from the video of her presentation at UXLX July 2014, link here.
Games center around emotion, design for emotion by creating hypotheses such as:
- Until my players feel __________, I won’t ship
- Negative emotions are powerful also and are valid to design for
Bartel’s Player Types
- KIllers
- Achievers
- Explorers
- Socializer
Social game player types
- Express themselves
- Collaborators
- Explorers
- Competers
Who are the major player types for your product? What is the engagement style of your personas?
Core Loops drive engagement
- Multiple steps over time required to achieve success
- Example Fish Ville: You buy standard fish eggs; care for the eggs until fish hatch; clean cages etc while they grow; then sell the adults and buy exotic fish eggs and start over
- Others loops include:
- Consume > React > Share > (back to Consume)–driven by social sharing
- Buy > Review > Shopt < (back to Buy)–driven by social reviews
The vast majority of apps are never used or used only once (like 90% or something)–core loops give folks a reason to come back
Aesthetics are at the core of games
- They have to be key to the product development lifecycle from the beginning
- Sim City and Zynga’s version, The Ville, have very different audiences due to the design strategy
- Sim City is very complex and detail-oriented, with controls for creating infrastructures, utilities etc
- The Ville is more focused on being Zynga-cute and surface-oriented, infrastructures etc were thrown out and the building styling is brighter, rounder, softer, “cuter”
- Consider the interfaces for Photoshop and Paper app–core functionality is similar but the UI and UX differences create totally different experiences
From Wikipedia: Christina R. Wodtke (born October 22, 1966) is an American businesswoman and specialist in the area of user experience design and information architecture. Wodtke has held a series of executive roles in the tech industry, most notably leading teams who built the events platform and created an algorithm for Linkedin’s newsfeed, leading a redesign of Myspace and its profile pages and leading the design and launch of the Zynga.com gaming platform.
