On Monday, June 24th, I will begin teaching the first half of an 8-week User Experience Design Immersive (UXDi) at General Assembly. The course will be co-taught by me for the first month and Aynne Valencia for the second month.Week 1-4 is fundamentals (IA, IxD, UeR, UI) and week 5-8 is contexts and clients. I’d love (and so appreciate) to have you contribute in any capacity that is exciting to YOU.  

Some ideas for modes of contribution are: 

• chatting 1:1 with students about their design projects for the course and about design as a career
• an informal Q&A during lunch where you chat with students about what you do and your thoughts on design in general
• a more formal presentation during class where you dive deep into a topic you are excited about presenting on
• Let us visit your design studio on a field trip
• and/or the end-of-the-year portfolio review where you give students feedback on the portfolios they plan to use to get hired.

See below for more detailed descriptions and time commitments of ways to help out!  Also, I’m totally open to hearing any suggestions you have as to how you might want to contribute your time and energy.The class takes place at The Hattery, at 414 Brannan Street between 2nd and 3rd, in SF from 9-5. 

 DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS:

• Buddy Sessions

  • what – 1:1 pow-wow sessions with students

  • time commitment – 1 hour/week – can participate anywhere from 1-8 times

  • description – you will meet students and chat individually with them to evaluate and critique project-based work, answer questions about UX design as a career path and serve as a sounding board for UX questions

• Lunchtime Leisure Lectures

  • what –  an informal talk delivered during the students’ lunch break

  • time commitment –  1 hour/week – a one-time commitment

  • description –  once-a-week, students will have an expert in the UX field come and chat informally with them about their path to UX, what they are currently doing and where they see the future of UX going; these talks are informal and personal – think of it like a fireside chat, but during lunch

• Classroom Deep Dives

  • what – a more structured presentation on your area of expertise

  • time commitment – 1-5 hours/wk (depending on how much you need to prepare for your presentation and also if you want to stay after your lecture for Q&A) – a one-time commitment

  • description –  throughout the course, Christina & Aynne will be supplementing their own instructional materials with lessons taught by experts in their respective fields; it’s one thing to talk about Data Visualization and another thing to have someone like Edward Tufte come and talk about DV

• Project/Portfolio Reviews

  • what – 1:1 feedback on student projects and portfolio work

  • time commitment – 2 hours on each of the dates listed below – can participate anywhere from 1-4 times

    • Friday, July 5th

    • Friday, July 19th

    • Friday, August 2nd

    • Friday, August 16th

  • description – students will benefit greatly from having current UX practitioners give them feedback on the projects that they are working on during the course; the final date (August 16th) will be a portfolio showcase, in which students will receive feedback on the overall structure, content and execution of the portfolios that they will use to get hired for their first UX job!

Ping me! I’m cwodtke at this URL…..

• Do not listen to the first recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl because then you’ll realize you are wasting your life on this project and need to go do something truly important.
• No, now is not a good time for inbox zero.
• Yes, you do need to see the dentist about that funny spot on your teeth, but waiting on hold is just an excuse to play LeapDay. Let’s fess up.
• “More research” is code for “not making.”
• No, the dishes in the sink will wait.
• Stop rejiggering the framework, and just make what you said you’d make!
  “I’m thinking about it wrong” just leads to more anguish, and less shipping.
  The phrase “the best is the enemy of the good” is only possible approach, my friend.
• Mute the sound, those notifications are not for anything important.
• Don’t freak out about the wall of stuff. Pick one item. Do it. Take the next item. Do it.
• Candy! Coffee! Cola! Whiskey! SOME CHEMICAL WILL SURELY WORK.
• Stop blogging

As I teach UX, I felt I needed something simple I could draw on a whiteboard. Something that withholds some complexity until people understand the basic fundamentals. And maybe most importantly, something that did not suggest workflow the way Jesse’s had. I chose clarity over complexity. So I reduced and reduced until I had the three core skills, IA, IxD and Interface. Then I added the three contexts/inputs- business, technology and users.

This is an activity based model: it’s all about what a UX knows and does. it’s not about job descriptions, one person could do all, or three or more could do this work. It could have been further abstracted, I suppose, to content, interaction and interface and ignore the current labels for that kind of work, but I feel something is lost if I do that. The actual professions have a body of knowledge worth referring to.

As well, this model can describe a process can start with any of the inputs, and move around all three skills, reflecting the “working the canvas” process approach. Here is how I used it to explain what a UX designer does.

