Fun is the Future: Mastering Gamification

Fantastic overview of gamification design elements and the ways they can impact design, marketing, services, and business.

(via GoogleTechTalks)

Design with Intent Toolkit

Awesome card deck of design patterns and lenses.

The Wilderness Downtown

This music video for Arcade Fire’s new song, made with Google Chrome Labs in HTML 5, is utterly amazing - interactive art with a personalized touch.

Don’t Become a Digital Dinosaur

Believe it or not, the biggest challenge I have in my job is dealing not with traditional advertising, but with what I’ll term “traditional digital”. This are those folks who have been making microsites and banner ads for so long that they don’t know how to do anything else - and, unlike the traditional advertising people, are unwilling to admit that there’s something about digital that they don’t know.

This article from UX Magazine has some great tips on keeping from being a Digital Dinosaur. 

  • Integrated experiences
  • Designing for the “space between”
  • Customer experience (vs. solely user experience)

Add social business to this list, and you’ll be evolving in no time.

Eight Principles of Information Architecture

Interesting thinking from Dan Brown on eight principles of successful IA (and, I would argue, UX in general). They are:

  1. The principle of objects – Treat content as a living, breathing thing, with a lifecycle, behaviors and attributes. 
  2. The principle of choices – Create pages that offer meaningful choices to users, keeping the range of choices available focused on a particular task. 
  3. The principle of disclosure – Show only enough information to help people understand what kinds of information they’ll find as they dig deeper. 
  4. The principle of exemplars – Describe the contents of categories by showing examples of the contents. 
  5. The principle of front doors – Assume at least half of the website’s visitors will come through some page other than the home page. 
  6. The principle of multiple classification – Offer users several different classification schemes to browse the site’s content. 
  7. The principle of focused navigation – Don’t mix apples and oranges in your navigation scheme. 
  8. The principle of growth – Assume the content you have today is a small fraction of the content you will have tomorrow. 

The Four Phases of Design Thinking

Really enjoyed this article that outlines the four basic phases of design thinking. Great designers do all four; mediocre designers specialize in only a few areas. This could be a great way to measure the success of a project as well. 

  1. Question - Asking basic “why” questions and challenging assumptions.
  2. Care - Empathizing with human needs.
  3. Connect - Synthesizing information in new ways.
  4. Commit - Giving form to an idea.

Digital Trends for Media

Great presentation from frog design on the current digital trends that are impacting media.

View more presentations from frog design.

SXSW Days 3, 4, 5, etc.- I’m a Procrastinator

Okay, so my daily SXSW wrap-up idea didn’t end up happening. I guess, given my history of procrastination, that’s not too surprising. So that I don’t get so overwhelmed with the idea of these posts hanging over my head that I stop blogging altogether, I’m doing a quick, one-post wrap-up.

Before going into the details of what I saw, did, etc., some stray observations:


Marci’s Final SXSW Wrapup:

Sunday 3/15/09

  • Journey to the Center of Design - Jared Spool rocked my world on this one (slides). Highlights:
    • “User-centered design never worked.” Whoa.
    • How Design Teams Work:
      • Process = how you get something done
      • Methodology = common rules for processes
      • Dogma = unquestioned beliefs/ practices
      • Techniques = building blocks of processes
      • Tricks = what you do when the right technique is too hard
    • Unsuccessful companies increase their methodology while successful companies use lots of tricks and techniques
    • We need to ditch UCD dogma in favor of informed design:
      • Vision - can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?
      • Feedback - in the last 6 weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use your design or a competitors design?
      • Culture - in the last 6 weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?
  • After listing to Mr. Spool (and watching him dance) I punked out and napped like a maniac. In the evening, I hooked up with some NYC peeps for BBQ at Stubb’s and some aimless party-hopping.

