Design thinking for ads people play rather than watch — interaction, feedback, pacing, restraint, and the small decisions that separate a good one from a forgettable one.
The squash, the bounce, the little burst of particles. None of it tells the player anything they did not already know — and removing it makes the same ad feel cheap.
12 min readA phone screen is not a small canvas. It is a surface with a curved reachable region, a blind spot that moves, and a corner almost nobody can comfortably touch.
11 min readEight seconds is not enough time to tell a story. It is more than enough to imply one that is already happening and let the player finish it themselves.
8 min readA response to a tap is not decoration. It is the only proof the player has that they caused something — and if it arrives late enough, they stop believing they did.
8 min readDesigning something a stranger will play for twenty seconds, without instructions, on a screen they are holding one-handed, while waiting for something else to resume, is a genuinely hard brief. It is closer to designing a toy than an advertisement.
The pieces in this section are about the decisions inside that brief: what to teach first, what to cut, how much feedback an action needs, and when to stop. Most of them come down to restraint — the common failure is not too little ambition but too much of it in too little time.
The shape most good ones share:
The first interaction is the tutorial. If a screen of instructions is needed before anything happens, the mechanic is too complicated for the format.
A tap that produces nothing reads as broken, and a player who thinks it is broken leaves. Every action needs a visible, immediate response.
The ad is a sample, not an examination. A player who fails learns the product is frustrating — which may be true, but it is not what you are paying to communicate.
A deliberate finish, then the invitation. An ad that simply stops leaves the player with no moment at which acting felt like the natural next thing.
The one-mechanic rule
One idea, executed clearly, beats three competing for the same twenty seconds. If the ad cannot be described in a single sentence without the word 'and', it is probably two ads.