Here are the definitions of the core three skills I’m using.

Information Architecture
The organization and presentation of information to support retrieval, understanding and use.

Interaction Design
Design of the behavior of digital products to support use in order to support human goals, such as work, play and connection with each other.

Interface Design
The skill of using visual design principles to communicate use of a digital tool or information space in order to assure that the users of that product can effectively interact with it.

As well, since it’s a Sierpinski triangle, it can be subdivided further… feel free to play with it!

And if color confuses things, one can do a more pure B&W approach, like this:

See Also: A Syllabus for User Experience

We picked four “hard skills” and three “soft skills” that make us a User Experience Designer.  For sanity sake, I defined the hard skills rather narrowly, so they would complement rather than compete.  I’m interested in how folks see these.  What is missing? What’s not ringing true?

They follow:

Information Architecture
The organization and presentation of information to support retrieval, understanding and use.

Interaction Design
Design of the behavior of digital products to support use in order to support human goals, such as work, play and connection with each other.

Interface Design
The skill of using visual design principles to communicate use of a digital tool or information space in order to assure that the users of that product can effectively interact with it.

User Research
A collection of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, used to understand the audience of a digital product in order to inform design and business choices.

Design Communication
Ability to articulate your thinking via words and pictures. You should be able to create effective diagrams including sitemaps, task flows, conceptual diagrams, wireframes, and create final comps  as well as invent new kinds of diagrams when needed. You must be able to present your ideas and work, explain your rationale and incorporate feedback.

Team Collaboration
Ability to understand business requirements and technical constraints/abilities and work with your product partners to design products that can be launched successfully into the world.  Ability to collaborate on design solutions.

Profession Design Skills
Able to determine requirements, write a proposal, negotiate a project, present your solutions, discuss (and charge for) changes, estimate time it takes to do work, interview and be interviewed.

Interestingly, the hard skills were easier to define for me than the soft skills, despite all the endless fuss around the act of  definition.

The Continuum

The student and teacher then compare notes on how they see the student’s skill level on a one to five scale:

One: No clue, or have heard of it but are unclear what it’s all about

Two: Could hire/interview someone to see if they hold this skill

Three: Can do this skills acceptably

Four: Can teach others this skill

Five: rock star ninja unicorn

Would this work for you?

Finally, I’m focusing on a “tai chi” style of teaching. When I was briefly studying tai chi, I loved the first posture. Our teacher described it as much in terms of emotion as physical alignment. You sat in to you hips, to gain stability, then opened your heart to the world, and finally lifting your mind to the sky for awareness and inspiration. I believe this is how you should learn to design as well.

So first I set an objective for Q1. Objects always work best when time constrained. I like three months as a time frame a lot. It’s long enough to accomplish significant things, and short enough to have a sense of urgency. Companies, of course, like them because they map to quarters.

Objectives should be qualitative, specific and bold.

My objective was to model a sustainable happy life. Oops, too big, too vague! That’s more of a life mission. So what looks more like a three-month objective?

Objective: Be financially stable while preserving health and doing work I like to do.
Financially stable: make as much as I spend, when I am at my lowest level of spending.
Preserving health: I have had horrible stomach and back issues. Back from too much desk time, stomach from stress.
Work I like to do: This historically as gotten me in trouble. I think so many things are cool and nifty, I have done things that have hurt my health in order to not be bored.

So now I needed KR’s. I knew I’ve had reached my objective if these three things were present

KR: earn X over three months doing work I’d do even if I wasn’t paid
KR: have a manageable budget to predict expanses
KR: zero acid reflux, zero back pain

X was the back of the envelope number I’d put together when I was forced to asses my life by my kindly financial advisor. However, I hoped to get to a more accurate one, both to better gauge financial health and to know when I can spurge at Anthropologie. And I’ve never run off a budget ever, but I figured that was the only way to really know if my life was sustainable.

Next I needed a plan. I had spent the previous quarter prototyping a life. I tried out consulting and teaching, and both were fun. However, the consulting had produced more stress than I could handle, but the teaching had gone well. I also had discovered two other things that were important to my well being: running and writing. Each had terrific impact on health, Writing for mental and  running for physical. I now had some good hypothesizes about what happiness night look like.

So: I needed to teach, write and run.

