I’m at an interesting place where I’m influenced by several different “disciplines” of design, and I think that’ll show in my work. There’s a lot of resonance between these; While the first two are pretty obvious, the third may not be. I’ll compact the first two into one for brevity:
Marketing + Web Design
These two have sort of developed along with eachother and influenced eachother. I design with marketing in mind. I market with the web in mind. Not only “Is this visually pleasing?” but also “How will someone react when they see this page?” or ”Is there something rewarding on this page?” I look at the data and tweak things to make sure everything works like clockwork. At the same time, I realize that data is not everything. There’s obviously a place for conversion rates and ROI, and a place for beautiful design, but solid user experience—from marketing efforts (online and off) to the website—is incredibly important. Ultimately all the prettiness and efficiency and statistics in the world won’t matter if the user, the person you’re trying to court, isn’t enjoying themself (you should, of course, ensure you’re actually making money while the user is enjoying your work). This brings me to the third…
Game Design
The above concludes that it’s ultimately the user experience that matters.
Lexia vs. Inferis
For several years, I spent a considerable amount of time working on Alexandria, an Ultima Online gray shard. Gray shards are server emulators that feature a hundred different flavors of UO, many of them quite sour, but some pretty awesome. Maybe it’s like wine, a flavor for every palate. I like to think the one I ran was awesome. I used to spend a lot of time getting to know the players, and designing features from observation and random inspiration. Research aside, design choices almost always came down to this:
“Do I think people will have fun with this?”
I mean, there’s a lot more to game design than that question, for that depth you might check out someone else’s blog like, say, Raph Koster’s. You know, people who have written books on the subject (Raph wrote “A Theory of Fun”).
Still, I think the same question—will people have FUN?—is crucial to modern web design, and doubly so for web application design. If there isn’t some sort of feedback, some joy from figuring out a new trick, from watching your friends list grow, from sharing something cool and having the world comment on it, then the design needs to be examined. It needs a fun injection.
If something is more fun with more people participating, then folks will go invite their friends. It’s your job to encourage and facilitate this, from the second they first enter your site. Facebook and MySpace and a thousand other social networks are huge not just because people like people (in fact, many people despise other people), but because it’s rewarding. More friends, more banter, more reward. If you hit 2,000,000 friends and announce it, you’ll get thousands upon thousands of them telling you how awesome you are. If you’re not into the big lists, it’s more like micro-managing your friends, or maybe just a facilitator for Real Life™ activities, but ultimately it’s the reward that drives people. It’s the fun.
I sometimes think if someone had unlimited funding and a handful of awesome game designers and visual designers, they could crush Google. Google is insanely useful, but honestly not very fun or visually exciting.
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Tags: creative process, fun, social networking, uo, web applications, web development
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