Fresh

One of the reasons I love web design is because there is so much opportunity to pull knowledge and inspiration from other disciplines. The SXSW panel “Playing on! Interface Lessons from Games” let me do that, and it dealt with video games, which are just fun. The general idea of the panel was:

“We know we will have succeeded when non-game interactions provide the same level of emotion, feedback, progress indication, innovative controls and social involvement that games supply.”

The points that really resonated with me the most were their discussion of “progress indication” and “social involvement” and how those apply to the work we do in web design.

Progress Indication

In the gaming world, the idea of gaining reputation and points is really important. It creates incentive for people to keep playing. It’s a reward system. The concept of “leveling up” also works in this manner; as you collect points you progress to higher levels which is an indication of reputation. The presenters gave an example from World of Warcraft:

The n00b on the left is clearly different from the Super User on the right. The Super User is tricked out in a cool costume and has lots of “badges.” Badges are a great way to show off the success a user has achieved. People have a “collecting mentality”; letting them acquire badges plays on this basic instinct. It also fulfills the need for achievement and respect from others described in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (mentioned in the last Fresh post)

Reputation is something that can be taken into account for any kind of web project. (Even if the design isn’t meant to be social, letting a user collect points can still be a powerful incentive to keep interacting.) Think about the idea of reputation and Twitter. Twitter displays the number of people following you and the number of updates you’ve done. This acts as really successful reputation/point system. How could Twitter utilize the idea of “leveling up”? Maybe the idea of paid accounts does this? Another great way to show reputation is by displaying a user’s “member since” date.

When it comes to profile design: making it seem empty when someone hasn’t added to an area of their profile will make them want to “fill” it; they will know there is more functionality that they can explore. Using “grayed out” design elements is one way to do that. But, also think about what information you can use to populate a profile without the user having to do any work (like Twitter shows how many tweets someone has done). Think about the statistics that you are collecting for every user and automatically display things that are relevant.

Social Involvement

The panelists talked about how non-game applications can become more social. They saw one area that this could be especially beneficial: the learning process.

A great way to learn how to do something is by watching an expert do the same task. This can happen in multi-player games. Bringing this concept into non-game applications could be awesome. What if someone just learning Photoshop could watch an expert create a clipping path?

Games employ the use of gradual learning often, too. When a user comes to a part in the game where they need to learn how to do something, new, more advanced functionality can be revealed. This way they are not overwhelmed or frustrated early on by too many options.This is a really good idea to keep in mind for designs that may require some learning by the user.

It was really cool to step outside my own frame of reference and hear what folks involved in game design think about every day. I’m hoping that a video of the panel will surface eventually! And last but not least, a quote from the talk that I’m sure you’ll appreciate:

“If UI designers made super Mario Bros, there would be one big button: “SAVE PRINCESS”