From that starting point, I came up with a bunch of ideas that would move me toward my goal: looking at the Dschool, exploring more work with General Assembly, getting a book proposal together. Finding ways to do talks that would at least not cost money to do. I’ve become a fan of avoiding monolithic product plan (which tend to be lies anyway), and instead creating a collection of projects that you can frequently evaluate. So I came up with a collection of activities I can try, and worked to sequence them.

And then I set into the part most people don’t talk about (or value): the weekly report.

I have had to write a lot of weekly reports in my career, and they are usually annoying and boring laundry lists I didn’t want to write and my boss didn’t want to read. But at Zynga, we learned how to make them awesome. It had everything to do with only tracking and reporting things that made a significant difference. Since them, I’ve used them in consulting as well, adjusting over time.

The format for the emails is similar to stand ups. Last week, Next week, Blockers. I’ve added in “notes” which are things the person getting the email should know. As well, each item has a priority: P1 (do this week), P2 (do this week if possible) or P3 (consider).

In each section you can only have three P1′s. You can have a couple P2′s as well. Maybe a P3. I quite enjoyed sending them to a boss; it made sure our priorities were tightly aligned. If I had a P1 s/he thought was a P2, we could have a conversation about why each of us thought differently about the urgency of the work.

P1s are the things that matter. I am huge stack rank fan. I stack rank everything. It give you clarity. It keep you from indulgence. It makes you examine your values.

The report section on last week lists the priorities you agreed on, and if they got done. If they didn’t, why they didn’t. You can start to see pattern in what messes you up that way.

Blockers are things you need help with, things that slow you down you can’t remove yourself.

If you can remove a blocker yourself, just f*cking remove it. This report isn’t for excuses, it’s for executing.

My coach agreed to receive the emails, in lieu of a boss. It’ s good to send the emails to someone, to stay honest.

I’m already learning from this practice. I had to admit I’d underestimated how much work the book proposal was, and change my goals from writing it to outlining it. I realized weather would affect my exercise schedule, and I needed to be flexible. I had to admit sometimes I punk out more than I wish I did And find a way to beat that.

So as we try to find a way to keep our resolutions, consider the OKR. rather than a big wish at the end of the year, how about a plan you can live with?

This is the community that lives to destroy any status quo as soon as it’s statused.  The “whaddya got” rebels are joined by a media establishment who worship “high production values” and many designers who just generally despise crappiness in all forms. They all complain the MVP is too small and too half*ssed to tell you if the product/market fit really exists.

What all these arguments lack is thoughtful examination of the V in MVP. And the V is the hardest to get right. Two cautionary tales:

• Thoughtful and successful adolescent start-up launches a new product into a desired market. New product was carefully thought out, spec’d within an inch of its life, designed well and when it hit the market  it was a complete product with no forgotten edge cases. It  flopped. No wide-spread adoption with existing users, no gains in engagement, no new users.
• Young start-up with proven entrepreneur team puts together a MVP launches, and it flops. Moves on. Another start-up launches a copycat and it succeeds.

And one surprising one:

• Trainwreck of a elderly company finally launches a product that had been rattling around the company for a while because no one had the courage to get it out. Bullheaded exec shoves it into he world, and it becomes the only part of the site growing usage.

These stories all share one common missing element I didn’t tell, and that is perseverance in making sure the MVP actually was viable.

1. The product was launched and the PM who worked on it moved on to the next big idea. It was considered perfect upon launch, so clearly the market didn’t want it, right?
2. The first start-up launched their product, talked to customers who didn’t like it, so moved on to something else. The second start-up launched, talked to customers, tweaked, talked to customers,tweaked and got it right. Turned out poor messaging was obscuring the product’s desirability.
3. The elderly company left a PM with nothing else to do working to work on the freshly launched product. He trolled the message boards, listened to the complaints, tweaked until the users were happy and evangelizing.

A Dictionary Definition:

vi·a·ble

Adjective Capable of working successfully; feasible: “the proposed investment was economically viable”. (of a seed or spore) Able to germinate.

A Working Definition:

vi·a·ble (for startups)

/ˈvīəbəl/

Adjective Desirable by the market Buildable by the company Profitable for the company

 

When you sit down to create an MVP, it’s easy to spend time on the M. And it’s important. You probably don’t have a lot of money. and you know it’s a long climb to the top of the mountain called success. So in order to make your resources last,  you need to do the smallest possible thing to learn if your product has potential.  But as Einstein said “Simple as possible, but not simpler.” There is a tendency to reduce the MVP to something so small it cannot it cannot be evaluated by the market you seek. Or worse, it’s misvalued.

