Inspiration is something that I think any creative person occasionally struggles with. I recently traveled to California and at my first stop, Yosemite National Park, I immediately felt inspired and humbled by all the amazing things surrounding me. I thought about all that we can learn from nature and how it relates to what I’ve learned in my career so far. The following 13 photos and accompanying thoughts on designing are things I wish I could have told a younger me, things I still have to remind myself of, or things I wish I could have (or would have) told people I’ve met along the way.
1. STAY HUMBLE

Giant Sequoia Trees — Yosemite National Park, CA 

You’re not one of the largest living things on the planet and you don’t know everything. Stay humble and learn what you can from those around you.

2. BE OVERWHELMED
Glacier Point — Yosemite National Park, CA
Some projects have such great potential that it can be really exciting. Go with it.
3. WATCH FOR BULLies
Road Block on the way to Stump Meadow — Sequoia National Forest, CA
Sometimes you’ll work with people who will treat you like a little design puppet, as if you have no thoughts or feelings of your own. These people can be extremely arrogant, hypocritical, ungrateful, and a lot of other things that I probably shouldn’t type out in here. Try not to let them get the best of you.
4. DO IT YOUR WAY
The Jeremiah O’Brian at Pier 45 — San Francisco, CA
There are lots of different kinds of boats and they all float. Everyone has their own way of doing things and their own process. Sketching, talking to yourself, expecting ideas to come in the shower, or whatever else works for you… go with it.
5. KNOW THERE ARE UPS AND DOWNS
View from the top of Lombard Street — San Francisco, CA
There will be amazing days when you’re feeling like the most creative person ever. There will be rough days when you feel like a kid with crayons might come up with something better. Days when your client’s feedback makes alcoholism sound like a good life plan. You’re a creative cat though so you can totally make it through all the ups and downs. Try to smile and do what this guy is doing and you’ll probably feel better.
6. WORK FOR IT
Sea lions high up on a rock off Point Lobos State Reserve — Carmel, CA
Maybe you were told that you could do anything you wanted since the day you were born. Or maybe you went to a college that told you companies would be lining up to hire you once you graduated. Either way, you should know that you still have to work for it. There are a lot of creative people in the world and you’re just one of them. Work hard enough to stand out.
7. LOVE WHAT YOU DO
Artwork by Mr. Brainwash on the side of The Cypress Inn — Carmel, CA
If you don’t love your work, you can’t expect others to. Aim to create your best work every time and know that it might still get rejected. Don’t fall so in love with it that you refuse to make changes. I had a teacher once that suggested taking out all of my favorite parts of a design and working only with the elements I didn’t care for as much. It was a really interesting experiment and forced me to transform those elements into something great, instead of just leaving them in because they worked well with what I had loved.
8. ENJOY THE JOURNEY
View of Coast — Somewhere along Highway 1, CA
Projects can be long and drawn out but the process/journey is beautiful. You can learn so much along the way, especially if you work closely with all the other people and departments on the journey with you. Don’t rush the process and don’t put it off.
9. AIM TO STAND OUT
A zebra and his cow friends — Somewhere along Highway 1, CA
Treat the work you look at for inspiration as just that; don’t ever create carbon copies of existing designs with different content. Aim to create something better than the designs you love, like a zebra in a field of cows.
10. BUILD BRIDGES
Bridge in Venice — Los Angeles, CA
Make connections. The people you work with will move around from agency to agency, and some of those people could provide future opportunities or be there for you if you ever need a favor.
11. KNOW WHAT’S ESSENTIAL
What happens in Vegas… — Las Vegas, Nevada
Learn to edit. Some things don’t have a place. If it’s a really great design element but it confuses the overall purpose, it’s not worth it. An eye for editing doesn’t just benefit design, all departments and many other industries can benefit from knowing when to take stuff out.
12. PLAY
Corona del Mar State Beach — Newport Beach, CA
Seeing what other people create can be really inspiring. When I was in school, we would have a final review of our work at the end of each year. At this review someone would always ask you what contemporary designers were your favorite. We’re surrounded by design everywhere we go, most of which isn’t very good so it’s very important to make sure you’re looking at good design as well. Explore the world of design (and tide pools). You never know what you’ll find.
13. BE OPEN
Sailboat on the open ocean — Newport Beach, CA
Be accepting of new ideas, new ways of doing things, new technologies, and especially to the opinions of others. That is how you learn and grow.
[Photo credit: Jenny Shaddach]

