What made Flappy Bird so popular?

Flappy Bird didn't require its audience to master a complex pair of controls, understand weapons, or memorize complex environments–and because of this, the small adrenaline jolt of winning was triggered early and often.

To be engaging, products and services don't need to be complex, photo-realistic journeys or lavish customer experiences. Many memes stimulate complex behaviors from simple ideas, as complexity theory points to small actions or simple chemicals that induce complex behaviors or multicellular life.

If your product, a site, or an interior process isn't achieving its goals, examine it through the lens of simplicity and strip out superfluous elements that expose the most crucial, and therefore almost certainly to engage, elements.

Products which make people wait for the payoff may lose customers due to insufficient patience. Apple designs the box experience separate from the unit user experience because opening the box is the first win that any product offers its owner. As a manager, if you want people to collaborate better, innovate, or become more worked up about their work, reward them, not with annual perks, but with fast feedback and other recognition that is genuine and timely.

Place the specifications for flappy bird and it will find funding, it may not. Reading the game play sounds pretty close to something like 1980s Defender. But sometimes what's written down doesn't matter. What individuals do using what eventually ends up in the market does, and that always involves a confluence of unpredictable events.

For Flappy Bird, some inherent need in the market for something simple from an as yet not known developer that downloaded fast and offered rapid gratification–among a large number of other attributes–led to the merchandise being truly a runaway hit. Serendipity can happen quickly, or it will take time, but when you ever gauge action through the lens of efficiency and predictability, you will probably fail to let things develop that depend on nuance, uncertainty, and happenstance.

The success of Flappy Bird might have been serendipitous, but once an implemented version hit the industry, its features were easily copied and the experience it produced mimicked. Copying could have occurred eventually, but Nguyen's rapid removal of the game from Google Play and the Apples App Store eliminated the perception of its shame in copying.

The following game for developers was the overall game to create the very best clone. Race on. For most businesses, whether they give simple product engagement models or complex experiences, they need to continuously think about just how to differentiate themselves from other experience, lest they develop into a commodity.

In the initial instance, the simplicity of Flappy Bird was its differentiation from overproduced and complex games that always include brand baggage and story overload. Simplicity in complex markets, quality of execution in saturated markets, human relationships replacing automation in low-cost markets, and delivering on brand promises are all easy (or not so easy) ways for organizations to differentiate themselves without reintroducing complexity.