It’s also tempting to stay in the comfort of the office, polishing your apples, making that dream product that you know the market will just love! I just watched a fairly brilliant idea die because it was never “good enough” to launch, and funding disappeared in the face of no market feedback.

So when you create the MVP, you must focus on the viability. And you can’t know what is viable until you put the product and the market together.  You have to become one with your market, and you do that by talking to people.

Users historically will put up with a lot of crappiness, if they understand and desire the value the product. But they judge that in a hundred ways, so your viability will be partially based on the context of the user’s mind.  One easy example: they don’t expect a lot of visual design sophistication from search engines, but they do in fashion sites. If your site is clunky and you are pushing haute couture, potential customers may write you off in the first five seconds of the page loading.

As you sit down to design your MVP, first ask yourself

“What is the question we must answer to move forward?”

and

“How do we know we have an answer?”

Then consider the nature of your market:

• How do they define  quality?
• What do they want they aren’t getting?
• How do they talk about it?
• What habits do they already have you can leverage?
• What switching costs do they experience?

Your MVP must be viable from the market’s point of view. The new users must know why your product is good, and be able to quickly build an ongoing relationship with it.  As Steve Blank says, you must leave the building. You will have to meet people before you begin to design and build. You will have to meet people while you design and build. and you will have to meet with people after you design and build, and you will keep designing and building until you are quite certain you need to do something else.

Your MVP must be viable from your company’s point of view: can you build something that will make more money that it costs? It can be heartbreaking, but sometimes those initial conversations with the market will prompt a pivot. But rather than getting down, celebrate! You didn’t waste time nor money. You can now find what will work.

Once you think you have a good clue on that, commit to do the smallest thing you think the market will accept as interesting as a beginning spot.  It should meet, as lightly as possible, the criteria your userbase sets. You can launch something less what you think will needed, if you know you can get continued interaction with the market.  If acquiring customers is tough or expensive, best to make them cocreators of the product.

And understand launch is the beginning, not the end, of what should be an iterative evaluation process.  I recommend committing to a period of time where you do nothing but work toward product/market fit with the single initiative.

Viable is a goal, not a set of requirements.

MVP is a process, not a strawman.  It is that first handhold as you begin to climb a mountain. And sometimes finding the handhold can be instant, or it can take some feeling around.  Take the time to make sure it’s a solid one.

V for Victory!

 

winter

January and February marked the end of my time at Zynga. Many many people like to ask me about it, my usual response is everything you hear is usually true: good and bad. It’s a complicated place. I also learned more there than all my other jobs, combined.

It came at a physical and emotional price. Here is my advice to anyone about to take a job: make sure the core values of the company are the same as yours, or you will experience cognitive dissonance.

A few more words on working at Zynga: many things Zynga-related have shocked me. Some people who I thought were friends suddenly treated me like I’d taken a job at Philip Morris Altria. They were more casual friends admittedly; my good friends expect me to do unlikely things. Most of these critics hadn’t even played the games, just read about them and decided they must be crap.

The other thing that shocked me was how everyone congratulated me when I joined: Zynga was among the hottest companies in the valley at that moment. And so many people told me I was an idiot to have ever joined when I left. Sometimes the exact same people. I often think of this story:

“There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “May be,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “May be,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “May be,” said the farmer.”


I left Zynga exhausted, and resolved not to work for awhile. I immediately went to Ireland, then New Orleans to reconnect with my old tribe: interaction design/information architecture. At these conferences I had some good times and some bad times. I was horrified when I discovered I wasn’t very interested in the vast bulk of the program. Much of it seemed irrelevant to me, or even silly (that doesn’t mean it was, just that it didn’t speak to me.) I felt like an outsider somewhere I thought I’d feel inside. It was like going home, and realizing mom has turned your bedroom into a sewing room.

But then, as so many many people hugged me delightedly and said they’d missed me last year, and as I got drawn into conversations about kids and career and how to make good products I began to feel better. I realized finally, that while what I do had changed and what I care about had evolved; who I love had not changed at all. When you’ve seen the same people. often only once a year, for twelve years, they are not your colleagues and peers; they are your family. I will be at future Summits and other events because these people mean the world to me.

spring

I went to Japan and Thailand. This was my trip of ridiculous fortune. Without paying much attention to booking beyond cheap flights, I landed in Tokyo for cherry blossom viewing season, and was invited to a picnic by ex-pat game designers and other technology types. I caught a train up to Kyoto, where the blossoms had just started blooming, and wandered amidst kimono wrapped locals through the winding streets, stopping to meditate in temples older than my country.