I am a lifelong fan of LEGO© toys and games and of J.R.R. Tolkien. So when LEGO began to release The Lord of the Rings sets, I was delighted. I then came across this video about designing Shelob Attacks while reviewing the new sets:

Shelob’s wheels from the “Designer Video: Shelob Attacks” (© 2012 The LEGO Group)

As a user experience researcher and designer, I enjoy learning about the design process fellow design professionals go through to come up with brilliant products. The designer shared the unique challenges in creating an organic shape like a spider. With such well-known source material, it might have been easy to assume that once Shelob looked right, the design was finished.

However, the LEGO design team did not stop there. They watched children playing with an early version of Shelob. About halfway through this video, the designer notes that they noticed that children would push the toy spider’s abdomen to the ground and not be able to slide her easily. To ensure that play would continue smoothly, they added tiny wheels on her abdomen. This subtle touch ensured that the great looking model would also be fun to play with.
This is a great example of how user research can turn a good design into a fantastic user experience.

Over the last couple of years I’ve really enjoyed learning the ins and outs of photography. It has been the creative outlet that I needed that is similar enough to user experience design, but different enough that it doesn’t feel like work. Now that I’ve been shooting for awhile now, I’m finding that many of the habits I have when practicing ux design are starting to carry over into my photography. The hook between the two lies in the attention of detail, a specific moment in time and properly serving the subject being photographed. The importance of these three concepts is the same in photography and in user experience design.

Attention of Detail

The ability to point out the minor flaws of an object or interface is curse for every designer. Personally, nothing drives me more batty now then seeing a UI widget be a pixel off from its intended alignment with other UI widgets. The curse exists in the world of photography. Nothing distracts more from a photo than an out of place object. This could someone accidentally, or intentionally, photobombing the subject, or simply a power line spanning the width of the scene. Getting the details of an experience, be it interactive or visual, wrong disrupts the user and takes away from overall engagement. Being asked to take photos for a friends family or going out on a photo walk has helped increase my attention. This experience naturally translate to the work I do at Perficient XD and makes the work I produce for my clients better.

Being In The Moment

When you use an application, website, or product there are certain magical moments that will either hook you into the experience or drive you away. The same magical moments exist when you are photographing a subject. I’ve read a lot about the best way to take photos of a sunset or sunrise. The one piece of advice that is consistent across photographers is find the scene you want to shot and wait. Wait for that moment when the light is perfect, then hit your shutter release. Once you’ve captured that “perfect” moment, wait 5 or 10 minutes and take the photo again. In just that short span of time, you will have a set of photos that tell different stories and convey a different mood. The core of this advice can best be applied to registration and up selling your customers. The span of time to ask and convince someone to sign up for your site or to buy additional products happens during “magical” moments while the person is using your site. Asking too soon or too late means you failed to convert that user or that you missed out on additional revenue. Be patient, wait for the moment that will really “Wow!” someone.

Focusing On The Subject (User)

Nothing is more important in photography than the subject. Not light, ISO, shutter speed or aperture. Without the subject all the theory and settings don’t matter because no one will pay attention to the photo. When designing a digital product, the same level of important should be placed on the user. If you don’t have visitors to your site, consumers of your products or contributors to your content then nothing else about your product manners. That’s not to say the subject, or user, should be the only focus. The settings used when taking the photo, or the design and functionality of a product all have their place. At the center of it all should be the subject though.

Wrapping Up

There are a lot of great resources out there for learning the theory behind the art of photography. I encourage you to read a post here and there, even if you don’t have an interest in photography. Look for the correlations between the craft of experience design and the craft practiced by thousands of photographers out there.
Digital Photography School
Fuel Your Photography
FroKnowsPhoto
PhotoFocus

Inspiration sometimes sneaks up on you. That’s what happened to me when I took my son to see Wreck-It Ralph, and prior to the movie the Disney Short “Paperman” was shown. I cannot properly expresses how amazing the creative genius of this short is, and it’s great to see that it was recently nominated for an Emmy. The emotions that hit me when I watch “Paperman” range from pure joy to complete disappointment. Please take 6 minutes out of your day and watch the video below, I promise you it will leave you inspired and give you a desire to do greater, more creative work in the future.

If you’re like me, you spend what feels like a decent portion of your professional life creating and compiling presentations. Or perhaps you’re like the other half of the professional world where a lot of your time is spent listening to those presentations.
I reflect back on conferences I’ve been to which are often a string of presentations and I try to think about which ones really stood out to me and stick in my mind. Chances are the ones that stand out include three things. A charismatic presenter, interesting subject matter, and a good story.
It’s something I’ve always suspected to be true, but the story concept is actually backed by scientific research. This New York Times article talks about what happens to your brain when someone tells you a story, fact or fiction. Here’s a excerpt:

In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading (or hearing) about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.

When we tell stories of emotion, describe smells and actions, our listeners brains become engaged in all of these areas even though this experience isn’t happening to them.
Certainly scientists aren’t the only ones that understand this. In the presidential debates, why did Obama answer questions about what he plans to do with our country with stories of growing up with his grandmother and the farm life struggles his family went through?  Why does Brian Tracy, a professional business speaker tell us stories about other business folk to demonstrate how to organize our calendars instead of using bullet points? Pharaoh’s lives and lessons described in picture painting cartouche’s. The bible uses parables.
Clearly not new ideas… These are all stories that are meant to engage us and make us understand new thoughts, or to make us want to get up and do something. We remember them better than presentations with bullet points.
Don’t just give a presentation with facts and figures. Find a way to weave in a story that truly engages the full mind of your audience. They’ll remember you far past the coffee break if you do.

When discussing great data presentation, Edward Tufte is often cited, with good reason. Good data presentation has always been important. It is especially necessary to achieve the potential with Big Data, uniting Information Management and Experience Design. I’m indebted to Perficient colleague Brian Dudley for introducing me to Hans Rosling and his inspiring way of presenting data.
Rosling presents data in a way that not only tells a powerful story, but is truly delightful. What is particularly wonderful in his presentations is the positive and encouraging story Rosling tells with data. His field of interest is in public health. The way such data is presented too often suggest only grim and daunting pictures for certain areas of the world. That’s certainly one way to encourage urgency, but such a message doesn’t necessarily point to definite solutions. Rosling’s presentations (watch, for example, The good news of the decade?), in contrast, show that, while there is still a lot of room for progress in public health throughout the world, we have made progress everywhere. He correlates factors such as education for women and availability of family planning services to where progress has been pronounced. He then builds the case that those same factors can help with remaining efforts to reduce poverty, end child morality, and achieve other goals to improve life for everyone. The data points to what is working as much as to what still needs to be done. That’s a powerful message and a lesson for presenting data in any field.
I also recommend gapminder.org, which Rosling founded with the mission of “Fighting devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview everyone understands.” If you have to present data and want to tell an amazing and beautiful story, Gapminder desktop is a must-have tool.
As we explore all that is possible with the emerging Big Data effort, Rosling is an inspiration to avoid “boring tables” that fail to really engage our readers. I hope you find his work as inspirational and a useful resource to add to your Idea Notebook.

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of changing the thinking about accessible design and how design itself is a powerful tool for change. Designing for change was a second strong theme at Big Design 2012, continuing from Big Design and UPA last year. Several sessions explored using design to bring about change, from personal to global.
In “Designing Behavior Change Games,” Dustin Ditommaso talked about designing to achieve behavior change. By blending behavior change theory and game theory, he designs games to improve behaviors, particularly for medical applications. He talked about how behavior change games go beyond gamification and work to result in permanent behavior change. Behavior change games offer the following:

• “Create novelty and interest for uninteresting activities
• Provide planning, structure, goal-setting and routine
• Facilitate feelings of autonomy and intrinsic motivation
• Develop and improve skills to enable change
• Provide a platform for enhancing feelings of competence
• Provide a platform for social support and influence”

A few examples of behavior change games include Health Month, Goalpost, Re-mission, Superbetter, and Ditommaso’s own Healthrageous.
When deciding to develop a behavior change game, designers need to understand behaviors in context:

• “What are the key specific behaviors?
• Why are the behaviors there?
• What needs to change for desired behavior to occur?
• What core behavior change techniques will be used?”

Activities can be turned into a game if the following conditions are met:

• “If the behavior can be learned or modified
• If the progress can be measured
• If feedback can be delivered in a timely manner”

Of course, understanding the audience, their aptitude for games, and their likely interest in one type of game over another are important to research and understand as well. Tailored to the right audience, behavior change games offer tangible, incremental progress and regular rewards that encourage successful changes for engaged players.
Dana Chisnell talked of designers having “superpowers” in “Leading by Design.” Chisnell, an expert in usability in voting and elections, shared her experiences as well as other efforts where design and design thinking is changing the world for good. Some examples of design for good included the Lifesaver bottle, using 3-D printers to print “bones,” Code for America, and others as well as examples from the audience.
Just a few of the superpowers designers offer to the world besides specific design skills:

• Training
• Practice
• Observations
• Experience
• Attention to Detail
• Patience

Chisnell asserted that “designers can be agents of change because we can deliver incremental, evolutionary, tolerant change.” She encouraged designers to get involved in making the world a better place to promote world peace and use our superpowers for good beyond our daily work. She said there are many ways to serve and promote change. From her own extensive experience in voting projects, she suggested just a few ways to affect change:

• Serve as an election worker
• Proofread for your county elections office
• Remove the stigma of the accessible voting system by using “this machine in the corner” of your polling place
• Participate on projects such as AIGA Design for Democracy and UPA Usability in Civic Life
• Support projects such as Kickstarter project for Field Guides: Upcoming projects will focus on education materials and registrar websites

What’s that? You’ve got killer deadlines at work? Your child has a dentist appointment? The car needs an oil change? I understand. I really do. I have an ever-growing list like that of my own. So I am going to share with you a few highlights from Brandon Gadoci’s inspiring “Getting to the Try” that I hope can help if you need to take on a more personal change: Redesigning you. He shared his personal and continuing journey to make a difference for his own dreams and aspirations despite being too busy. While his focus is on building the skills and knowledge to develop products and new businesses, his advice applies well to the message of redesigning the world for good and making time to get involved.

First, get uncomfortable. Change hurts. It brings fear of failure, pain, sacrifice, and doubt, but also hope and success. If we stay in our comfort zones with what we know, we cannot grow and make our full impact in the world. We should understand what we know and can already do, and then figure out what we need to know to accomplish our goals. Gadoci suggested finding resources, training, and communities to gain the knowledge and skills we lack. The most important step, though, is to start doing something to move forward and gain momentum. He asserted that momentum is greater than ideas because action generates more action.
Time management, even to the point of being a “jerk” to defend our time, is a critical part of progress. He again emphasized just doing something, emphasizing “progress over perfection.” Gadoci shared that he had to learn to chop tasks down to size and prioritize tasks. He also noted that he is not talking about multitasking, but rather “short bursts of focus.”
Finally, he concluded that we needed to take care of ourselves during the process. Eating well, sleeping (although he admitted that he needed more), being fit, and keeping our relationships strong were all important to maintaining the right motivation.
I previously shared a prediction by Whitney Hess for designers to shift focus from making stuff to making “stuff that matters.” These sessions certainly showed ways our colleagues are making that prediction come true and gave some ideas for all of us to contribute as well.

When was the last time you saw a floppy disk (outside of a museum, or your friendly IT guy’s stash)? In all likelihood it’s been a while. There may very well be some of you reading this who have never actually held a floppy disk, let alone used one. Oh man, that makes me feel so old…
Anyway, throughout our interfaces – both online and offline – we still use this outdated metaphor to indicate “save”, when an increasingly-large proportion of our user base actually has no idea why we’re using that icon. For a generation brought up with cloud storage, and auto-sync between devices, it will seem incredible that we ever had to carry around those little disks that only held 1.4MB (or 720KB back even further in the day!)
So the question becomes this: Should our industry start a conversation around changing this icon? And if so, what should it become?
I read an excellent comment on an old Slashdot article about this very topic that neatly and succinctly explains the problem, and a possible solution:

