At SxSW2006 Kathy Sierra talked about bringing the principles behind good game design to software design. Here are some of her suggestions for Creating Passionate Users for your product:
- Create a compelling picture of what success looks like -what does it mean to be really good at something.
- Provide a clear picture of success and a series of steps to get there.
- Make sure you have a meaningful benefit.
- Most technology products provide facts & data (reference material). You need to provide real support.
- A lot of our brain's effort goes to forgetting things in order to keep us sane. There are two ways to get people to remember things: repetition or a strong emotional connection (see Dan Gilbert’s summary for more on this).
- The state of flow happens when you believe that you can accomplish something that.
- Game designers work hard to put people into the flow state through a balance of challenge and knowledge/skill.
- You can't make things too easy. People need to perceive they can accomplish something yet the challenge is growing.
Get their attention, build interest (find something motivating), let them experience a challenging activity (experience), provide a payoff.
- The payoff needs to match the challenge (concept of levels in games).
- Think about levels for your product. How frequent are your levels? Better to have gradual growth than on big payoff.
- Often need to tweak levels (adjust to keep people going).
- Makes you user the hero. Describe to your team how users will change as a result of using your product.
- Meaningful benefit: meaningful can be small scale.
- Everything with passion - becomes tribes. “T-shirt first development” provides users an opportunity to identify with a tribe.
- Think about how do you make users insiders?
- Find users people can identify with (a key figure or character).
- The secret is: it doesn't matter what they think of you; its about how they feel about themselves.
- Give people an "I Rule" experience