In Thailand, I arrive just in time for Songkran, the New Years celebration. I wandered in to Wat Pho to get a massage (Thai massage was invented at Wat Pho, and they still have a school where you can get a traditional and affordable thai massage.) I found myself in the middle of a celebration with food stalls, dancers, sand castles and stayed until it was so late there were no ferries, and I had to take a life-affirming tuk-tuk ride back to my hotel.





I flew to Koh Samui, where I studied Thai cuisine at SITCA. If I weren’t a parent, I think I might have stayed there a year, just cooking and swimming and learning. As it was, I finally decoded what made Thai food thai; the magic blend of basil, garlic and galunga, and the ever important panden leaves. We would take our lunch break with a foot massage for 7 dollars at the spa next door. We never needed to eat, of course. I fell asleep more than once as my sore feet were kneaded. I also lived in the sea as much as I could. One day, while snorkeling, I saw sharks herding an octopus. Miracles in the shallow seas.



I returned to Bangkok and explored the ruins of Ayuthya. I was convinced by the hotel owner to hire a taxi at the same price as the horrible bus tours, and loved the freedom to wander temples as long as I pleased. As one point, at the top of temple, I found a dark staircase with bad smell, a rope banister and the hint of a light at the bottom. I made my way down, fear mounting, heat rising and at the very bottom ducked under a low lintel to discover a tiny room of paintings. Perhaps it was the fear of entering a dark enclosed space that pumped adrenaline in my heart, or the sheer unexpectedness beauty of it, but I became giddy with joy. I zoomed back up to the light, and threw wide my arms to hug the entire country. I love you so much Thailand. You are marvelous and messy and great and just built for epiphanies and healing.


A friend has told me she doesn’t want to go there because of the sex trafficking and prostitution. To color a country with the brush of the sensationalist media to to give up the riches the place has to offer. She also suggested I might want to skip Mexico; advice I also did not take. Some day I might die (I’m not planning to), it might be tomorrow. But tomorrow or 50 years or 100, when I die there will not be a list of regrets on my deathbed. Only memories.

AND I rode my first elephant.


At home, driving on the 280, I had an epiphany and converted to atheism, not out of anger and rejection, but out of revelation of the beauty and sufficiency of our existence.

summer

In June (not my first pick of seasons for going to Mexico, but the school year makes these decisions for me) Erin and Amelie and I went to Mexico. We climbed pyramids, and swam with sea turtles. I drove through cities where the streets were rivers after violent rains, and fished for the first time in my life (I liked it!) I watched my daughter figure out how to swim and do somersaults under water. We survived an ear infection and mariachis. We had locals try to teach us Mayan, and explain there would be no apocalypse. Erin went home, and my daughter and I grew a bit sick of each other and crabbed back and forth for a a day, until we climbed Coba’s pyramid, the tallest on the peninsula. I have no idea what happened there, but after we were happy and serene. We watched sea turtles come out of the water and lay their eggs on the white sands under the full moon.


Amelie learned how to swim.

fall

Home at last, I determined I should start thinking about NEXT. What ever that might be. I had meetings. I ate lunch and drank coffee. I signed up for six weeks of culinary school. I’ve written about it elsewhere, but it was a great exercise. What I learned changed how I cook forever, but also taught me that I was not going to cook for a living (something I kinda already knew, but it drove it home.) This is when I decided to start prototyping a life I wanted to live. I went into the fourth quarter trying two things; a consulting gig with a start-up in the food space, and teaching at General Assembly

I fell completely in love with the funny, brilliant founders and insightful CEO of Eatclub but I also realized the fast paced life of a start-up was no longer for me. To be honest, I can’t take stress any more. My body collapses, my stomach roils, my head splits. I’ve been going like a lunatic for twenty years, and now it’s time for me to learn how to be slow. Or it may kill me. Even though I loved the product and the people. I couldn’t stay with Eatclub, or my health and new found happiness would suffer. I finished my gig, and returned to my wanderer’s life. If you get a chance to work with these guys, grab it. They rock!

My students and me.

