Games, on the other hand, start with a simple set of tools and abilities and a simple interface. Then, as you game your way up from level to level, both tools/abilities and interface grow in power and complexity up to a point that you would never have though possible starting out. And all that is driven by your experience and learning your way around, which in turn are driven by your motivation to solve certain problems - like saving the princess.

Danc from Lostgarden gave a talk about he principles behind game design and their possible application to interface design to the Seattle IxDA chapter way back in 2008. It’s not only still worth looking up - it is a good basis for starting to think about applying these principles.

So - is all just Game? Jesse Schell (Professor at Carnegie Mellon University) shares thoughts about the pervasiveness of gaming in his DICE2010 talk: When games invade real life - where he dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular “Facebook Games” era:

He also makes the point that you want to level complex or complicated tasks by providing gaming incentives that motivate people to explore new features. And that you do that by rewarding them for exploring and learning.

A reward system is apparently also what drives Amazons Mechanical Turk: Andy Baio told the audience in his SXSWi session “Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play” that he set up a mechanical turk task to ask people why they turk. About 1/3 said that they did it for fun.

@screeny: Whether Amazon intended to or not they turned Mechanical Turk into a game. A MMORPG of sorts. #gamingthecrowd

So giving out badges for bugtracking seems to work. But how do you incorporate these principles into applications like word processing or email/messaging or most anything aimed at normal users and their mundane tasks? How do you build applications that grow with the demands and reward change?

Again, it is Danc who writes about a Office Add On that tries just that with Ribbon Hero:

Imagine Microsoft Office turned into a video game. One where learning a productivity app is a delight. One where the core loop of gameplay involves using and gaining skills in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

It sounds a bit unlikely doesn’t it?

Well, I’m happy to announce the availability of Ribbon Hero, a new download from Microsoft that turns using Office into a game. I’ve been helping the fine folks over in Office Labs with the design and we are all immensely proud that this is getting released to the public. Huge kudos to Jen, Jonas and the rest of the team. CNET calls it “Brilliant”.
Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game

Ribbon Hero aims to “level people up in their abilities” in MS Office and allow them to share their results on Facebook. - coming from the knowledge that people wanted to use more features of Office - but didn’t know how. MSNBC’s Channel 9 Jonas Henlin from the Office Labs explains how Ribbon Hero was developed. Ribbon Hero is available on the Office Labs’ Ribbon Hero page, where there are also a few more videos. And here is a talk Danc gave at Word Camp 2010 in early may:

It mostly adds another layer that introduces highscores into a world that previously had to live without them, thus giving you a way to brag about your achievements, but also teaches you about features by letting you play through challenges that you can call up if you are intrested in completing certain tasks.

Rewarding and giving you bragging rights is a topic that was very much at the centre of the Gaming the System with 4chan talk at SXSW.

4chan’s Christopher Poole (moot) and Jason Scott told us about how inherently fickle motivations can be - and how they may take up a life of their own. moot becoming the Time Magazine’s Most Influential Person 2009 is nothing anybody ever planned - it just happened. It is a sort of emergent behaviour: a group somehow attracted by meme-engine 4chan decided they wanted him there. If he’d told them to, he admits, it would never have happened.
And this was only one example of how motivation is the sometimes unpredictable key point, that is rooted in the possibly varied interpretations of the values associated with the application. 4chan is probably not a good role model, but a good example: the core value of anarchic freedom ruled only by the will to fame and the rules are what make it extremely unpredictable. But any platform or emergent technology makes very visible what is also true for any tool or application: there is no end to the user’s ingenuity in putting tools to unprecedented uses.

So probably this whole gaming the interface thing is one more thing to go social with your application: from delivering a product (and maybe listening to feedback from disgruntled or happy users) to a truly interactive approach that allows your users to really own the application and making it part of a socially interactive network.

Which means that you should think hard about the kind of rules you set up for your gamed interface - and what kind of values they reflect.

wikipedia is a game where you can choose to be a beaurocrat #gamingwith4chan (Jason Scott)

Start by analyzing your content: what kind of content do you have (images? text? audio? video? comments?… you get the drift) and then thoroughly and mercilessly check for content that is no longer needed.

