Amuse UX Conference 2017 — Takeaways Part 1 (Day 1 & Atmosphere)
By: Krisztina Szerovay
Tags: UX Research, Interaction Design, Amuse Ux, UX Design

I’m a boardgamegeek (as you can see here), so I was really-really excited about the first talk.

“How often do we really let a singular, desired experience drive every product decision?”

What Board Games can Teach Us about Designing Experiences

Speaker: Stephen P. Anderson (Twitter)

Talk: What Boardgames Can Teach Us About Designing Experiences

What designing tabletop games can teach us about designing for experiences?

UX can learn from many things, like: LEGO bricks, motorcycle maintenance, Marvel comics, making bread etc.— but would it be useful or relevant to UX?

Why tabletop games?

Venn diagram of UX and Tabletop games: significant overlap. Rich, nuanced, engaging experiences — our focus. Modern boardgames are good for inspiration (e.g. Catan, Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Pandemic, Codenames). The game market has matured in the last 5–15 years: one great game comes out, & the next game iterates on it (e.g. too much downtime gets fixed). Games are creating a tense, emotional engagement. Matt Leacock (game designer of Pandemic): “I still practice UX, I just do it with cardboard now.” Because it’s our job. “Experience design is the design of anything independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.” (Jesse James Garrett) There are many other similar disciplines that focus on human experience and engagement, e.g.: film making, restaurants, fine arts, advertising, customer support, theater/dance/performing arts, public speaking, architecture, fashion design. But there are many differences, e.g. film is a passive activity, not interactive. “Game Design and Interaction Design are fraternal twins. They share almost all their DNA.” (Christina Wodtke) Affordances, discoverability etc. — there is a significant overlap!

What can we learn from tabletop games?

Significant overlap (the talk concentrates on 5 areas)

Experience-Driven Orientation

Model based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: things moving up through different levels:

Functional (Useful): Works as programmed

Reliable (It is available and accurate)

Usable (Can be used without difficulty)

Convenient (Super easy to use, works like I think)

Pleasurable (Memorable experience worth sharing)

Meaningful (Has personal significance)

At and near the bottom: focused on Tasks (products, features); objective & quantifiable. On and closer to the top: focused on Experiences (people, activities, context); subjective & qualitative.

More critical parts of the model: stuff at the bottom and on the top. What is your orientation? In the early days of a product: tasks, then it gets more experience-focused. Question: how you are looking at the problem you are solving? There is a shift:

instead of talking about tasks & features: people, activities, context;

instead of output & functionality: outcomes & functionality;

and instead of interfaces, interactions or usability: perceptions, emotions, attention, memory.

From Product Focus to Experience Focus

A model in game design: M D A — Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics. The designer and the player each have a different perspective. What is the value of a game? Fun? We shouldn’t start design with the mechanics and the rules. Start with fun and aesthetics, and work backwards. In this quote you can change the “player” to the “user”: “Thinking about the player encourages experience-driven (as opposed to feature-driven) design. As such, we begin our investigation with a discussion of Aesthetics, and continue on to Dynamics, finishing with the underlying Mechanics.”

Example: there was a game prototype, and lot of publishers passed on it. His game publisher friend, Randy Hoyt looked at it and said that there is real potential, it is fun, but some things need to be taken to the next level. From his blogpost:

“The key was to go down a level deeper. At work, we were doing a branding exercise for a product, and we listed off the adjectives we wanted to describe the product. I realized that a similar exercise would work here. If we re-themed the game correctly, the mechanics (the intersection of the rules and the components) would work together with the flavor to produce a theme and a narrative to created a coherent context and experience for players.

I mulled over all the feedback on the mechanics: what type of experience were they creating on their own? What adjectives did players use to talk about the mechanics? Players described the game as simple and elegant. It was calming and relaxing to play. They were surprised and delighted by the richness of the decisions. They said it flowed smoothly, that they could play it over and over again.”

They needed a good theme. He got the inspiration from the movie “Tangled”. “This image captured perfectly the feeling that the playing the game produced, and I knew a theme and narrative woven around this could work to produce a great experience.” The result: Lanterns.

Pandemic: different feelings — the players’ goal is to stop 4 deadly viruses. The associated feelings are: anxiety, stress. Completely different focus and intention.

Takeaway: How often do we really let a singular, desired experience drive every product decision?

adding features

eliminating feautures

pushing back on customer requests (filtering feedback through the product vision-lens)

prioritizing the backlog

how we design a familiar feature

delaying releases — “Until my players feel ______________, I will not ship.” — until the desired feeling is not created, no release

“Games often ship late because they ship based on exit criteria, not deadlines… Either you ship something tiny before you run out of money, or you ship late something that is sufﬁciently fun. The ﬁrst are higher risk, but if the core works, they’ll make it.” (Christina Wodtke) Find the core, spiral out from there.

2. Focus on the Whole

Game: system — every little change, detail can effect the entire game. Gestalt Psychology: the whole is other than the sum of the parts. How the parts come together: the whole is equally important. “An experience is other than the sum of the parts.”

Experience Focus vs. Product Focus

“Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.” (Steve Jobs)

Takeaway: Do your processes encourage a focus on the whole and how all parts fit together for a desired effect?

What gets defined as a release? Is it a complete set of things?

What is the critical “core” to your experience?

What do you measure?

Does your team consider how new features might play with or disrupt existing features?

Do you test small parts of the entire experience?

What is the scope of the projects you take on?(more epics and themes vs. stories and tasks)

Brandon Schauer — MVP model: Cupcake → Cake → Wedding Cake, and NOT: Cake → Filling → Icing.