However, teaching turned out to be a massive win. I loved helping my students figure out this crazy things called UX, and they taught me as much I as I taught them. As well, the class gave me an excuse to reach out to old friends and make new ones in the form of guest speakers. I have to thank

• Andrei Herasimchuk for setting up the class by talking about fundamentals
• Steve Portigal for teaching the art of the user interview
• Eric Bell, for both teaching the fundamentals of deliverable, and being a supportive and amazing TA.
• Randy Farmer, for explaining reputation
• Klaus Kaasgaard for explaining the power of network effects
• Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone for teaching all about Design Pattern Libraries
• Daniel Gatsby for teaching how to design for online and off expereince
• Todd Zaki Warfel for teaching the basics of prototyping (Amelie, who joined a few classes really like this one)
• Dan Parham, for showing my students what a design founder can accomplish
• Amy Jo Kim for teaching collaborative design
• Jen Ruffner for explaining the art of optimization
• Jeff Johnson, for teaching us the physiology of design
• Greg Nudelman for teaching the basics of mobile

I don’t think we’ll soon see the like. It was an amazing class. I learned as much as the students!

And I relaunched Boxes and Arrows. Little BANDA is still finding her feet, but we’ve begun publishing again, and we have a new staff joining the few tough folks who have stood by her these last couple tough years.

2012 has been packed full of stuff I love. I’ve learned some hard lessons along the way. It can be miserable to live with uncertainty. I’ve never had to do it before: I’ve always known what I wanted to do. Many times I’ve wished I could just find that perfect job where someone would tell me what to do and who to be. But that would never suit me, and I know better. When solstice came, and it was the longest night of the year, I almost despaired of knowing what to do with myself. I thought, how much easier it would be if my life ended now. But I lit every light in the house, every candle, built a fire in the fireplace and held my daughter in my arms. And believed hard that if I just stay honest with myself, something will turn up.

But as I sit here looking at 2013, I’m full of hope. I have a couple of projects I think may be wonderful, I have some trips and talks I know will be. I’m planning my next teaching gigs (and would be happy to come to your town and teach there, if you wish.) I’m digging into a book proposal, and planning a new workout and diet routine. Amelie wants to go to Thailand, and I want to visit Machu Pichu.

Every day you are not dead is a chance to live a wonderful life. I plan to.

How about you?

I have news for you: not all fun is the same.  Here is a list of things I do not find fun

• Knitting
• Paint-by-numbers
• Camping
• Golf
• Poker

Yet I do not deny these things are fun to someone.  I don’t insist no one likes golf, they just do it to network (although I suspect it often.) I don’t look at the knitting craze as I would a cigarette pack, wondering how someone gets started with something so obviously disgusting. I don’t wonder what weird endorphins are released by sleeping on the ground with bugs. And I don’t accuse REI of manipulating people into buying expensive sleeping bags they don’t need, even though they are. Clearly.

We all find different things fun. Richard Bartle was the first most famous categorizer of players. In his Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDs,* he sorted players of MUDs into four types: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, Killers.  Achievers just wanted to be top rated. They love leaderboards. Explorers are driven by curiosity. They are the ones who stay up until 2 am to finish a novel or find out what lies around the corner in a maze. Socializers will tell you they met their best friends playing World of Warcraft.  Killers like to win, as long as you also lose.  In fact, if you lose, it’s ok if they don’t win. As long as you go down hard.  Don’t play Scrabble with these people.

Since then, people have been trying to apply these types to all sorts of games (and gamification). But not all games are MUDs.  Amy Joe Kim in What’s Your Engagement Style lists out Compete, Collaborate, Explore and Express as engagement styles found in social games (and social websites).

As well, Nicole Lazarro laid out the Four Keys to Fun, which categorized our game play into Hard Fun “Fiero” (which has become part of the game design lingua), Easy Fun i.e. “Curiosity,” Serious Fun which she equates to “Relaxation,” and People Fun or “Amusement.”  I find Nicole’s the hardest to work with linguistically, because Amusement doesn’t quite capture what social play is about. But Fiero nails it. From First Person Shooters to crushing your friends in a close match Words with Friends, Fiero is Bartle’s Killers without the blood.

So what kind of fun is Farmville? I was lucky enough to meet many Farmville players when I was at Zynga, and they were not pale slot machine addicts, fingers twitching over a need to plant a Macaroni Tree. They looked a lot like the folks I saw at Michaels when my daughter and I went there to buy craft materials.

Bartle might say they were Socializers or maybe achievers, except they weren’t that into leaderboards. Some did like having a better farm than their friends. It was a kind of “smug neighbor” syndrome. But these were rare.  As for them being socializers, it was more likely they just quietly exchanged “gifts” and did not chat with each other. Conversations features were more ignored than used.

