You know you’ve made it when Google replaces their logo with one inspired by your product whenever anyone searches for it.

Welcome to the popular craze known as Wordle.

Wordle is a game that was built by a single developer, has millions of daily players, and was recently bought by the New York Times for a 7-figure amount.

Now if you’re thinking ”What the heck is Worldle?” then please take a minute to do the following:

1. Have a look out your window to make sure you’re if not living under a rock (no judgement if you are, 2021 was rough)

2. Play today’s Wordle on the New York Times website and then head back here

So what is it about Wordle that has led to its immense popularity and success? And how can we apply the same thinking to our own services and products?

Let’s find out.

What is Wordle?

Wordle is a guessing game where you get 6 chances to guess a 5-letter word. The twist is there is only one word to guess per day.

The game uses coloured tiles to let you know when a letter in your guess is in the word but in the wrong place (yellow), or in the right place (green).

The game is fun and simple but it’s also nothing new. In fact it bears a striking similarity to the 1980s American game show Lingo.

Nonetheless, Wordle has become wildly popular.

So what is going on here? How did it become so popular? 🤔

Two things:

1. Having the exact same puzzle each day for everyone 🌎

2. The ability to share your game experience with emojis 🤯

Wordle gives everyone the same puzzle to solve each day. This creates a shared experience where we are all facing exactly the same challenge. This leads to competition and sharing our experiences with others. But we need a way to share our success with others. This is where emojis came into play. Wordle makes it super easy share your result with your friends using emoji squares, all without spoiling the answer to the puzzle.

Here’s what this looked like:

⬛⬛🟨⬛🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
🟨⬛⬛🟩🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

This was Wordle #233 6/6 - These emojis tell a story, in this case a real struggle where I got the answer on the last attempt 😅

This sharing feature is super important to the success of Wordle. Once it was added to Wordle in December 2021, there quickly became two types of people; those who shared their Wordle result, and those who were utterly confused by all these squares people were sharing.

And it felt like the first group was becoming larger every day.

Why social matters

We are social beings. The desire to be a part of a community, has been key to our survival as a species - think safety in numbers. When we do join communities we tend to seek out and connect with like-minded people.

Researchers of the self-determination theory suggests our relatedness to others is an important psychological need for us to feel intrinsically motivated and to flourish as humans. We also have a desire to compete and compare ourselves with others too, which can motivate us to act.

Think of the most successful and engaging video games and digital products and there’s a good chance they have some social, community or competitive element to them that bring people together (e.g., TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Strava, World of Warcraft, Minecraft).

For experiences that don’t have social features built into them, it becomes important to leverage established communities and networks, just like how Wordle provided an easy way to share the game experience on social media.

The simple emoji sharing feature of Wordle effectively tapped into both the social and competitive nature of humans.

The emojis told a story of how we managed the daily puzzle without revealing the answer and ruining it for others. Did we find today’s puzzle easy? Did we struggle? Did we somehow fluke it and get it one go?

The vagueness of the emojis also helped fuel initial curiosity in the game. I remember being thoroughly confused when friends started sharing them.

For those in the know, the emojis posed a challenge to other players, could you do better on today’s puzzle than me?

It’s incredible. Wordle became a social phenomenon with just a share button and 30 emojis. 🤯

How can you support community and competition in your product?

Unfortunately it’s not enough to just add a share button to your app or website and be done. When it comes to adding social and competitive elements, it needs research and careful design.

In fact, the emoji feature from Wordle was originally an idea from the Wordle community, where players initially created their own emojis for each puzzle to share on their social network. The creator of Wordle liked this and decided to add them to the game.

So if you have an existing product, a great place to start is by having a look at what your community is sharing on their social networks. This kind of research is cheap and easy to do.

For example a quick search on Twitter for “Strava” (the physical exercise tracking app) shows just how many people share their exercise results and photos from their runs and rides. What’s interesting though is that many people are choosing to share screenshots of their exercise summary screen rather than use the share feature of the app. This might be worth investigating further to see why some users are choosing to share this instead of using the share feature in the app. 🤔

If you don’t have a reach on social networks just yet, then talking to your users directly can be a useful strategy.

But what exactly are you looking for when researching and designing community and competitive features?

Two good places to start include exploring what your users find valuable sharing with others and the reason they want to share it with others.

Find something worth sharing

Start by reviewing what progress, milestones, goals and effort users make in your product or service.

Look for moments when a user completes something that took effort and they might be proud of (e.g., a new record for running 5km, a 500 day streak in Duolingo, getting a new high score or fastest time in a game, completed reading an enjoyable book, or finding your product fun to use).

Identifying these moments can be useful starting points for identifying value and providing a way to share it.

Another way is just creating a product that makes users feel amazing. A side-effect of this is that they’ll want to share your product with others. Kathy Sierra talks about this in detail in her talk Building Badass Users which is definitely worth a watch.

Create a reason to share

If you can’t find a reason for a user to share something from your product or service, you can try creating one.

There’s a great toolkit called the Make It Toolkit which provides techniques for behaviour change. There’s a whole section on making your product more social, and three useful techniques for doing this are providing a shared goal or competition.

Having a shared goal is one approach where your users are working together towards achieving something together.

A great example of this can be found in the gamified app Magic Mountain where users have a shared calorie goal they need to burn in order to reach the top of a mountain. Each calorie they burn contributes to the groups total calories.

Some people prefer competition over collaboration, so creating a competitive feature might be another way to encourage sharing.

There is also an approach where you can extrinsically reward a user for sharing something, but this approach can feel disingenuous at times, especially if it’s a one-way transaction (i.e., only the user who shared it benefits). You often see this approach used in free-to-play games that rely on large numbers of players for profit.

With this approach, you’ll often find users will try and cheat this system (as evidenced by the discussion in this reddit thread!), so tread carefully if you’re planning on using rewards to motivate users!

I prefer the approach AirBNB takes where if I refer a friend to AirBNB I get credit AND my friend gets credit. This way I’m more likely to feel better about sharing as we both receive a benefit.

Shared success

So it’s a little more than just emojis that contributed to Wordle’s success, but they definitely made an interesting way to share the game’s experience in a way that didn’t ruin it.

I can’t finish an article about sharing without asking one last thing, if you enjoyed this article, why not share it with someone else who think might like it too? 🙌