Category Archives: Interfaces

Play Factor integrated on any site

Posted on by
Reply

It is not new nor brilliant. Badges have been in games for a long time. They suddenly jumped to real life through startups like Four Square and Get Glue.

The concept is simple. Someone tracks your habits (somethings that has a TON of value) and grants you badges for whatever you do. Comments, ratings, clicks, rants, messages, everything that can be tracked can be badged.

So here comes Badgeville trying to commoditize the concept and create a central place where you can find the whole framework to apply in your product. That´s a nice way to put the Play Factor into your company´s products.

Remember. Badges are an easy and simple way to make your visitors play with your content. But it is just one feature. You will eventually need to go deeper. As with everything else, the concept will evolve and ask more, creatively speaking, from your team.

An interface to manage your life

Posted on by
Reply

It is a matter of perspective. Life is not a game per se, but if you apply the right metaphor, look from a specific angle, you could make it look more like one, and have some good results from thar.

Imagine, for a second, that you ask yourself a series of questions about your life and establish a series of goals completed and to be completed. College? Check. First million dollars? Working on it. How far are you to that objective. Oh, 43%. Nice.

With the right framework of questions, you could in a first attempt, visualize your life in terms of the stats of a game character. Your age against the general life expectancy. Your income and savings against the first million. Your health status against what a person at your age, in your country.

The tricky part could be how to update all these stats. Some of them could be perfectly automatic. Some would rely on your ability to update, only. Think about it as FourSquare or Goall meets real life and go deeper that just location. And it is kinda happening now. If you have a look at Get Glue’s App for iPhone, you will see that they are trying to make you check in in media products like books, TV shows and such.

You could manage your life in a whole different way. You could establish financial and even emotional goals and look how far or close you are to them. And you could visualize everything in an interesting and exciting way. I am working on how to do that…

The best ones play with you

Posted on by
Reply

A very common mistake when you are doing any kind of research is what i call the hammer approach. There is a saying that when a person has a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

So I like to put some serious effort in not saying that everything is a game or that games are in everything. But ont thing I can say with no fear of being wrong: most of the success stories of the last decade had some component of the Play Factor.

eBay
Can’t you see how much of a game is it? I will go on the mechanics of these things in later posts, but the thing is: the rush of bidding and fighting for your great deal is nothing more than a game.

Social Networks
This is so obvious. In Facebook, My Space or Orkut you collect people, groups and even play with other people. There are strong gaming and playing components at the core of the social networks.

YouTube
When you watch, you press play and have fun. Then you browse and browse through tags. You comment and have the social rush of saying funny things and sending links and ideas for your friends. You set up your favorites and playing lists. Or else, you make your videos and share with people and waits patiently for comments.

Amazon
Search for a product. Read what other people say. Write your own review or else say how many stars you give to the product. Hey. They show that people that bought this one liked that other one. Cool, what are they saying about it. There’s is a bargain here. Cool, let’s grade the seller! The interface makes you play as you shop. That is why this is so addictive.

And there is more. Just look at how your most favorite websites work and you will see the Play Factor in them. The best sites and best media products have this component. And they have different concepts. Not evey people love to bid. Some only like to browse products. Not everyone feel well about colecting stamps in a social network environment. We look for the ones that fit with our tastes. That is why we love them.

Pandemia: the game of world domination

Posted on by
Reply

This is not the central point of my research, but I will always talk about how we use interfaces that reminds us of games. These are more metaphors and not always pratical or workable concepts.

Have a look at how everyone, everyone that matters, at least, used mashups with maps and shiny graphics to keep track of how the Swine Flu (ridiculously renamed Novel Flu H1N1 by WHO, CDC whatever).

guardian_map

nyt_map