If you’ve ever played Candy Crush or Fruit Ninja, says Bruno Campos, you’ve experienced “juiciness.” The Bachelor of Design assistant professor describes it as interacting with an online game and, with little input, getting lots of positive feedback. 

“It’s that feeling of being rewarded,” he says. “There’s something satisfying about ‘slicing’ a piece of banana, seeing an animation flying on top of the screen and hearing it splatter. It just feels good.” 

That juiciness, Campos told MacEwan’s Office of Research Services Research Recast(ed) podcast, is the focus of his research – but he’s taking it in a slightly different direction. While there’s considerable research on juiciness in gaming, there is none when it comes to its impact in other areas of design. 

So Campos is leaning into his almost 20 years of combined teaching and industry experience and testing how juiciness applies specifically to interactive infographics. In a recently published paper, he looked at nearly 200 online infographics published since 2010, evaluating their use of key techniques – screen shakes and sound effects, for example – to generate a feeling of being rewarded based on a single input from a user. 

He’s trying to figure out whether juiciness helps users receive the information an infographic is trying to convey. 

For example, in an infographic about teaching a dog tricks, do beautiful illustrations and juicy effects help users absorb the information, or is the appeal more about enjoying playing with the animation itself? “Are we actually learning something, or does juiciness get in the way?” asks Campos. 

He explains that the implications are more significant than whether your dog learns to catch a ball or roll over. Interactive infographics can be used to learn and share critical information when big things are happening in the world – think COVID or a major catastrophe like an explosion. 

“If we make an infographic about an explosion and there’s an animated explosion, are we shocked by that, or does it give users a better sense of how things happened?”

Campos is currently building prototypes to test the theory and make research-based conclusions. He also ensures that juiciness makes its way into his classrooms.

“I try to create a very relaxed environment,” he says. “We’re going to laugh; we’re going to feel good.” While the jury is still out on whether the good feelings we get from juiciness impact how we retain information, there’s also a chance they could help his students retain the important information he’s sharing.

Watch the full podcast