Motivational Interfaces, or, Everything I Need to Know about Family Trees I Learned from Angry Birds

According to the market research firm Global Industry Analysts, each year 84 million people spend $1,000 or more on family history research [8]. Ancestry CEO Tim Sullivan reported over two million paying customers at the world’s most popular commercial genealogy website [7]. Family Tree Maker, the leading producer of genealogical desktop software has shipped approximately 2 million units since 2004 [1]. According to Businessweek, “genealogy” is the second most researched topic online [5]. Huge numbers, you say. Genealogy has finally hit the mainstream, you say. Let’s juxtapose those numbers against another popular recreational activity: computer games. During the week of December 22-29, 2012, iOS and Android device users downloaded 30 million copies of games from the Angry Birds franchise. 30 million. In seven days. During 2012, the total number of Angry Birds downloads passed one billion [11], and software maker Rovio now has nearly 300 million active monthly users for its games [4]. In numerically relative terms, Rovio Entertainment’s customer base is two to three orders of magnitude larger than Ancestry’s, and more than an order of magnitude larger than the entire worldwide genealogy market. Rather than simply dismissing Angry Birds as a mindless waste of time, or asserting that there’s no comparison to the very serious and intellectually taxing task of genealogy research, I assert that several profound lessons can be learned from the comparison. Put simply, the genealogy market would be significantly larger if it were more like playing Angry Birds and less like doing your taxes. Researchers acknowledge the compelling (and arguably addictive) nature of well-designed games [3]. A significant number of factors have been shown to contribute to the suc-