renew your subscription or that status/service will go away.

They group you with other people who are also playing the games you’re playing, and winning at them as well.

All of these work to do one thing: get you hooked.

You become accustomed to a particular standard of experience, and then are told that if you do not act, especially quickly, that you will lose that experience.

9 times out of 10, you’re gonna do whatever it takes to keep that dopamine flowing, including parting with a substantial amount of money, because we, as people, make decisions emotionally, and then use logic to justify them; not the other way around.

The ethics of the Casino Effect

The biggest question that plagues us as UI/UX designers, then, is how ethical is the casino effect? Can we leverage it without producing harm?

The answer is less clear than we’d probably like.

Admittedly, ANY usage of the casino effect is probably not absolutely ethical, but there’s one thing that casinos don’t do that you can do to apply it in a much more ethical fashion.

Make the exits clear

Most casinos intentionally obscure the exits. They don’t have clocks on the walls, and they encourage people to stay as long as possible with things like free food, drinks, and tokens.

In order to ethically deploy the casino effect, you must do three things VERY SPECIFICALLY right out of the gate:

Make the exits obvious and clear. Make the cancellation process simple. Offer a viable alternative.

These three elements are imperative to a high-quality, ethical user experience, because they do three things: