A recent article on “What 8-Bit Video Games Can Teach Us About Design And UX” got me reminiscing about those early days. There are lessons those digital pioneers can teach us, and they are as applicable to today’s web sites and gadgets as they were to those noisy arcades.

Hadouken!

Pong was one of the earliest coin-operated video games. There was a Zen-like simplicity to the instructions painted on Al Alcorn’s seminal classic: “Avoid missing ball for high score”. However, Alcorn wasn’t convinced that simple game mechanics were enough to keep players coming back, so he added an additional challenge. He divided the famous Pong paddles into eight sections, each reflecting the ball at a different angle. This gave advanced players a new challenge to master, and a feeling of control.

Even the popular fighting games of the 1990s followed this formula. Basic “button mashing” let many new players win their battles through sheer luck. But, if they truly wanted to master the game, strategy guides held the secrets to characters’ “special moves”.

Nobody is going to write a strategy guide for Mobile Safari. But, you might want to try a little “button mashing” in your favorite apps anyway. Did you know that if you hold your finger down on a link in the iOS browser for a few seconds, it offers actions like copying the address or opening it in a new tab? Encourage experimentation and discovery in your own products to engage your advanced users. Make them feel clever and smart every time they stumble across something new.

I Call Next Game!

In those early days, gamers would start a row of quarters along the bottom of games’ screens, a tradition that continued well into the age of tokens. And, if you asked any member of the crowd, they could point out exactly which one was theirs. It stood for their place in line to play the game, and this practice was widely respected.

Nobody designed this into the games. It came from the players themselves, and spread through word-of-mouth; from gamer to gamer, arcade to arcade. If your product has an active community of users, there’s no doubt they’ll start developing their own rules and rituals, and the worst thing you can do is fight it.

In 2008, Facebook angered users of an application that introduced them to complete strangers with similar interests. In an email, the company proclaimed that their site was “a social utility”, not a “social networking site”, and users who friended people they didn’t know in real life weren’t using the site correctly. This was one of many early stumbles in Facebook’s rise to popularity, and contributed to the scrutiny they face even today.

Twitter, on the other hand, embraced community innovations like “retweeting” and “hashtags”, incorporating them as features of the site itself. By encouraging users to shape how the site was used, they built loyalty and a sense of ownership that survived through major outages and other growing pains.

Checkpoint!

Many primitive video games made a simple offer: three or four lives for one quarter. Novice players could face a “Game Over” screen in under a minute, while advanced players could park their Pac-Man in the “safe spot” for hours (or until the arcade staff showed them the door). But as attendance dwindled, arcade owners raised prices to get more value from their square footage.

At first, the price for a game went up to fifty cents, then a dollar or even two. To get that kind of money out of customers, though, they needed to offer much more in return. They weren’t going to get much repeat business by killing off new players right away. Game developers traded the concept of “lives” for more timer-based play, guaranteeing beginners could play for a minimum amount of time. “Checkpoints” rewarded skilled players with extra time.

When prices crossed the one dollar mark, game companies also enticed customers with bigger screens and more interactive hardware. “Ride-on” games simulated the experience of downhill skiing or motorcycle racing, and “Bemani” games traded traditional game controls for simulated musical instruments and dance floors.

I don’t need to tell you the importance of providing value to your paying customers. But with today’s fickle buyers turning up their nose at “expensive” $1.99 purchases, it’s vital to convey your product’s true value. One popular way to do this is with a “freemium” business model, where users sample most of a product’s functionality for free, with an option to buy more advanced features when they’re ready.

But it’s much simpler to humanize your product and the people behind it. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, does an amazing job as the public face of his application through an active Twitter account, blog, and podcast appearances. He’s so good at this that he got people to pay a monthly fee to use Instapaper without offering a single benefit above the free version’s features. They did it to support him.

A Waste of Time

Controversy surrounded arcade games going back to when pinball machines had actual metal pins. Pinball’s iconic flippers were added to turn them from games of chance to ones of skill, but that wasn’t enough to stop major US cities from banning them. New York City didn’t officially lift their pinball ban until 1976. In the video game frenzy that followed, concerned people spoke out against the evils of unsupervised teens and the debilitating effects of Pac-Man elbow.

Arcades may not have deserved their poor reputation, but they do provide some lessons in what we can avoid.

It Ate My Quarter!

I worked in an arcade for two summers while I was in college, and I soon came to loathe the coin accepter. Whether a game takes quarters or tokens, chances are it uses a standard, replaceable device that filters out incorrect coins and slugs by thickness and diameter. They’re completely mechanical, but these cheap mechanisms still malfunction all the time.

I’d barely have my coat off before some kid would tell me “the machine ate my token”. Chances are, it really did, and we could trigger a free game to make up for it. But players also knew they just needed to say those magic words to get as many free games as they could before we kicked them out.

In an arcade game, the coin slot is the first place a player interacts with the machine, and a bad first impression can ruin their whole visit. The same applies to your interaction designs. A flawed registration form, app install process, or shopping cart will reflect poorly on the quality of your product. It also might make you look desperate for business, and a target for fraud.

New and Improved!

In 1999, Williams recognized that pinball wasn’t as popular as it once was. To revitalize their flagship product and make it more appealing to young video gamers, they created the Pinball 2000 platform, which used the famous “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion to project a video screen above a traditional playfield. The technology was impressive, but the product was a flop. Purists were disgusted, and youngsters just didn’t get it. Williams closed their pinball division in October, 1999.

Stern Pinball, located in Chicago, is the last pinball manufacturer in the world. Their Melrose Park factory hand-assembled a scant 10,000 machines in 2008. But by sticking to a formula of traditional pinball mechanics and popular licenses like Transformers and Avatar, Stern is still open thirteen years after Williams threw in the towel.

Don’t follow trends. Your competitors may have flashy slideshows, social features, and even walk-on videos. But, you should resist using the latest features in your designs unless they create a solid improvement in user experience. Even then, don’t trust your gut. Use A/B split testing to make sure these new features perform before forcing them on all of your customers.

Ahead of this year’s EuroIA conference I caught up with experience architect, strategist and all-round nice guy Joe Lamantia. We talked about designing for experiences, games design, Killzone and monasteries.

Steve Baty: Joe, you’ve been working in User Experience design for many years. What is it that first got you interested in the discipline?
Joe Lamantia: Waaaaay back in the day, I wanted to be an absent-minded professor. I’d always been interested in the transformations that emerge when you bring dynamic cultural, technological, and social layers together, and disciplines like media theory and cultural studies seemed like a good spot from which to watch all the action.  Then the birth of the Web presented a perfect opportunity to participate in the creation of a new medium from the inside.  In terms of aspiration, what could be more rewarding than having a hand in building the world we all inhabit in the future?  I find that it is more fun to create than to critique, so I stayed on the ‘creating’ side of the balance every time I came to a career decision.  In retrospect, looking at my writing and speaking, whether on user experience or ubiquitous computing, it’s become obvious to me that I’m in between the creator and critic camps. I like to do both. So far, I’ve had opportunities to follow through on this synthesis, and I hope that continues to be the case.

SB: The connection between experience design and game design has been gaining interest in recent times. What is it about game design that we can use to inform the design of other types of experience?
JL: I wouldn’t say I have an insider’s view of game design, since I’m not a professional, and the only game I designed was 20 years ago.  (I used to make my friends play; the fact that some of us are still friends is a testament to the strength of the friendships, and not the game!)  The two things I try to take away from game design are a sense of wonder at the amazing diversity of experiences that people crave and want to engage with, and a broader appreciation of what people will happily accept as a natural part of those experiences.  At the more tactical levels of methods, design patterns, codified best practices, etc. the biggest lesson from games seems to me to be that many of the hoary old truths of experience design that are rooted in established disciplines like human factors / usability and information science, are easily trumped by considerations such as emotional and social aspects.  (Err, in all but life-threatening contexts, perhaps.)  I don’t mean to throw out the baby with the bathwater – properly minding our foundations is critical to creating good experiences – but there are wider horizons out there for how we should be working, and what we work with.  Lazzaro’s language of choice is a good example.