The whole concept of saving files (including the word itself) is counter-intuitive to most people. If you know that the computer makes a temporary copy of the file and then wants to copy the new file over the old one, then the word makes sense. You’ve made changes to a different file. But the average user doesn’t realize this, nor should they. They think that what they see on the screen is the file. When I edit a file, any fool looking at the screen can see that the changes have been made. Why would the computer ask you to do something you have already done? Intuitively, the screen represents the current state of the file, so if I wish to stop working on a document, it implies that I’m satisfied with its contents. If I create a new file, add some data and then try to close the document, at that point the software should intervene and ask me to pick a name for the file.
I could see a person accustomed to using the word ‘save’ in the phrase “I’m not sure I really need this any more, should I throw it away? No, I’ll save it, just in case…” to interpret the save prompt in the same way, i.e. I’ve decided to discard the changes I’m making, but maybe I’ll save them in case I want to make a permanent change later, more like a recycle bin.
My suggestion is get rid of ‘save’ altogether, and replace it with something like ‘Confirm your changes’, and a big green check mark in place of the floppy disk. Why bother the user with an icon representing the mechanics of the operation?

(Comment on “Modernizing the Save Icon“)

Logical. Still accomplishing the same thing, but in a way that makes sense to a user unaccustomed to iconography like floppy disks.
The thing is, I’m rather fond of not upsetting the status quo too much. Icons can become…well…icons, if you pardon the pun. Why change something so integral to the mechanics of computing? After all, sometimes context changes…

A police telephone box. Or the TARDIS, depending who you talk to

Google is sponsoring its second annual global science fair for students aged 13-18. This competition calls for the “brightest young scientists from around the world to submit interesting, creative projects that are relevant to the world today.”
I have always found science fair and similar intellectual challenges to be incredibly inspiring. Falling into a rut of thinking is so easy, and we don’t even realize it’s happened. We have to solve many problems every day in our work and personal lives that we learn certain patterns for quickly analyzing the situation. We build up a mental file cabinet of solutions that we draw from regularly. That serves us well, so we continue to do this. Less often, though, do we challenge those previously successful patterns and innovate new solutions. One of the things that make science fairs and other student competitions wonderful to observe is that the young participants typically haven’t had so much time to develop ingrained patterns of thinking. Consequently, they think about problems in unique and inspiring ways.
For five years, I managed a student technical writing competition that invited entries from students in the same age as those invited to participate in the Google Science Fair. Most of the competition entries were papers from science fairs or advanced science projects that the students had participated in. Participants, young as they were, were thinking about difficult problems and coming up with new ideas for researching and solving them. A few examples of the wide-ranging topics include cancer research, CAPTCHA effectiveness, developing artificial muscles, exploring deep sea vents, and risk factors for falling in the elderly. I was always amazed at the great ideas, some of them incredibly practical and relevant. I’ll be checking back to the Google Science Fair site in anticipation of similar inspiration.
Another reason to be aware of an activity like this is that participants are developing innovative solutions that might have relevance to your work. One possible way of tapping into this is to participate in a local science fair. You might be surprised what great ideas students at schools in your area are coming up with. Some student competitions, such as FIRST, encourage industry experts to get directly involved by sponsoring and mentoring entrants.
Another possibility is engaging the participants directly. Internships can cultivate talent and certainly create goodwill with educators and the community, but few companies approach student work as ways to really innovate and grow. The top three winners of the Google Science Fair 2011 won internships at CERN, Google, and LEGO – organizations that understand creativity and innovation. However, a lot more than just these three smart, motivated students were involved. Over 10,000 students from around the world submitted entries. Of those, 60 semi-finalists were selected. What might an intern from this group of students offer your company? What kinds of problems do you face that could use fresh ideas and novel thinking? What would an intern with demonstrated experience in problem solving as submitted to this event offer your organization?
Lastly, consider this an opportunity to challenge yourself to break familiar patterns and ways of looking at problems. Although you might not be able to submit your entry, apply the tools (like the Educator’s toolkit) and information on the site to a difficult problem you face. Create an “submission” based on the template. You may find that the process knocks you out of your usual problem-solving rut and leads you to some new ways of thinking.

In “The top mistakes UX designers make: the writeup,” Scott Berkun shares common errors about culture and attitude that designers and user researchers make. Sadly, most of the mistakes seemed to result when we fail to have empathy for our colleagues. The following summarizes just a few of Berkun’s points that I found particularly interesting and distressingly familiar:

• Never make it easy: Berkun notes that we fail to make usability usable and often become the “UX police,” a hostile role that no one appreciates. We are trained to function as lone practitioners rather than learning the skills to be full members of teams that we more often work in. We need to make the effort to fit into the organization culture.
• Forget your coworkers are meta-users: Related to the previous point, we deliver what we do in formats that are hard to consume and put to use and often omit the kinds of details that our development colleagues need.
• Vulcan pretension: A failing of research is to insist that we should only ever offer data and never our opinions. However, we have insights to offer that may come over the course of our work, so we should be comfortable offering our opinions, distinguishing them from data, where they make a valuable contribution.
• Dionysian pretension: This is the design corollary to the Vulcan pretension. Berkun defines it as “the dreamer mentality as an excuse for not having to do the thinking required to make an idea real.”
• Don’t know the business: We need to keep in mind the company goals and business drivers. “Having a better UX doesn’t guarantee anything: many market leading products are UX disasters.” We need to understand all the factors that lead to or divert from success for the company.

After identifying these mistakes, Berkun advises the following to correct them:

• Earn credibility in your culture on your culture’s terms.
• Make it easy/fun to follow your advice.
• Design for your developers/managers, as they are the first users of your work.
• Have something at stake
• Consider switching to a role with power
• Seek powerful allies
• Get out of your office and drop your ego
• Follow the money

Berkun presented this at the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting in January, and the Q&A from that meeting is included in his post. A valuable point from that discussion:

“When there are smart, confident people working on things they are passionate about, there’s going to be unavoidable messiness. There is no ideal team where everything goes smoothly and every decision is contention free.”

Since most of the listed errors happen when we fail to empathize with our colleagues, a first step to moving past the messiness as well as for following Berkun’s advice is to recognize our teammates’ needs in the same way we strive to understand the people who will use our products. Indeed, Berkun notes that they are our “first users,” relying on our work to do theirs. We must see things from their points of view and endeavor to provide real value to them from our contributions to the team.

November is National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NaNoWriMo. This annual event is “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.” Started in 1999 by Chris Baty, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words, the equivalent of the average-sized novel, in 30 days. Sounds crazy? Baty acknowledges this in the first line of his book No Plot? No problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days:  “The era, in retrospect, was very kind to dumb ideas.”
Success has been more than just kindness, though, as this dumb idea clearly resonated with a lot of people. NaNoWriMo participation has grown from the original 21 participants in the San Francisco area to over 200,000 worldwide in 2010. In 2006, Baty founded the nonprofit Office of Letters and Light to run NaNoWriMo, sister event Script Frenzy in April, and the NaNoWriMo Young Writer Programs, which “provides kids and teens with a month-long creative experience that improves self-esteem, teaches perseverance, and radically alters their relationships with writing and literature.” Now in its 13th year, NaNoWriMo is a global, multi-channel, social event that has grown as much because of its passionate community as the organizers’ hard work and dedication.
Participation in NaNoWriMo, like most online social communities, is free. All you have to do is sign up on the NaNoWriMo website where you can connect with fellow writers, track your progress, and get pep talks from organizers and famous authors, among other amusements. Unlike most social communities, however, this event has been refining this experience since before the words “social networking” buzzed into our social consciousness.
The history of NaNoWriMo provides an interesting perspective on how the online user experience of NaNoWriMo evolved in conjunction with and sometimes anticipated the emerging technologies. Consider that NaNoWriMo launched five years before Facebook, seven years before Twitter, and ten years before foursquare. Before the word was coined, NaNoWriMo was a gamification of novel writing, establishing personal challenges and a friendly competition as participants strive to stay on track with writing 1,667 words each day. The community that has built up online does not rival these later companies in size, but certainly provides an example of an engaging, vital, self-sustaining social network for members.  This timeline shows that this “dumb” idea was ahead of its time delivering the kinds of user experiences that have captured so much attention currently.
That history and the incredible evolution of its user experience make NaNoWriMo a topic of interest to me and an example for anyone interested in compelling UX design. But my true enthusiasm for the event comes from the boost that it gives my creativity. Few activities recharge my creative batteries like NaNoWriMo. I get to cultivate skills and explore ideas that are outside the normal course of my work and other activities. Such a creative recharge, even in this very different kind of activity, has a way of refreshing how I approach the work and other activities that I do.
2011 will be my third year participating in the event. I finished the last two, earning my NaNoWriMo winner t-shirts. This year, I have an even more demanding project schedule than the last two and no clear novel theme entering the event. But I find that I’m eager for the starting line, to face that stark blank page. Even if I don’t cross the 50,000 word finish line on November 30, I know I’ll have learned a lot in the process. If you’re intrigued, come experience “thirty days and nights of literary abandon” for yourself. And let me know, or even better, connect as a writing buddy through NaNoWriMo. I’d love to cheer you on.
Now, to quote Maurice Sendak via program director Lindsey Grant’s kick-off post, “Let the wild rumpus start!”

