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Design Examples
Interactive minigames
How products hide playable games in dead ends and waiting screens, with examples from Wendy's, Kualo, Codecademy, Honey, Instagram, Google Play and Around.
Examples on Built for Mars include
Wendy's 404 hides a game
Team games speed meetings up
Nibble fakes interactivity
Real world examples:
The video chat service Around has built in 'team games', which allow a seamless transition into playing a whole team mini game.
More context
At first, I wondered why this was valuable. But after speaking to teams who use it, I was told that it adds an incentive to speed a meeting up.
"If we finish early, we can play Bomberman quickly".
When you hit a 404 on Honey, you'll find a hidden mini game where you have to jump to collect cash.
Go to UX BiteView#1040
Tapping on an emoji in an Instagram chat will load a 'pong' mini game.
Codecademy's 404 page has a mini game, very similar to the popular Google Chrome one. But they also have a CTA to learn how to build games, via a Codecademy course.
To make the process of reading facts more interesting, Nibble have a minigame to grab the fact with a claw machine.
More context
If you try this, you'll notice that it's essentially just an animation to select a random ball—which likely isn't related to the fact.
But, the slight illusion of interactivity is interesting, and can break up the monotony of reading fact after fact.