Design

Book Highlights: Design of Everyday Things

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Book Summary Design of everyday things

It’s not your fault. Design Principles – Conceptual models, feedback, constraints, affordances, mapping, visibility Power of observationDesign is communicationFalse causality Principles of design for understandability and usability – conceptual model & visibilityMental model, designer’s model, system image, users model The paradox of technology Naive physics and psychology might be wrong but are often sensible Learned … Read more

Designing a better user experience for products

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Build a product and the users will come they say. Sadly, that statement is deceiving. The users might come as a result of a marketing blitz, but for them to stay on and use the product and recommend it to others, they need to enjoy using the product.

Gamification beyond points, badges & awards

When designing a system, consider the social engagement verbs that you want to use to describe desired user behaviors. It is known that male users prefer competition, while female users like to collaborate. So identify your target audience, list the actions you want them to perform and then design features or flows around it.

Do you want the user to ‘Express’, ‘Compete’, ‘Explore’ or ‘Collaborate’?

Product Usage Lifecycle

Product Usage Lifecycle is another important aspect to consider while designing the system. What actions do you want the users to perform at the onboarding stage will be different from ongoing use and the passionate use phase. Needs of the users at each stage are different and therefore your goal must accordingly change as well.

Our approach when building products and adding features is to first look at Benefits, Ease of Use and then maybe the Positive Emotion it evokes. What if we turned that around? How about building virality into the product by delighting customers when they use your product? You’d save a few marketing dollars for sure. Intuit uses this approach to build their products. (Design for Delight)

Coming back to gamification, progress mechanics that involve points, badges, & leaderboards is the last step in game design. Having built a gamified product, I can tell you this is the easiest step, and therefore very tempting to do it first. Even here, one can dig deeper behind what I call the 1st layer of gamification, to identify patterns for reward schedules that tap into intrinsic motivation.

Another game design concept is the use of the MDA Framework  – Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics. Keep an eye on how much importance you pay to each and in what order.

Gamification, unfortunately is a much-abused word that has to come to signify trivial use of points, awards & badges. Gamification done right will provide better user engagement at every phase of product use. But it is also tougher and intellectually more challenging.

Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal are two game designers you must follow if you’re interested in applications of game design.

 

“Timelessness” Of Design

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An excerpt from The Vignelli Canon:

“We are definitively against any fashion of design and any design fashion. We despise the culture of obsolescence, the culture of waste, the cult of the ephemeral. We detest the demand of temporary solutions, the waste of energies and capital for the sake of novelty.

We are for a Design that lasts, that responds to people’s needs and to people’s wants. We are for a Design that is committed to a society that demands long lasting values. A society that earns the benefit of commodities and deserves respect and integrity.

We like the use of primary shapes and primary colors because their formal values are timeless. We like a typography that transcends subjectivity and searches for objective values, a typography that is beyond times – that doesn’t follow trends, that reflects its content in an appropriate manner. We like economy of design because it avoids wasteful exercises, it respects investment and lasts longer. We strive for a Design that is centered on the message rather than visual titillation. We like Design that is clear, simple and enduring. And that is what timelessness means in Design.”

Source: http://52weeksofux.com/post/832646183/timelessness

Book Review: Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal

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Reality Is Broken – Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change the World is written by Jane McGonigal, a well known game designer. She’s a strong proponent of using games to solve real world problems which is what this book mostly talks about. I first heard about her when I was reading up on Gamification while during our ground work for XPlore. Her TED talk garnered a lot of attention and got me interested in what she had to say. The book is well researched and has plenty of references to positive psychology and games. If you’re a hardcore gamer, a casual gamer or just interested in solving real world problems, then this is a must read.

Jane talks about the history of games and why they are such a powerful form of recreation and have been played for centuries. To understand the why, you need to look past your biases against video games and games in general. Most of us consider them as “time pass” and not being productive. In fact some even consider them to be harmful, which of course is true for anything done in excess, not just games. Most games have four basic traits – a goal which gives you a specific purpose, rules that set limitations, a feedback system that is real-time and voluntary participation. If you think about it, these four traits can be applied to so many fields – education, work or any task. So what makes games fun and work boring? Voluntary participation perhaps?

Games can be defined as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. You put challenging obstacles in front of you, set rules, and have a specific goal and the whole activity becomes much more interesting to the human mind. Well designed games push you to the edge of your ability and when you’re performing at your peak, a win, or an epic win in gaming terminology, leads to what Jane calls a “fiero” moment (Fiero is an emotional high you feel when you triumph over adversity). Games induce stress, not the kind of stress that weighs you down, but positive stress called ustress (positive emotion). And that’s why, when you fail in games you are motivated to try again as opposed to feeling terribly demotivated when failing in your exam or at work.

Now combine this with concepts like flow, happiness and intrinsic rewards from positive psychology and you have a powerful combination for motivating people, making boring environments more fun and productive. There are four categories of intrinsic rewards that she talks about in the book. Satisfying work – work that is clearly defined with demanding activities and visible results. It turns out that to be happy at work we actually need activities that challenge us. Less or no work actually makes Jack a dull boy. The craving for success is something we all aspire for and is a strong intrinsic motivator. Social connections we build through sharing experiences contributes to our happiness. And when the work we do or tasks we take part in has a context, a larger meaning, or is part of something bigger, or epic scale in gaming terminology, we feel motivated and happy to be doing it. And this is what games do. Playing games is actually very challenging and demanding and yet we seem to enjoy them.

Games can be looked at as a form of escapism. To run away from reality. To switch off from the real world and immerse yourself in the virtual world. But there are a new category of games that have emerged called ARGs – Alternate Reality Games. They don’t just exist in the virtual world. They connect the virtual world with real world activities. They combine what we love about games and what we want from our real life. There are many kinds of ARGs as well – Life Management ARG, Organizational ARG, Conceptual ARG, Live ARG and Narrative ARG. ARGs are being used my marketers, educators, and NGOs to create awareness about a product, or create collaboration projects on an epic scale. Check out the following games, some of which were designed by Jane McGonigal, that empowers individuals all over the world to work together and collaborate on real world issues. World Without Oil, Superstruct and Evoke were designed by Jane McGonigal. More information on them can be found on her website.

The book was an inspiring read for me. Using games to solve real world problems is a great idea. It’s an entirely new way of looking at solving some of the teething problems we face today like poverty, diseases and conservation. If you’re still skeptical about games and gamers, you should read about Foldit. What took scientists and supercomputers ages  to decode, gamers with the help of the Foldit game were able to decode complex protein structures in months.