Why not borrow from game design to add richness to what seems a very hum-drum type of chore?  People take pleasure in mastering even the simplest tasks. Thus the rewards of ritual; say when cooking using traditional tools & methods such as whisking everything by hand with the just right amount of manual dexterity. We can design for the emotional rewards that come from the different levels of accomplishment and knowledge for even simple tasks.

Take the design of interactive voice response systems: I’ve observed that people who use the same IVR repeatedly often make a game out of going through a menu of choices as fast as possible by speaking memorized choices before the system prompts them with a question, once they know the timing and the choice trees well enough.  Why not take this into account by offering the option of issuing a string of several commands up front that will take you directly to the choice you need, and then recognizing you for getting it right?

SB: You’re recent article for Johnny Holland presented an overview of the work of Lazzaro. What is it about her work that resonates with you most?
JL: Nicole’s work directly connects the way that designers create experiences – our materials, processes, outlook on what’s possible, etc. – with the emotions that these experiences inspire or encourage.  Her language for design is close to fundamental, since it works at the level of choices.  There’s no ‘middle layer’ of abstraction that Lazzaro’s design language has to work with or through.  For example, we’ve learned much about the psychological and emotional impact of design decisions about elements such as language, typography, color, and line weight via research in cognitive science, linguistics, the vision system, etc..  But remember that these design elements are often heavily coded by culture and context; at different times and places, the people experiencing these elements will have different feelings about them, and the experience as a whole.  Designers have to work with these elements as they are mediated by cultural and contextual layers.  Lazzaro’s language of choice addresses a deeper level that is less dependent on context and culture.  If someone has the choice of fragging you or working together with you, very little of the emotional impact of that choice on the experience you have is determined by cultural and contextual factors.

SB: What are the parallels between the design of the social mechanics in games that we can draw for other social environments?
JL: Relationships are one of the four basic types of fun Lazzaro identifies, which means that we should be able to directly translate these ideas into the design of enterprise social environments.  Groups of humans will always have work that needs to be done. Why not structure the working experiences to directly provide social rewards in the same ways that games do, in addition to the usual pay or other sorts of incentives?  Looking further afield, new models for economic and cultural production like co-creation and distributed business (and we’ll see if social business catches on) all depend directly on well-designed social mechanisms for their basic functioning.  Far from being a game element, social mechanics that encourage feelings of cooperation (or competition!) are indispensable for the new ways that we’ll be working and creating in the future.  Here perhaps we finally see potential for cracking the glass wall that separates the commonly understood purview of experience design from activity and effectiveness at the levels of organizational structure and culture [that some of our leaders in the field have been pushing industry to recognize].

For a good historical example of how this all comes together, I think there’s lots to be learned from the monastic orders – Christian and otherwise.  These experiences were structured by mechanisms designed to create mixes of the different sorts of emotional rewards Lazzaro identifies, in addition to the fundamentals of providing food and shelter for their members.  Recall that the original monks were hermits who avoided society; the rise of the various orders reflects a substantial change in the basic character of the experience offered.  We have different language for the core attributes now – value proposition, brand promise, experience theme, what have you – but as designers of social environments, we could use the analytical power of Lazzaro’s model to examine the historical evolution of the monasteries, since all the major orders were carefully designed to create a certain sort of experience, each distinct from the others.

SB: For EuroIA you’re presenting a case study on Killzone. Can you tell us a little about that game?
JL: Killzone is a popular first-person shooter style game with a science-fiction setting, created by an Amsterdam-based studio called Guerilla Games, which is owned by Sony.  The Killzone family is known for offering an experience that’s rich in environmental detail such as graphics and physics, as well as an extensive character creation and advancement possibility space.  We’ll talk specifically about Killzone 2, looking at some of the many social elements that this release includes.

My role in the presentation is describing how Lazzaro’s language points the way toward the hybrids of game and social experience that Killzone exemplifies.  Reinoud Bosman -  esteemed former colleague and experience architect par excellence – takes the spotlight by looking at the structure and design of the Killzone experience in detail. Reinoud was directly involved in the design of those social elements, so his perspective is – pardon the pun – first person.

SB: Thank you for the interview.

