Gamification: The users perspective

Gamification player vs designer Gamification The users perspective

As a gamification designer, it is easy to get hooked up on the intricacies of the system. The feedback mechanics, the game mechanics, the economy and the cleverness of it all. It is also easy to think, “this is going to be great” when you have a new idea and then spend waaay to long making the idea real.

What we need to to is step back from time to time and say “How will this actually impact the user”.

For example. You have this fabulous animation that you want to make use of. It fits the overall theme of the gamified solution you are building and think that it adds a little bit of playfulness to break up part of the process. Great. However, what does it really give the end user? If it is used once and adds some greater value to the process they are going through, by giving a new understanding or insight – then brilliant. If it really does give the user a break for a particularity complex part of the process, then okay. If it sits there and forces them to watch it, possibly more than once with no option to skip – step away from the idea. Read More ...

Web design, when did the rules change?

When I first started in web design things were different. We only need to worry about HTML 4 and 2 browsers. We concentrated on quality of the content as that was pretty much all there easy. Content was front an centre.

Then flash came along. Suddenly we had a way to integrate really rich media and interaction in out web pages. With a tiny download, we could have cross platform compatible sites, that look the same in any browser and would deliver the same experience to all.

Then Steve jobs decided that Flash was bad and suddenly everyone jumped on his shity band wagon and started to get rid of flash. Instead they created a new version of HTML (because XHTML was too hard for them to follow) and instead of having to just download a tiny plugin, you had to totally change your browser to get things working. Read More ...