Monday 3/16/09

  • What Can We Learn From Games - Increased complexity in games creates opportunities for user-based designs (implicitly, through the choices they make). This has been common in games for some time, but is now happening in other media, e.g. the way in which ARGs related to Lost.
  • Advertising is Entertaining - Who’s Selling Out? - This conversation was kind of silly, as it was moderated by content providers and I more frequently find myself on the advertising side. It seemed to populated mainly by advertising douches (“why won’t The Onion feature my movie in a sketch?”).
  • The Decider Party - Best party of SXSW, mainly because I got to pat Eugene Mirman on the back (even though I arrived to late to see him perform).

Tuesday 3/17/09

  • The Future of Visual Storytelling is Interactive - Or Is It? - Cool discussion on interactive storytelling that primarily focused on interactive video and ARGs. I do think that as computers continue to take over mainstream media channels (most notably TV), these sorts of distinctions will be less relevant.
    • “Filmmakers think that digital is trying to displace their medium and we’re not.” - Victoria Ha. I completely disagree with this - I think digital WILL displace traditional film/ TV as they are now.
    • Types of interactivity discussed include:
      • Choose-your-own-adventure-style storytelling that adapts through audience participation (e.g. lonely girl15)
      • Environments in which users can create their own story through their interaction with a open-ended environment (e.g. sandbox games)
      • ARGs (alternate reality games) incorporate live elements and live events that users can selectively participate in.
    • An amusing afternote to the panel was a very irate audience member who didn’t like how their definition of “interactive” varied from the one she used in her thesis, or something.
  • Tuesday Keynote Interview - Chris Anderson interviewed by Guy Kawasaki - Inspiring (and ambitious) discussion about the meaning of “free” and how it’s affecting businesses and user expectations online.
    • The way to be free: Step 1. Create Celebrity, Step 2. Monetize Celebrity
      • Which is harder: achieving or monetizing popularity?
      • Our job is to build an audience the right way: by providing value.
    • What is “free”? It’s a very loaded word. Atoms get more expensive as they increase, bits get cheaper.
    • Models for free:
      1. Media model: advertising subsidizes costs.
      2. Freemium - give away 95% to sell 5%. E.g. MMORGs. Only 5% conversion is necessary for profit. People misunderstand how hard it is to get 5% of any population to pay. Switching from Free to Freemium breaks a social contract.
    • Is there any scenario in which this generation will pay for digital content? NO, but people will pay for convenience.
    • FREE/ CHEAP has no negative connotation on the web.

Link: Transmedia Planning

Transmedia Planning

Cool article about how communications planning now can (and should, in my opinion) transcend media to the extent that different portions of a narrative can be distributed across channels. This has been said before, but it needs to be reiterated as mainstream content/ advertising still hasn’t got the message.


Via Talent Imitates, Genius Steals.

SXSW Day 2 - Beef and Booze

As I should have foreseen, I am already behind on my SXSW roundups. Here’s a quick look at the awesome on Saturday 3/14/09:


  • Curating the Crowd-Sourced World - Okay, I have to admit: I ended up at this panel accidentally thanks to conference room confusion. But I was psyched to hear Gina Trapani.

  • Opening Remarks by Zappos.com’s Tony Hsieh - So many people have written volumes on Tony Hsieh’s speeches that I don’t want to go into too much detail. But some of my favorite points were:

    • A company’s culture becomes its brand.

    • Chase the vision, not the money: whatever you’re thinking, think bigger.

    • Happiness is the ultimate life goal for EVERYBODY - so take time studying your own happiness.



  • From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small - So far, my favorite panel of SXSW. This is a topic that has been near and dear to my heart recently, as I figure out what my own business path will be. Whitney Hess is my better-known, better-spoken döppleganger.

  • Comedy on Television and the Web - Fun and funny panel with some celebrities (web and IRL). Interesting how people still differentiate between media channels - to me, both the web and TV are distribution channels, nothing more.

  • Fogo de Chao - Awesome Brazillian churrascaria with @Bescka and @Chateau.

  • SXSW Interactive Opening Party Hosted by frog design- Quick stop by the big frog opening party, which was pretty much how all big parties are: crowds, plastic cups, loud music, strangers.

  • OK! Happy Cog’aoke - Fun, backyard-keg-party feel sponsored by the cool kids at Happy Cog.