Last weekend, I virtually attended BlizzCon 2011, a conference hosted by Blizzard Entertainment, the game developer behind Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo. A major focus of this annual conference is to provide insights and generate excitement about upcoming content planned for each franchise, but it is also a celebration of gamers, by gamers, and for gamers. Tournaments give us a chance to see the best of our fellow players compete against each other for major prizes (for example, the champion World of Warcraft arena team split a USD75,000 first prize) and glory. Interviews and panels by the game designers and developers provide insight into the work, thought, and passion that fuels the continuing evolution of these games.
It’s these last types of sessions that I’m especially drawn to and from which I gain user experience design insights. Although the focus of the conference is notably different from the UX-focused conferences I’ve written about previously, this conference offers a unique perspective into what goes into creating some of the richest user experiences around.  This year, I especially enjoyed World of Warcraft (WoW) Lore and Story Q&A panel featuring Chris Metzen, Senior Vice President, Story and Franchise Development; Dave Kosak, Lead Quest Designer for WoW; and Sean Copeland, historian. As I watched them answer the most detailed questions about the story line so far from a passionate crowd, it dawned on me that there are strong lessons here about designing for UX over time in a way that few companies currently consider. Three areas are very relevant to development of many other products.

Engagement

The first area to consider is engagement. Low hanging fruit, right? Games should be engaging in the exact way spreadsheet software isn’t. However, in a potentially endless experience of a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, keeping users engaged enough to get through the grind of killing 10 of this enemy and harvesting 30 of that rare herb to level and advance quest lines is really very challenging. Not every game does this well.
Two points emerged to show why WoW in particular remains the dominant MMO after 10 years. The panelists have great passion for their material and have great empathy for their fans. They care deeply about delivering a phenomenal experience, they care about the characters and worlds they create, and they care about seeing all of that evolve and grow. “We love these characters,” said Kosak. Metzen reiterated, “No one loves these characters like we do.”
Ethos is tough to bring into a world, though. Even Blizzard designers still struggle with bringing some elements of the story into the game without getting in the way of people who just want to play. Watching them work through these struggles show that emotional engagement is still one of the hardest parts of the user experience to design for.
The gamers who experience the resulting story and game are a diverse, international audience who are equally, if sometimes not more, protective of this world and its culture than the designers. The gamer audience is also characterized as being some of the most demanding and critical consumers of any service in the world. Blizzard’s response? The game designers invite questions, criticism, and ideas in a live Q&A session as well as in developer diaries that they post periodically and in the online forums for each game. In these online resource, they often detail player feedback that changes and developments are responding to. Metzen has talked about how BlizzCon refuels his “geek batteries” and closed the panel expressing his appreciation to the audience, “Thanks for loving this stuff, for sticking with us.”
And the engagement effort is across multiple channels, including the tone and look-and-feel of the websites (microsites serve each franchise separate from the main Blizzard site), user forums, BlizzCon, and offline media such as books and comics allow lore enthusiast to dive even more deeply into the individual characters and their stories. They then share what they learn in forums. Hints were made in other panels that there may be yet other media through which players can engage.
There are unique challenges with providing multiple channels for players and still keeping everyone equally engaged, even those who don’t take advantage of other channels. Taking the example of sharing story through books. Metzen noted:

