Workshops

Wednesday, October 2, 2013
The Player’s Journey Workshop with Amy Jo Kim

9:30 AM – 5:30 PM

Design product, app or service to drive Sustained Engagement

Activities focused on harnessing the intrinsic power of gaming to create better products and services. It helped participants to grow a vibrant, sustainable and self-organizing community around their offerings?

The Player’s Journey workshop introduced powerful, actionable design framework built around 5 Principles for Sustained Engagement:

  1. Intrinsic Motivation 
    design for learning, mastery, autonomy, purpose, belonging, fulfillment
  2. Progress Over Time 
    design for onboarding, habit-building, mastery, and character development 
  3. Meaningful Social Actions 
    know who you're designing for, then target their preferred Social Actions
  4. Happy Habits 
    drive retention by building positive emotions into your core game loops 
  5. Collective Action 
    help players rally around shared goals and join in something larger than themselves 

Amy Jo Kim guided participants through each concept, using case studies to illustrate key ideas and helped them you apply these ideas to create a compelling Player’s Journey.

Friday, October 4, 2013
Seductive Interaction Design with Stephen P. Anderson

1 PM – 5:30 PM

A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users' information, showing their profile's "percentage completed." Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.

Designers work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it's all waste. They have to extend the designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.

In this fun-filled, interactive workshop, Stephen P. Anderson guided participants through specific examples of sites who've designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He also demonstrated how to engage users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital in designing consumer applications and corporate products.

Using the Mental Notes card deck, participants started with an application that was perfectly "usable," and took it to the next level by exploring how things like feedback loops curiosity and social proof could make a site more seductive.

Who participated?

Designers, developers, marketers and product managers and people involved in the design of website and applications. The focus of this workshop was on how to design for behaviors, which is one thing diverse product teams can align around!

What they learned?

By the end of the workshop participants were able to learn the following:

  • Discover practical ways to apply ideas from psychology to interaction design
  • 15 principles from psychology (such as Curiosity, Set Completion and Sequencing)
  • Why making things usable isn't enough
  • How our design decisions influence behavior
  • Were able to translate business goals directly into behavioral goals (allowing us to measure UX decisions)
  • How even business apps could benefit from a little playfulness