Juice
Table of contents
Brought to you by:<br>Zorg Industries
Juice<br>Juice<br>Planted: Mar 2023<br>Tended: Nov 2025<br>Status: mature<br>Tended: Nov 2025<br>Intended Audience: Software designers, Product managers, Creative coders
Juice is the non-essential visual, audio and haptic effects that enhance the player's experience. For example, the delightful chimes sound that plays when Mario collects a mushroom. The 1UP text that appears is essential. Communicating the player gained an extra life. The sound is the Juice. Non essential but serves a purpose:<br>▪ reinforcing Mario did indeed collect the mushroom,<br>▪ that this was a good thing and<br>▪ giving the player a small reward. Encouraging them to collect more and teaching them how to play.
“'Juice' was our wet little term for constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do - tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. It makes the player feel powerful and in control of the world, and it coaches them through the rules of the game by constantly letting them know on a per-interaction basis how they are doing.”<br>Game DeveloperHow to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days
Below is a delete button. When clicked, it displays a delete-in-progress message. Use the range input to increase the button's level of Juice.<br>DELETE<br>Are you sure?<br>Deleting...
▪ None : The button fulfils functional requirements.
▪ None<br>▪ Hover feedback<br>▪ Push visual feedback<br>▪ Push audio feedback<br>▪ Confirm action<br>▪ Transitions<br>▪ Loading visual feedback<br>▪ Loading audio feedback : Another use of redundant feedback.
“It's about maximum output for minimum input.”<br>Martin Jonasson & Petri PurhoJuice it or lose it
Juice can:<br>▪ teach,<br>▪ make something feel more alive,<br>▪ improve the sense of responsiveness, impact or reward,<br>▪ make an action satisfying and<br>▪ enhance the player's emotional connection to the game. Making the experience more memorable (emotions are the foundation of memory).<br>Juice is about the tiny details.<br>It's about squeezing more out of everything.<br>It's about serving the user's emotional needs, not just the functional.<br>It originated in games but can be used in other types of software.
Game feel<br>Game Feel is described as the tactile sensation of manipulating a digital agent.<br>In Super Mario 64, the player gets joy from just moving Mario around, without the need to complete objectives.<br>This is achieved by juicing Mario.<br>The nuance of how he gradually moves from a walk to a run.<br>The spring coil and explosion when jumping.<br>A celebratory "ya-hoo" while in the air.<br>Game Feel taps into the human nature of performing actions that have no purpose. They just feel good.<br>Take this like button from Josh Comeau's website.<br>Clicking it triggers satisfying animation and sounds that makes you want to keep<br>doing it.
The obstacle
An obstacle when attempting to make the user feel is the pane of glass<br>separating them from the content. Preventing the user from touching it.<br>In addition, the way we talk to software is heavily muted by the input device (controller, mouse, keyboard, ...). Only allowing a vocabulary of button presses, mouse positions and joystick angles. Game developers compensate for this using redundant techniques.<br>For example, to acknowledge one action, like a button press, the developer<br>could use multiple animations, sounds and vibrations.
For non-game software, using a lot of Juice could be a bad thing.<br>Games often flood the user with Juice because the intented UX (User Experience) is immersion.<br>For a non-game app, the intent may be to allow a task to be done quickly.<br>A small amount of Juice may enhance the UX.<br>A lot may make the task take longer, degrading it.<br>Before juicing, understand the intended UX.<br>Juice should make it better, not worse.
Priority<br>There is a trend to juice rare events in non-game software.<br>For example, an explosion of confetti to celebrate completing onboarding or a funny animated 404 page.<br>Game developers do the opposite.<br>They focus on the mundane, routine tasks.<br>Because these are the foundation the rest of the software sits on.<br>Steve Swink broke down what the player does most in Mario 64:<br>▪ 20-something hours: completing the game, defeating Bowser, getting all 120 stars.<br>▪ Every hour or two: completing a 'boss' battle.<br>▪ Every half an hour: getting access to a new area or painting.<br>▪ Every 5 minutes or so: completing an objective, getting a star.<br>▪ Moment to Moment: steering around, running, jumping, performing acrobatics.<br>Completing onboarding is like completing the game. It happens once. Juicing it has little effect on the overall experience. Better to juice the moment to moment events.
How to create game feel<br>Rahul Vohra talks about a design process where interfaces begin as toys. A toy being:<br>▪ fun,<br>▪ without a goal,<br>▪ indulges moments of playful exploration and<br>▪ create moments of pleasant surprise.
We play with...