UI Analysis: Screen real estate on Weather. Is your product a vitamin or drug? Can you design for word of mouth? One stream to rule them all the real Facebook vs. What is a website for? How important is that feature? The importance of sketching in product design Justifying fit and finish Two goals of giving feedback Product design replacing UX? Why should we make our websites usable? Why even spend time on UX? It's rather simple, actually. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen explains it well 15 :.
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. Note a pattern here? There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.
This is why we spend so much time on usability and UX design. If we scare off our visitors before they have even had a chance to look at what we're selling, then we won't sell anything. We are not looking to transform our products into games. Instead, we are trying to learn from an industry with an extremely engaged audience. We shouldn't blindly use these theories; rather, we should adapt them to our needs and to the platforms on which we deliver our products, without compromising with the quality of our products.
Gamification shouldn't be something you apply after designing and building your product. Gamification is a part of the design process itself.
But how do we put this into practice? While the process will be shaped by your product and audience, here are some areas to consider when applying game theories to your product or website, along with some good resources on implementing them. Since the birth of the personal computer, we've been accustomed to using a mouse and keyboard. However, in the world of games, the physical controls change with the platform. On a PlayStation, you have the geometric buttons and a couple of jogs. On an iPhone, you have a touchscreen and an accelerometer.
You might have a tennis racket for the Wii. One game can be controlled differently on two platforms; for example, you might steer a car with the keyboard arrows on a PC but tilt on an iPhone.
With the mobile market ever expanding, we need to make sure that our users have a good experience, whatever platform they use to visit our websites.
We need to adapt our products to the platform they are being served on. If you own an iPhone, try visiting Google Images 16 , and compare the mobile to the desktop version.
Swiping through the result pages is a great experience because you're used to that gesture on the iOS platform. Visit YouTube from a PlayStation 3, and you will be greeted by a design suited to a media center.
When I got my first iPhone, I spent a lot of time playing with the interface. But the interface was still limited to a set of predefined gestures.
With the iPhone 4S came Siri, which enabled us to interact with the device in a completely new way, and it took mobile devices to the next level in accessibility. Popular games are often location-based—i. Can we benefit from this in Web and UX design? Heck, yeah! Amazon 21 uses location to direct you to the store for your area.
Amazon detects where I live and points me to Amazon UK. Checking my location may be a simple technical task, but it makes it feel almost as if they know me. Social networks are taking advantage of our urge to play and the fact that we almost always have a GPS-enabled gadget with us. That is extremely cheap advertising.
In games, we often see direct feedback to our actions. For instance, your guide might interrupt a game that's not going so well to help you remember how to use some skills that you learned earlier in the game. Providing feedback to your users, especially when something goes wrong, is crucial.
Be honest with your users, and help them move on. There are many ways to give users direct visual feedback in a design: show them what page they are on, use consistent colors for links, create a helpful page, give useful information when a field isn't filled in correctly in a contact form. Many people are poor spellers, but that shouldn't prevent them from buying your product.
Feedback is not only about responding to the visitor's actions, but also about foreseeing their actions. Olark 24 is a great example. Olark is a customer-support service that puts chat functionality on your website.
May I help you? When a visitor replies to the automated message, they're connected to an Olark employee, who then answers their questions. Be careful not to annoy visitors, though. Remember Clippy? Respect your users—if they close the chat window, don't reopen it when they visit another page on your website.
I won't get into this argument—I'm simply stating that I believe that content is still the most important part of any product. Your candy might be wrapped in pretty paper, but people won't buy it twice if it tastes like junk. This, of course, doesn't mean that we shouldn't wrap it nicely; pretty paper certainly has its advantages. Visiting a business website for which the designer chose Comic Sans as the font really takes the focus off of the content.
Make sure that your design represents the content—use the design to substantiate your message. You cannot increase the intrinsic value of something by adding game mechanics. You CAN make the value more visible. You CAN change the paradigm and context of your site visitor from user to player—increasing their engagement.
Gamification is just a tool to serve content more digestibly. Don't overuse it; your website or app will not improve from the application of game theories. The product needs to be great, otherwise it won't matter. Gamification can improve the user experience, but by no means can it create it alone—the user experience is also created by logical structure, good writing, motivation, flow, etc.
Design enhances value, it does not create it. The same could be said of gamification. A point system and badges are not what make a product good, but rather the experience they provide combined with the product itself.
Gamification really can create value— it depends entirely on the user. School teachers know this; to be effective, they have to look at the student, not the class. Not everyone learns the same way. Two times two might equal four, but there are a million ways to learn that. For instance, Treehouse 31 has a great product not because you can earn badges; that's fun and all, but the value lies in the high quality of the teaching material.
On Treehouse 32 , you can unlock badges by taking quizzes and completing code challenges. Vitaly Friedman, editor in chief of this very magazine, said at the Frontend conference 33 video in Oslo in that we should be better at storytelling in Web design.
The Web is not a static medium —why don't we embrace that? The possibilities for creating beautiful, useful and helpful interfaces and products are endless, but we rarely take advantage of them. We need to experiment in order to create better interfaces. As Vitaly said, we need to tailor our designs to the particular needs of the client. We need to stop focusing on selling products; we don't have to trick people into buying.
No one will buy a product that they don't know something about; tell the user what your product does and why it does it the best before even attempting to sell it. In October , ZURB posted an article advocating for hiding the sign-up button in order to get more sign-ups In Angry Birds you can earn badges for completing various tasks throughout the game.
I don't know about you, but I've played the same levels over and over again until I got three stars. We want to be best. Other than getting badges for ranking high, you also get badges for playing longer, hitting a certain number of pigs, etc. When I visit one of my local bakeries to buy bread, I get a stamp on a card. The next time I visit the bakery, I get another stamp. When I have 10 stamps, I get free bread. Simple but effective. I would never visit another bakery.
Because most of the visitors are first-time visitors and they want to focus on learning […]. Compare and contrast the experience.
Published on DesignStaff…probably the best blog […]. Continue Reading: Your competitors are free prototypes. Tags: News Comments Off on Your competitors are free prototypes. Continue Reading: The cycle of customers who care. Tags: News Comments Off on The cycle of customers who care. Solid piece by Des Traynor. If you know what jobs it does, you can objectively measure it.
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