What button, sorry?

/r/thebutton is a Reddit’s subreddit published on April 1st. It was launched on Reddit official blog with only few lines of explanation:

«The timer will count down from 60 seconds. If the button is pressed the timer will reset to 60 seconds and continue counting down. Only users logged into accounts created before 2015–04–01 can press the button. You may only press the button once».

As of today, the button was pressed by thousands of people and the timer not only never reached zero but it also never went below 35 seconds. Is it an April fool’s prank or an actual thing? No one knows, but many people want to find out. Factions and (there’s honestly not a better word for it) cults formed and started trying to understand what to to with the button. To press it soon in order to run out of clicks sooner and discover what happens when it reaches zero? Or to wait until the last seconds to reset it in order to prolong the lifespan of the button for as long as possible?

I’ve been watching the button and reading the subreddit for a while now (I tend to become fixated on this kind of crazy internet things) and started to think to it as a very interesting experiment in basic interaction design. The button is, in fact, a fantastic microinteraction. And I’ll try to describe why following the structure of microinteractions from Dan Saffer’s Microinteractions: Designing with Details.

Crash course on microinteractions for the uninitiated: a microinteraction is «a contained product moments that revolve around a single use case» and a single task. Like the iPhone airplane mode or the Twitter pull to refresh. The trigger is the thing that initiates the microinteraction. The rules determines what happens. The signature moment is your favorite moment in the microinteraction: the bit that makes the interaction pleasureful or interesting or funny. The feedback tells the user what is happening or what just happened. The loops and modes allow the user to set options. Okay, you are ready. Let’s talk about this button.

The trigger

Well… it’s a button. You can press it. (This one was a freebie).

But look at that tooltip

The rules

The rules of the button are clear but only to a certain extent:

you can press the button

you can press the button only once

if you press the button the timer will reset to 60 seconds.

It’s stated on the subreddit that you can only press the button once but the information is not very visible (the copy is in the sidebar but the button is at the very top of the page, over the posts. The information and the button are in two different sections of the site). And to understand that pressing the button you will reset the timer you have to either press the button and find out the hard way or to read the announcement post (only liked) or find out reading the subreddit. These things (except the placing of the copy, maybe) are of course intentional. Reddit people said: we made this, figure out for yourself what to do with it, knowing that they have an amazing community that would go batshit crazy about this mystery.

What is also intentionally left not clear is: what happens if you don’t press the button? No one knows. What happens when the button finally reaches zero? No one knows. We are in a LOST-like situation and the button — at the moment — is perceived as an act of faith or an act of resistance. And it’s very fascinating to watch people fight and discuss over a button.

What’s interesting here is how impatient many users are. Reading the subreddit you notice that several people clicked the button before even knowing what the button did. They saw a button and just clicked it. It’s a very reassuring behavior, to be honest. It means that at least some users are willing to explore new interfaces and test out things, even if they don’t understand them fully. And, hopefully, this button is one of the few cases where you can’t undo what you did after you pressed the button.

The signature moment

In the case of thebutton, I think that the signature moment comes before the actual interaction. You see, being a once-in-a-lifetime interaction, the Reddit designers added a lid to the button to give it some gravitas and allow you to press the button intentionally and not on a random click.

If you roll-over the button, the lid slides up a bit and if you press once, the lid gets removed, activating the button. It’s like one of those nuclear missile buttons you see in moves. Many users removed the lid, many played with the idea of pressing the button by rolling over it. Some fell under the temptation, others stayed strong. The best moment in this microinteraction is not when you press in the button, but when you remove the lid and get ready to do to it. That’s what makes the button great. It’s not a button, it the button. By reloading the page once you removed the lid, the lid comes back on. So the signature moment can — and has been — experienced more than once.

Get ready!

The feedback

When you press the button, two things happen: the timer resets to 60 seconds and the button stops being a button. And, apparently, that’s it.

But then you may notice another thing: every user that posts on the subreddit has a flair (a little badge near their username) and the flair says at what time the user pressed the button. You pressed at 59 seconds? You get a purple flair with a 59 inside. You pressed at 48? You get a blue flair with a 42. And so on with a color change every 10 seconds (or, at least, that’s what the users found out from looking at the CSS of the subreddit. No one has ever seen a orange or a red flair, the ones closer to the zero). If you did not press the button, you get a grey flair with “non presser” written on it.

Again, no one knows what to do with these flairs but at least the feedback is clear: the user are divided in groups based on whether they clicked or not, and on when they clicked. Many users embraced these divisions, creating mythologies around the flairs and speculating on their meaning.

Yes, I was once a fervent “non presser” but not anymore. I pressed it FOR SCIENCE

Loops and modes?

As far as we know, the button is a microinteraction without modes. Every user only has a single chance to press it. Once you pressed, you can’t go back or change your result. But maybe once it reaches zero, the button will change shape, unlocking options for those who pressed or those who didn’t press. In this case, it would be a fantastically long microinteraction.