Joe is one of the speakers at the EuroIA 09 conference, being held in Copenhagen (Denmark) on September 25 and 26. The theme of this year is “Beyond Structure”.

As an Interaction Designer, I’m perpetually impressed with the continual design success inherent in most video games. We are taught to know our users by understanding their goals, leveraging mental models, and taking ourselves out of the equation in order to design useful and appropriate interfaces. And although a user-centered design approach is invaluable, I can’t help but wonder how game designers just seem to nail it time and again for what are large and diverse audiences.

Now, I have to confess that I’m not a hard-core gamer. I dabble on occasion, but mostly prefer to watch others play, as well as keep abreast of the industry. What is clear to me, is that the experiences are immersive, the storylines compelling, and the business itself, well, huge! So, just what is it about the domain-formerly-known-as interactive entertainment that makes it so engaging?

First, Knowing What We’re Up Against

Let’s be honest, doing your taxes using software as a service or completing a registration form isn’t exactly as enjoyable as a Halo LAN Party or rocking out in Guitar Hero. Gaming has a clear advantage here. This focus on the act of gaming is also very different than using traditional software, where the completion of a task leads one closer to a desired outcome or goal. Software is really just a means to an end; nothing more than a tool for most.

The game play journey on the other hand, can be as important to the user as achieving their goal of completing the game. A good experience needs to be rooted in an emotional dialog with a good story. One could even argue that the interactive component introduces another dimension altogether, thereby perhaps even making it more emotional as compared to a passive experience like watching a film or reading a book.

The sheer amount of time users invest in playing is also a major difference. Gamers can spend tens of hours practicing and honing their skills. That said, it also means that early stages are especially important because users won’t continue playing unless the experience is perceived as worthwhile.

New Media Culture, Meet Everyone Else

In the last few years, gaming has become much more widespread, having made tremendous inroads into Mainstreamville. You’d be hard-pressed not to find a console as the living room entertainment hub and the incredible success of the Nintendo Wii has contributed greatly.

The generation that grew up playing early video games is now also leading the way in designing experiences and their backgrounds have unmistakably influenced their work in the way of incorporating traditional gaming mechanisms. The gap between previously sovereign digital platforms has indeed converged, and they are now inextricably intertwined.

What that means, is that everyday users are now bringing mental models from what used to be segregated digital arenas to the interfaces we design. As Interaction Designers, it is our responsibility to understand that, so as to then be able to imagine and create designs users can intuit more easily. (I’d even go so far as to state that embracing this convergence actually makes our jobs that much more interesting, but more on that later).

OK, so gaming is popular and some really smart folks have begun to take the field seriously. Why should we care and what does all this mean? Well, there are interactions we can leverage (a kind of gamesmanship, if you will) in our day-to-day design work. Although we’ll need to set aside some of the advantages discussed earlier, there are still general principles we can learn from and borrow.

Everyday users are now bringing mental models from what used to be segregated digital arenas to the interfaces we design. As Interaction Designers, it is our responsibility to understand that.

Useful Game Design Techniques

In assessing some of the research out there and coupling it with my own experience, I’ve tried to corral some of the themes that emerged. Here is a collection of nine techniques with examples of how they might be applied.

The Edge and Back: Taking users to the very edge of their perceived comfort zones can have amazing affects. (Actually, this technique applies in all walks of life, but I digress). Video games tend to get harder as a user makes progress, meaning they’re also always getting better.

This technique can arguably be interpreted as being similar to what’s known within the user experience field as Progressive Disclosure. Exposing users to increasingly complex or advanced features as they gain familiarity with an application is powerful stuff.

Degree of Difficulty: Most games allow you to choose how challenging you want the experience to be. Some games even allow for practice tutorials and playable demos.

Complex systems that require a degree of mastery come to mind here; things like software for architects, which can do everything from actual 3D modeling, to budgeting for building materials. An embedded example project – much like the examples included within Adobe’s design products – also help users get started. (Can you imagine software that allows users to first choose their ability level; perhaps even incrementally increasing the level of complexity as they gain confidence?)

