There’s a lot of talk about Gamification these days. This is literally using game-mechanics to increase engagement and motivation in an experience, or more specifically ‘adding points, challenges, achievements and leaderboards to working culture’. See the examples below from thenextweb.com.

Lots of game-like dashboards to keep track of progress and opportunities to improve

Bringing in other ‘players’

The ‘player’ profile pod

I’m a football fan and, being the great convenience of Twitter, I follow a lot of football and sports journalists. I’m always intrigued by how people who write for a living tackle the 140-character-world of Twitter. Anyways, one of the recent ‘Twitter storms’ was the launch of a specific team’s football kit (not their main one) which contained the colours of their main rivals, albeit sparingly. Online the supporters were going mental. Mad. So mad, that the journalist actually wrote a piece about this online outrage at this new kit. It seemed doomed to tank. Could the club withdraw it? Is it too late to put out a new design?

Anyhow, the club launched this ‘controversial’ kit and what happened? Fastest-selling kit in history …

Just goes to show, we should always remember (especially as user experience designers), that we are not the world. We are not everyone. Heck, we aren’t even a majority …

This is yet another gem unearthed through Twitter. Designer Mike Kus blogged about Realigning Innocent Drinks where he realigns (specifically not ‘redesigns’) the Innocent homepage to reflect the brand more accurately. This is massively important, especially for brands like Innocent (and probably all aspiring brands) who try to bring a certain amount of personality through in everything they do.

Realigning Innocent from Mike Kus on Vimeo.

This video was equally interesting for me because you almost get to see how a visual designer works, which you can never really do unless you sit behind one for the whole week. Which would be rather annoying.

An article by UX Magazine caught my eye this morning – Why Persuasive Design Should Be Your Next Skill Set. It’s another one of those terms I’ve seen being banded around for a while, kindof understood it (or at least had my own interpretation of the term), but never explored it in depth. There’s also an interview with Andrew Chak about the topic on UIE.com.

These respective articles describe ‘persuasive design’ as “the use of psychology in design to influence behaviour”, and I also interpret usable as a base requirement when designing a website, with designing it persuasively to be taking the design to the next level. There is a fine line between persuasive design and deceptive design / coercion but the key differentiator is that persuasive design is helping users do what they want to do. Or as William Chak says: “Persuasive Design is not about manipulating users into doing something they don’t want to do. Instead, the goal of Persuasive Design is to get users to make the right decision”.

Here’s a presentation on the topic:

Smashing Magazine also talk about Persuasion Triggers in Web Design being Reciprocation, Commitment, Social Proof, Authority, Scarcity, Framing, and Salience. Dan Lockton has created a Design with Intent toolkit to help designers create products and services optimised for the designer’s intended user behaviour.

An interesting resource that the UX Mag article mentions is a behaviour grid created by a Dr. BJ Fogg, which classifies behaviours as positive and negative and how long they can be sustained. Here’s the grid …

Here’s the grid with food examples …

The web has changed the way we work & play massively. The speed at which new sites, apps, tools and systems are appearing – all with their own goals and feature sets – and how they are now beginning to talk to each other is giving us, as end-users, unending opportunities to be creative. I’m a firm believer that people, from all walks of life, are naturally creative. This is using the term ‘creative’ in its most holistic sense. In my industry, the term ‘creative’ has somehow been altered from representing a mindset or an approach to representing a very specific job title. But I think being ‘creative’ is different to being a ‘designer’. Yes, they’re tightly aligned, they overlap incredibly but they should not be exclusively linked.

I’m constantly in awe of some of the iPhone apps out there. The design elegance, the slickness of interaction, the functionality of the app and the overall user problem they solve … or the opportunity they create. The people who thought them up are as creative as the ones who spec’d, designed and coded the thing.

But if there’s one recent thing that’s reminded me that all people are naturally creative it’s how some people have adapted the new Facebook profile page (see below). The one that allows a more flexible profile photo and then also picks out five other photos to headline at the top of the page. I’m not sure how Facebook envisaged people to use them but the was some users have turned this rather functional profile page into their ‘canvas’ is really, really cool. I tried it but gave up …

Apps like Instagram have brought out the amateur photographer geek in all of us. I reckon Instagram could turn a picture of a half-eaten chicken sandwich into a moody, arty, interesting photo. Services like Twitter encourage us to write, and be creative in what we write, how we write, and where we write. Events planning & organising sites like Eventbrite and Meetup are allowing us to arrange meetups within minutes, fostering collaboration and co-creation. Video sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube are turning people in their bedrooms into producers or even comedians – people like Rebecca Black, oh hang on, that one wasn’t a joke. Anyway, these tools, readily accessible and easy-to-use, are becoming more available, creating new outlets for previously dormant creative tendencies in all of us. And long may it continue.