“I was petrified of trying to develop fiction in real-time with WoW. Quest design process is complicated enough, right? It’s really hard to develop quests…  to develop that much story and keep moving… As we were chasing stories over the year, we took a more conservative route [in the past]…

A lot of people don’t want to go out and read a book. They want their content in the game… I think the onus is on us try and bring and really bring these events and have them more evidenced in the game. That kind of thing needs to be balanced with the quest lines and the content that Dave and his team are already pushing.”

Kosak added to that point,

“Certainly, one of my principle goals with being on the content team of WoW is to make sure that these key events that happen in the lore are somehow represented in the game. If you read the book, you’ll get all kinds of perspectives about the characters and about the event that happened.

But there will be a component of it in the game that you can interact with, so that you can catch up, so you can see what happened. ‘Oh, big event! I was there. I got to experience that.’ It’s not easy to do. We going to keep trying to experiment with that. I think we can do a much better job of it… It’s one of my principle goals and I work really closely with the guys on c-dev [content development] to make that happen.”

BlizzCon Website: World of Warcraft Lore & Story Q&A Panelists Metzen, Kosak, and Copeland (© Blizzard Entertainment)

Culture

Second, MMOs are inherently social, but WoW’s design and lore cultivate a culture and in world and out. The culture in WoW along with other online communities has been studied by sociologists (Ars Technica has an good example article). Guilds, tournament teams, and just an in-game friends list, allow players to connect and share with other players and develop relationships.
Game design also promotes social interaction by encouraging players join in parties to solve challenging boss battles and achieve player-vs-player dominance with team mates, share adventures with their fellow guildies, have a dance party in the town squares, and of course, talk about the exploits of Chuck Norris in and out of the WoW world. The structure of quests, the variety of chat channels, support for services such as Ventrilo for voice chat, and flavor controls like emotes let players create their own game experience and contribute to that of others. And if one thing doesn’t provide the experience you want (Chuck Norris chatter isn’t to everyone’s tastes), you can go find another experience to share.
Out of world, you can join user forums to talk about almost any point of the game of interest and, of course, attend BlizzCon.

User experience over time

Third, and of particular interest to me, WoW delivers an evolving experience over time. They aren’t afraid to take risks that might potentially alienate some players initially, but will advance the story line, expand the lore, and refresh the experience for seasoned players. They realize that they cannot be complacent if they want to remain relevant. In the last expansion, they completely broke the world of Azeroth. Areas that had become stale are totally new. Next, they are delivering a new race and a new class (a way of playing) in Mists of Pandaria. But they aren’t forcing the story in a stilted way. The panelists were not afraid to say they haven’t worked out every detail for certain characters and certain storylines.
Even the existing content provides new ways of experiencing the world are readily available. Create multiple characters and accomplish the same quests differently. They deliver periodic world events and holiday content to mix up the regularly scheduled questing.
They are also constantly looking at game play. As much as I cringe every time I have to reallocate my skill points when they reset a character class, I recognize that they are trying to create a balance where every player can play and make equal contributions. They adjust player-vs-player battlegrounds and increase challenges in existing dungeons. They have lowered the barrier to entry, introducing free play to level 20 and supporting faster advancement up to level 50, while maintaining the challenge and commensurate rewards for higher levels. This attracts and encourages new players to join an established culture while avoiding alienating experienced players, a difficult balancing act.
That’s just a broad overview of the insights that MMOs and WoW in particular offer for developing richer and more complex user experiences. I could write more, but that’s enough for this post and I need to go do the Hallow’s End holiday quests before the event ends next week.
Author Notes:
Access to the recording of the panel requires a virtual ticket, which is still available for purchase if you’re interested in watching the panel for yourself. You can view the recording through 20 November 2011.
BlizzCon, World of Warcraft, Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.