I first became aware of Wordle around Thanksgiving. By Christmas, it was everywhere I looked.
My Twitter feed was filled with people posting their results. TikTok was showing me videos of people sharing their strategies. Clients old and new were finding ways to ride the trend. And there were newsletters, interviews, and explainers about What It All Means.
But for whatever reason, I resisted joining the craze. Until this week.
For almost 20 years, I’ve talked about sports with the same group of friends. Today, most of those conversations happen on Slack. Seven days a week, we chatter back and forth across 117 different channels that capture all our various interests. And when a subset of those friends started a new channel to share their Wordle results, I couldn’t hold out any longer.
I won’t break any new ground describing what makes the game so much fun on an individual level. Yes, in the year 2022, it’s deeply satisfying to work through a problem with an actual solution. Of course, it’s nice to have a routine with low stakes and a reliable rhythm. And obviously, it’s a relief to experience something on the Internet that isn’t an aggressive recommendation engine for commerce.
But just as it took my friends to get me to start playing, I think the magic of Wordle is in the collective experience it generates.
When people share their daily score, it’s a signal of overlapping identity with all the other players. Because everyone is working to solve the same word — at the same time each day, only once each day — we’re all sharing the same frustrations or celebrating similar accomplishments. Each day’s outcome is the starting point for discussion or commiseration.
Even the way that Wordle’s infrastructure is designed to make its construction of community more authentic.
- The barrier for entry is non-existent. There’s no app to download, no account to create. You can play just as easily on your laptop as on your phone.
- When you’ve solved the day’s puzzle, you’re immediately invited to share, but you don’t have to connect to a social platform or download a graphic. Your results are just copied into your clipboard.
- And crucially, when you post your score, there’s no URL pointing back to the Wordle website. There’s no pressure to feel like you’re part of the growth strategy for a product. You just share the number of the puzzle you solved and how you did.
As campaigners, those are design principles with a lot of utility for our work.
When we’re building a new campaign, it’s not enough to think through how it will land with our supporters individually — we need to use each engagement to build solidarity horizontally across our organizations.
When we need to activate our supporters, the experience has to be intuitive, and the invitation to broadcast the results of that activation should be built in from the start.
And not everything needs to be ruthlessly optimized for growth — especially when doing so diminishes the impact of the broader experience you’re creating.
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