3. Playtesting

Typical process: you have an idea; it is an idea until you put it in front of people and play it. (Until you put it on table, it is not a game.) Then playtest: first with the inner circle of friends (until you have a core that is fun), then outer circle of friends (goal: where does the core break?), then: playtest with strangers (to test the rulebook and onboarding — without you being present).

Playtesting — typical process

Takeaway: When do we bring users into the process to play with something? How early in the process are users able to play with a semi-complete version of the product?

To what extent do you include users throughout the entire design and development process?

Do you start with the core experience, then move out?

User Research → Personas, Customer Journeys (lot of abstract work) → Wireframes → Copywriting — but when does it come together as a whole? An integrated experience is presented too late in the process! Something tangible sooner → better research and iterative feedback!

4. Use of Space

Spatial arrangement. Example: using a pepper + salt shakers and sugar packets to explain something — using space & objects to create a visual representation ~ Data Visualization, Infographics.

“Before the page, there was space itself. Perhaps the simplest way to use space to communicate is to arrange or rearrange things in it.”(Barbara Tversky)

E.g.: packing for a trip (arranging things on the bed; sorting laundry). We use space to convey meaning. Gaming examples:

Avignon: tracks of cards — pushing them away from you;

Catan: most intense parts is the beginning — initial settlements;

Star Realms*: shared space between the two players; different decks; cards played during the current turn and persistent cards etc.

(*Btw. this is one of my favorite games :))

Amazon.com: grid view — opportunity: but their arrangement means nothing.

Amazon.com: the original grid means nothing! We could use many ways to convey meaning!

Takeaway: How are you using space and the spatial arrangement of information in your work?

5. Friction

Fundamental difference between games and product design: game is about creating friction, UX is about removing friction.

“UX design is about removing problems from the user. Game design is about giving problems to the user.” (Raph Koster)

“People play games for no productive reason. You go out of your way to put up with unnecessary obstacles.” (Randy Hoyt)

“The friction is the game. In UX a lot of what I did was around eliminating friction. Friction is almost always bad (and only sometime strategically good). You’re just ruthless about getting rid of it. In games it’s the total opposite. Whenever I’m ruthless about getting rid of friction, there’s no game left. For me, the practice of game design is the practice of thoughtfully using friction to create a great experience.” (Dirk Knemeyer)

Game Kahuna: it is a math problem, fun challenge.

UX design is about removing problems from the user (Steve Krug) vs. Game Design is about giving problems to the user. Middle ground: learning challenge that would benefit from being “gamelike” or playful. Don’t make me think about the wrong stuff (e.g. the user interface). We should be thinking about the critical stuff (the content)!

Philosophical question, example:

Designing an app for the Tokio subway system — Do we help people master the train system, or do we help people not think about it?

the train system, or do we help people about it? It depends: if someone is travelling to Tokio for some days: they don’t need understand it. But if someone is going to live there (e.g. for more months): should this person has a mental model of the system? Yes.

Framing things as learning challenges! Help me think better & engage with the content.

Game experiences create learning challenges to make something a fun and interesting game, so they add friction. Product experiences remove and simplify learning experiences (remove friction) to increase efficiency, conversion rates, task completion.

There is a time & place to simplify things for people. In lot of these learning contexts we should be engaged with the content. Otherwise we take away people’s power of making formed & empowered choices.

“ …but people do enjoy things that are not easy to learn. There’s a sense of accomplishment. Most things that are rewarding aren’t that easy to do… Within UX, there’s a lot to be said for other kinds of experiences, not just the usability or how quick something is to learn.” (Randy Hoyt)

Takeaway: In what ways is your work about more than ease of use or efficiency? Is there any learning challenge inherent in the experience you are working on? If so, could this be reframed as a playful learning experience?

+1: Learning Through Games

Fundamentally 3 different things:

Path : e.g. Candy Crush: progression & level-based game

: e.g. Candy Crush: progression & level-based game Loop : e.g. most boardgames, we play over and over again, see patterns, and we learn them

: e.g. most boardgames, we play over and over again, see patterns, and we learn them Sandbox: e.g. Minecraft: some basic rules + objects; people have done things that the creators could have never anticipated

Path: Candy Crush, Loop: 7 Wonders, Sandbox: Minecraft

Path ends in an exchange: for time & money → satisfaction and enjoyment — it is not about engaging with the content, or to learn/grow;

Sandbox ends in learning through discovery and construction: the maker mindset

Loop: how the brain works, ends in learning through pattern recognition

We need new tools and systems to help us

understand each other and our world,

explore complex topics through safe, playful interactions.

Example: Parable of the Polygons by Nicky Case. Simple rules, goal: making shapes happy. It is about desegregation. Complex thoughts showed through a game.

“Work and learn together to enter into a conversation assuming that you know as much — if not more — than I do, let’s create a shared, emergent mental model by working together.”

Some questions

Could we say that lean and game design are not compatible? They are entirely compatible, the fundamental premise of lean are these rapid iterative learning experiments. Game design is also all about learning. Lean is not about shipping necessarily, it is about learning.

Will virtual extended reality replace only cardboard-based boardgames? There is something fundamentally human about tangible things, having stuff you can touch and feel (the tactility part). More likely: hybrid interactions — boardgame pieces, but the boring parts (e.g. setting up the game) is accelerated through augmented reality. What makes a good game is a choice. What does not make: calculations.

When increasing fidelity as early as the talk described, how do you ensure you still build as fast and cheap as with lower fidelity? That’s the key. The state of the tools and frameworks we have today, pattern libraries etc. allow us to build a hi-fi prototype in hours (if not minutes).

Link: Stephen P. Anderson’s website