The USS Quad Damage

Teller (of Penn and Teller) explained the main secret regarding “how magic works”. This was fairly insightful and interesting for a number of fields:

1. Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. Then I allow you to see the palm of my hand empty before a fifth coin appears. As Homo sapiens, you grasp the pattern, and take away the impression that I produced all five coins from a hand whose palm was empty.
2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians¹.

This is quite valuable advice, and not just in the field of magic. A lot of designers took the advice to heart, especially because it fits into a neat moral tale: Create delight for users by putting in more effort than seems worthwhile. It just sounds so sensible, and most of all, so morally superior. I spent several hours fine-tuning the gradients of this button because that’s the kind of effort it takes to make magic.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem here: Magic isn’t real. Engineering is real. By creating “magic”, what you are really doing is tricking your user. If Teller creates a floating ball and moves it around and through objects, you are entertained. If you create a floating ball in your app then what you’ve created is a ball that doesn’t really float for most tasks that users are doing. It will work well in demos but it will be a frustrating tool for users. When it works, it’s “magic”, but when it doesn’t... it’s worse than awful, it’s deceitful.

Magic is hard, reality is harder still. Make reality!

¹ Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-His-Secrets.html