Kim would probably say they were expressers, and this comes closest to what I saw in forums like this one. There is a real pride in what one can accomplish.  But those who expressed were also less common than those who made amazing farms, and kept them to themselves.

Lazzaro is probably the winner in capturing the Farmville Fun with “relaxation.” The farmers are hobbyists in the truest meaning of the word. They make things for the pleasure of making.  It is a quiet place where they can bring order to their life the way they often can’t otherwise. I suppose most folks on Etsy are there not to earn a living, but because otherwise their houses would be overrun with plarn dresses and paper rose bouquets. Look, it’s ok I’ve made 50 couch doilies. I’m a small business!

Perhaps I recognize this urge to create useless stuff from the model railroaders in Mason City, Iowa, where my grandparents lived. These men could hide from the chaos of the house overrun by kids into the order of the basement wonderland. Perhaps I find myself retreating into the same urge as I cook, giving up the living room as lost to my daughter’s time machine built from Amazon boxes. The kitchen is the one place, cooking is the one time I can be in full control.  But the urge to make always overwhelms the urge to consume. My freezer is full, and I throw away too much.

My City in Cityville was the same way for me, for a while, but it stayed in its little box. It was a tiny place I could travel to in my mind, with the wide grassy central square with a gazebo like Mason City, but also a block of brownstones with a deli, like my favorite parts of Brooklyn. I controlled where the Starbucks went, and if it was allowed in. And clean-up was a breeze.

Yes, Zynga does a lot of things you don’t like that retailers also do, like limited-time promotions, artificially limited collectibles and placing way to many pop-ups between you and your play. We put up with the Amazon Gold Box, some people collect action figures, some don’t and no one likes pop-ups (Really Zynga, quit it.) But most people also understand that games are not free, and may be willing to click an ad or buy a gold unicorn because they like it.

They also use mechanics that heighten the pleasure, like the harvest mechanic. The Harvest mechanic** is probably one of the most misunderstood mechanics. It’s not inherently addictive. You do something, then you have to come back later to get the rewards of what your efforts. It’s a strong retention mechanic, one that we recognize from creative acts from gardening to baking.

The irregular reward schedule mechanic***, one of the most addictive mechanics and the one you see in slot machines is not present in Farmville. Let me say it once and clearly: the game is actually fun for a certain set of people. They are not shooting up endorphins any more than your grandfather is when he makes model railroads. In fact, at least your grandfather gets to sniff glue while he does it. And some people do spend way too much time playing Farmville, just like some people spend way too much time building railroads, playing D&D, making porcelain unicorns and other horrors. And some people spend way more money on it than they should. How many porcelain unicorns does one need? But these are outliers, far from the masses who worship roulette in the casino temples of Vegas.

Making just feels good. The Farmville farms don’t mess up the kitchen they way my hobby does. Cityville doesn’t take up room on the shelves, like the jars of jam I make but don’t eat. But all of these provide a quiet respite from the madness of the day, a place to be, and a place to quietly busy.

We all have something like that. We are not machines, to always be of use. We need a place to rest our minds. We need a place to let our imagination out without the pressure of it having to be productive.  Perhaps you are a guild member in WoW. Perhaps you wash your car obsessively, dreaming of Lemans as you triple wax it. Maybe you build cities in Minecraft, maybe you collect American Girl dolls that you arrange into oppressive and nonoppresive depictions of femininity.

As one player said “Some people knit. I farm.”

* Multi-user dungeons, an early multiplayer role playing game.
** a mechanic is a rule in the game that gives it shape and often makes it fun. i.e. strawberries take five minutes to reach maturity. or checkers become kings if they reach the far side of the board.
*** Your brain releases dopamine when you get rewarded. When you can’t predict when you will receive a reward, your brain produces more. This is the gambler’s high.

But more than the do nots, I was excited by the dos I could teach. Do do primary research. Do understand context. Do learn about game design and social design and network effects and business models.  Do design an entire user experience. I was excited to teach a foundations class, ignoring the face that foundations is usually taught by multiple professors over a year 8 hours a day.  Call me what you want, but underachiever isn’t going to stick.

So here is what I thought was worth teaching.  And why, and links to slides if it has been taught and if have them ( I have had many many guest speakers).