Power to the User: We all like to be in control and video games are empowering. As protagonists, gamers feel like they’re in command of their virtual world. This is actually pretty remarkable considering that most games are designed with a pre-determined outcome – albeit some more loosely than others. It’s that perception of being in control that is the real magic here.

On the web, examples can include giving users the freedom to come back to a registration process when they don’t have a specific piece of data available at that particular moment; or, allowing for partial completion of a profile (e.g., LinkedIn), potentially providing incentives to complete the process later.

You Are Here: Giving users constant status updates as to where they stand in their virtual world is something games do incredibly well. For example, being able to instantly access a level map at any time is very reassuring.

Translating this to web design can be as simple as using breadcrumb trails and status indicators during registrations or checkout flows. Bigger picture stuff can perhaps include encouraging exploration by showing users what percentage of an application’s features they have encountered up to that point (i.e., “Oh, I see that I’ve only been using this percent of the app; I wonder what else it can do?”)

“Tell Me What I Need to Know When I Really Need to Know It”: Providing users with information at the moment they need it most is something video games do a great job of. Games offer up useful tips that the user can dismiss or opt-out of entirely.

Having users learn through actual usage is key and inline links to contextual information/ help content is probably the most common application here. (see als: The iPhone is Not Easy to Use, by Fred Beecher)

Task Accomplishment and a Sense of Accomplishment: Traditional usability testing generally involves capturing metrics like: “Did the user accomplish Task A: Yes or No?” and the paths taken. However, when game developers test their wares, they also try to gauge the overall experience (i.e., Was it fun? Was it hard? Was it easy? Was it too easy? Would the user play again? Why or why not?) This focus on the large canvas logic – in addition to the usability of game play mechanics, of course – provides incredibly rich data that can be the difference between success and failure.

The takeaway here is to make sure stakeholders don’t become mired in the details around the success or failure of specific tasks and loose sight of whether the larger concept makes strategic sense.

Shared Experience: Capturing and then presenting issues that users encountered can be a wonderful way of educating the ones that come thereafter. The MMORPG EverQuest has a great deal of support available, but the game is designed to encourage “soloing” early on – meaning a user goes off to explore by themselves to gain experience. As the levels become more challenging however, “grouping” is encouraged so they can learn from one another in increasingly complex environments.

An interesting example of leveraging collective knowledge can be found within TurboTax, which uses their “Live Community” feature to bubble-up the most common questions during specific tax preparation steps. Answers from previous users and tax experts are displayed to the right of where users are working.

Sensory OptimumLoad: (Versus, of course, sensory overload, which is not a good thing). The highly interactive nature of gaming and the engagement of the senses is part of its allure. However, well-crafted games unfold their stimuli gracefully, allowing for a gradual period of acclimatization. Consistency is also a critical component because these interactions ultimately become a language the user relies upon. System feedback – in the way of visuals, sounds, and haptic controller vibrations – are an ongoing dialog.

As mentioned earlier, when users first encounter an interface, they bring their “baggage” in the way of existing knowledge from previous experience and conventions. They either expect things to behave a certain way; or, have to draw upon related experiences to try and make sense of them. This speaks to a need for standardization within a product, which hopefully also leverages established domain conventions.

FunNess: And lastly, having some fun is always good. Doing something that’s fun means it’s engaging, which in turn makes learning about it easier. Understandably, not every interaction can be a barrel of laughs, but there are plenty of ways to inject some creativity here and there.

Language and tone-of-voice is a simple way to make things a little more interesting. I recently encountered a mundane Terms & Conditions checkbox interaction that playfully stated: “Our lawyers make us do it.” That one sentence put a smile on my face and made me think a bit differently about the company. (see also JohnnyTV: Designing Humanity Into Your Products, by Bill DeRouchey)

Epilogue

As we have seen, convergence among what have historically been very siloed experiences has now expanded the universe of options Interaction Designers have to choose from. The challenge of course, is that the next-generation of experiences will not only need to be both useful and appropriate, they’ll also need to engage users more than ever before. My final words of advice in that case: choose wisely, be creative, and don’t be afraid to inject some fun. All in all, I’d say things just got a lot more interesting.

Top image: Wii promo photo