And then document: what, where, where does it come from (and maybe think about what content to evaluate, if it is just too much). In the talk, they suggested to “put it in a really big spreadsheet (and decide which information to document there - like what, where it’s from and who owns it)”. However you document it - you should be able to cross-reference it and find a way to keep ahead of the untold numbers of content you find. Because the next step is to…

Find out how is it organized and see, if that still makes sense. I.e. is there a reason why exhibit “A” is where it is - or was there just no other place you could think of to put it. And is there a better way to stack your content?

Next, you should of course analyse other factors such as seo, accessibility, functional requirements and - my I add the output device.

FInally: Asses the Quality of the Content. Ask yourself the question:
- do you have all the content you need
- is it up to date?
- is it communicating clearly?
- is it relevant?
- are tone and style appropriate?
- is it meeting your business needs?

The art with question like these of course is not asking them, but answering them honestly and maybe ask your users that they think about the issues regarding your webpage.

After the talk I was left with the impression that I had just gotten a good run-through of the basics of content strategy. Something to work with. Hope I could relate that.

Ever sat in a meeting where two opposing parties - or stakeholders, as you might call them - lambasted each other with what their respective user research had found out? Sure you have, and you may even have witnessed one where they held opposing views on the same usability subject concerning their site: each side using a study they had commissioned to prove their point.



Now that usually is the time when you start thinking about what you can do to help a situation that may not have much to do with users and their experience. But the last time I had that kind of meeting a different thought struck me: how can it be that two studies that are supposed to measure the same thing come to different conclusions? Especially given that it is probably not exactly cutting edge science that we are dealing with here.


I admit: that thought didn’t come from nowhere – at that time I had been reading a book by British writer, broadcaster and doctor Ben Goldacre. The book is called Bad Science and its cover promises fast and powerful relief from scaremongering journalists, pill-pushing nutritionists, flaky statistics and evil pharmaceutical corporations.


The book – in a way based on Goldacres “Bad Science” columns here and in The Guardian – debunks various cases of pseudoscience of the aforementioned varieties of scaremongering and evil. In doing so, it also gives a short and very enjoyable tour of the scientific method: how a proper study should be constructed, how it should be documented, how statistics work, and how peer review is like democracy: it’s not perfect, but the best we have.


Ring a bell? It did for me. It got me thinking about what exactly they had been measuring in their usability studies, how valid the design had been, how transparent the statistics. More often than not it is down to the question that had initially been asked (which gives rise to another interesting bias often found in this context: that of looking for confirmation of a thesis instead of actively trying to falsify it in order to test its validity).


And that’s why I think Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” comes recommended for our profession. It’s not only a good read (for most anybody, I guess, but of course even more so if you are interested in science) but it gives some insight into how to check for the validity of the research you are presented.
If you want to go buy it now, here are some links that get you there and help me with this blog:
The English version
Bad Science
Und das Buch auf Deutsch
Die Wissenschaftslüge: Wie uns Pseudo-Wissenschaftler das Leben schwer machen

And here are the links to Ben Goldacre’s blog and column – and to an interesting post on a similar subject I came across just recently.
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre’s blog
Bad Science @ The Guardian
Don Norman on Research and Innovation: Technology First, Needs Last

Suxorz ‘09: The Ten Worst Social Media Campaigns

The Suxorz ‘09 panel - comprised of Henry Copeland from Blogads.com, Zadi Diaz from EPIC FU, the inimitable Jeff Jarvis,  author of What Would Google Do? and host of the upcoming Guardian Media Podcast, US edition, Michael Monello from Campfire and Sara Smith, Wonkette - returns to dissect the ten worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of the year.  The podcast was fun to listen to - except for the bits where the audience piped in without the help of microphones (listening to the panel breathing amuses only for so long) - and provided some interesting insights of the “don’t” variety.

Check it out on swsx.com or download it directly here.

And then there was this panel:

What Teens & Tweens Want In A Web Site/Application

You know what - they had like actual teens on the podium giving very interesting input for all those designing or programming a website or application for teens or just wanting to be relevant to the next generation. Very intresting indeed. Panel was hosted by Anastasia Goodstein of Ypulse.

Check it out on swsx.com or download it directly here.

So cheers for now: enjoy.

Meanwhile, enjoy a few thoughts and ramblings about #rp09 - which I couldn’t attend - and the UX-Camp, which I hopefully will attend.

For news and the latest from re:publica 09, I suggest you head over to twitter and search for the hash-tag #09. Much more reliable that the livestream from Berlin, which is sometimes live, but mostly not streaming. And probably much more fun, too. Seems a mixed affair over in Berlin.