Day One

I started with an introduction,

Andrei don’t need no stinking slides

Demonstrating how hard indirect manipulation is with a pen on a stick.

then Andrei spoke on key principles designers seem to have forgotten about, including Modality, direct manipulation, and feedback loops. He’ll be writing more on these toward the end of the year, but for now I recommend a visit to wikipedia to learn more.


Day Two
Next the amazing Steve Portigal came in to talk about User Research. I really felt it was important to lead with research. First we understand, then we think, then we pick up pencil and draw… finally we make product.

Day Three

Although I have mixed feelings about using personas in every day life, I have a lot of faith in their power to turn people into user-centered designers.

Day Four
Bizniz

Day Five
This is a day where I taught mental models, including Indi Young’s without slides! Yes! amazing! I used a whiteboard. I loved it. However I’ve got nothing to share. Um… buy her book!

Day Six
Lost in the desert. Running out of bourbon. Send cabana boys.

Ok, no.

My redoubtable TA, Eric Bell taught on deliverables. I’ll see if I can track down his slides.
I include the definition because when I use the word redoubtable, he thinks I mean people doubt him.

Au contraire mon frere!

Day Seven

Has it really only been seven days?

Day Eight
Don’t you hate flashbacks?

Day Nine
I dust off my old social talk and bring it to the new generation

I’ll say, it’s more relevant than ever with the rise of so many new social sites.

Day Ten
And now for something completely different: Randy Farmer!

Day Eleven
Klaus Kaasgaard explained the power of network effects, and how to design for them. No slides, sorry. But let’s take a moment and enjoy how many a’s he has in his name.

Day Twelve
Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone on Design Pattern Libraries
No slides at the moment, but their whole social library is online, and this may help

Day Thirteen
Daniel Gatsby told us lots of secrets from Apple and Square and guess what.. no slides! Bwahahaha! You had to be there.

Seriously, it was awesome and maybe someday he’ll write his genius down!

Day Fourteen
I’m baaaack

Day Fifteen
Todd Zaki Warfel on Prototyping, and Dan Parnum tells the case study of Neighborland. Whew, that night was awesome. Amelie even made a prototype

And yes, NO SLIDES YET. Calm down, already.
Enjoy Todd’s slides on prototyping from Australia. They are quite similar, I assure you

Day Sixteen

Next up was Amy Jo Kim, talking about collaboration in game and experience design.

As well, she’s writing a lot about it on her blog.

Days blur together into a mess

As the holidays came, and guest speakers got slotted in when they could make it, it all became a bit of a blur. The large deck below got taught across at least two days.

I spoke on Visual and Interface design principles:

and Brand

and in the middle of all this, gave a workshop… outside of the class… on UX. I include it here, because, why not?

Finally I had Jen Ruffner speak on Optimization, and Greg Nudelman on Mobile.

And Greg just wrote a book, and an article for B&A, and has these fine slides that are quite similar

and at last, we had the student presentations and portfolio review.

Overall it was an amazing and wonderful experience. One That I hope to repeat.

In a project, the north star is the goal you are trying to accomplish. Game designers have a built-in north star because they make games: it’s fun.

If you are a part of a game design team, you have experienced the daily (sometimes hourly) question: is it fun yet? You’ll add in new quests, you’ll take out complexity. You’ll change-up the avatar outfits, you’ll rebalance the economy and you’ll ask over and over “is it fun yet?”  You’ll ask until it seems like the team is a bunch of six-year-olds in the back seat: “are we there yet?” And one day, in a playtest, you realize you’ve arrived. Your test-player and maybe even the staff are smiling and grimacing, sighing  and squealing. Fun has arrived.

But how do we know how to launch of our web sites and apps? When we complete the requirements list.  What kind of goal is that? Your product is not a grocery list, completed when everything on the feature list has been checked off. Your product must be a bridge between your customers and their dreams.

There is an alternative. If, at the beginning of your project, you set a north star, you’ll know when you can launch. The north star varies for product to product. If you were Mint, your North Star might be “Do we feel like we are the boss of our finances?” and you could ask as features complete “are we the boss of our money yet?” until you — and your users–  felt, yes, I’m in control. If you were OKCupid you might ask “do I feel like love lives here?” and you could test until you were sure your users really felt they could fall in love here.

The North Star is emotional. The North Star is hard to measure. The North Star inspires the team. The North Star helps you cut features as well as create them. The North Star points the team in the same direction.

Why would you build anything without it?

Related: Building a Vision of Design Success

Featured Image North Star on Flickr