Jon Radoff’s Entrepreneur 2.0 Blog

Last week, I kicked off an experiment in collaborative blogging.   I used the microblogging environment of Twitter to generate conversations in an effort to mine the collective intelligence of lots of experts—and then synthesize and permanize the information in the more traditional format of a Wordpress blog entry.

Since my blog is about the business of social media and videogames, I asked the following questions:

• What can Website designers learn from games?
• What can games learn from website designers?

I received tons of input from game designers, user experience designers, social media experts as well as other people who are interested in both.  What struck me is the consistent themes that surfaced regardless of whether the person answering was looking at it from the “games learning from the web” or the “web learning from games” standpoints.  Here are some of the key themes that I detected:

Simplicity

Leave the slick animations at home and focus on simplicity instead—that was a major theme that web designers suggested that game designers learn from.

@EvilStickMan “Pretty graphics do not trump playability/usability”
@Dits “pointless minigames and button presses are not welcome in todays websites or games”
@doogiemac “Players don’t want to endure your “slick” animations when navigating menus, etc. They just want to perform the task ASAP.”
@eriksr “I suppose its to never forget about the user experience while you’re making all the pretty animations and colors. Fun/ease is king”
@UltraNurd “Use readable fonts :oP.”
@slandry1234 “introduction of “fun” most UX people stop at usable and never make it fun. Enjoyable interfaces are more apt to be learned”

It’s the Interface, Stupid

User interfaces are central to both games and websites, and designing-in your usability is going to be central to success.

@dominichamon “Interface, interface, interface. Game designers should start to think of the interface first and not leave it to the last minute.”
@skio I’d say building simple, refined user interfaces–but there are good and bad UI examples in both the web and game worlds.
@GKokoris “Usability trumps all. Artful content is lovely, but should never be used at the expense of a clear, unambiguous interface.”
@UltraNurd “This is more general HCI, but avoid interface innovation. Users expect widgets to work certain ways. FPS HUDs are a good standard.”
@thevioletdivide “Game -> Web: People like surprises, but everything they expect to be able to use should be easily located and usable. “

Progressive Disclosure

The conundrum in both games and complex websites is that you often have a need to let the user engage in complex functions—but you can’t start with complexity.  Good games introduce new forms of interaction and engagement as you play them; good websites need to do the same.

@slandry1234: “The interface should unfold in complexity as the user learns the app. Don’t overwhelm from the start.”
@evansims: “design for people, not your ego.” – which I take to mean that you’re not designing for yourself.  Complex interfaces are understandable to you because you made them—but they probably don’t work in practice.

One area I’m going to highlight is @kentquirk’s suggestion that I look into Csíkszentmihályi’s research on Flow, because I discovered a bunch of interesting research by using that as a starting point.  I think it applies to a ton of things—game design, user experience, and plenty of other areas.   Chen’s research on Flow in Games is a good primer for game designers, but I think user experience designers would also enjoy reading it.

Giving a Sense of Reward

A way to make websites more fun is to include elements that are fun.  Game designers are great at including “compulsion loops” that make you want to keep engaging with the game; it’s about balancing the effort required to engage with a game with a sense of pay-off.  Websites can do this by including things that reward members by recognizing them, implementing leaderboards and point systems, or by giving instantly rewarding experiences.  Conversely, bad games are usually the ones that fail to give you a sense of accomplishment at an appropriate pace during gameplay.

@brullig “How to make a simple concept, or one traditionally considered “boring”, fun and interesting in order to draw users in“

This is a fascinating area that I believe will be an area of research for years to come.  Eric Bethke did a great presentation at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year on the subject of applying MMORPG-type goal structure into the design of Websites (best takeaway: don’t design user interfaces—design goal interfaces).  And the folks at Shufflebrain put together a presentation last year that describes how to apply game mechanics to software design, specifically looking at the underlying game mechanics of MySpace.  More recently, Mashable compared the personality types of social media junkies and MMORPG players.

Games need Better Community

@Keadin “Utilizing community, The cloud.”

This is an area that’s close to my heart.  I think the great games have built-in viral mechanics—just like the best websites.  I wrote about this for Gamasutra last year in my article, Five Prescriptions for Viral Games.  Overall, I think game companies can save an awful lot of marketing dollars if they design games to take advantage of viral effects from day one.

Conclusion

Games and social media have more in common than you might have thought.  If you’re in one field–it’s a good idea to study the other.

This is a conversation that isn’t over yet!  I’m sure lots of people have thoughts on the subject.  Please add your feedback here, or join the conversation with me over on Twitter.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Games, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.