Presenter is Josh Knowles, a freelance designer who has worked on both game designs and other application design (http://auscillate.com).
Abstract: Tricks and techniques from the game design world can be applied to non-games — social apps, creative tools, etc. — to improve user experience, user enjoyment, and results. We’ll look at traditional UX in a new light: from the perspective of games and gamers (and zombies, aliens, and goombas).
Notes:
- How to get people to sign up for something or participate in something?
- Often, approaches to UX for these things tends to be a bit dry
- The idea is to create passion in users to get them to want to participate
- Game design is starting to work its way into other things now
- American Idol
- Million’s Poet
- Toyota Prius efficiency leaves in the dashboard
- Target checkout terminals – grades/scores
- Game design can be a big part of interaction design, but right now it’s often a novelty and not something core to design
- Games take a task and apply rules to give the participants enjoyment and satisfaction
- Classic arcade games are this boiled down to essentials – basic tasks with applied rules and risk/reward structures
- Galaxy Zoo; Solar Stormwatch – astronomical phenomena turned into a game
- Google Image Labeler – the timed tagging and matching tags from two random strangers
- Faux stock markets
- (my note) Formspring.me is kind of game-ish
- Slashdot comment moderation and granting mod points to random users to help improve comment displays to random users (and Karma)
- StackOverflow applies this to Q/A (10 points to rate up, 100 points to rate down, 200 points to see fewer ads on site, 1k points to delete questions)
- thesixtyone – music filtering system
- Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown (duh)
- Basic concepts
- Points (especially public points and high scores)
- Number of friends
- Percentage completion of participation (Shelfari, LinkedIn)
- Badges and Achievements (specific defined activities)
- Unlockables (site or application features you receive as a reward for participation)
- Individual unlockables versus global unlockables
- Game boards
- Visual representations of what’s available or what you can do
- You can learn from:
- Classic video games
- Board games
- Sports
- Basic game concepts have universal appeal and people can recognize them quickly
- Education (games are excellent teachers)
- Invitation (give users an explicit invitation to participate – these are ways to nudge users towards certain actions)
- Pitfalls
- Don’t use points in a way that will distract users from what’s most important on the site
- Don’t put a number on a bad behavior
- Don’t oversimplify what’s important to your service
- Don’t let people game the system – avoid anything that can be automated to success (challenging to avoid)
- Avoid blocking people in to the point where they can’t build on top of your service or innovate new ways to use it (Twitter)
- Reasons to do this stuff
- Educates your users and makes them better users
- Creates better differentiation for users
- Users are more willing to collaborate
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