Category Archives: Interaction Design

Lessons from designing role-playing game adventures

Design Theory, Games, Inspiration, Interaction Design, Quotes

I was reading James Maliszewski's interview of Paul Jacquays*, and came across this bit:

10. Are there any lessons you've
learned from working in the computer game field that you think ought to
be applied to tabletop RPG design?

Provide more than one
solution to encounters, if only to be willing to accept the other
solutions that your players devise.

Take into consideration your
players' (not their characters') skills and ability to understand 3D
space when creating or choosing adventures. Don't throw new players into
complex 3D settings. Mapping and understanding one's position inside
3D space can be challenging even for skilled players. Start "flat" and
work them up to spaces with more complicated vertical relationships.

Create
spaces that could work in the real world. Walls have thickness. Large
open interior spaces have to be supported by columns to be believable.
As a fantasy illustrator, I learned to engage the viewer's suspension of
disbelief by creating realistic, believable environments which would in
turn lend their reality and believability to the fantasy elements found
within. Designers need to do the same thing … engage the players'
suspension of disbelief just long enough to convince them that game
situations are grounded in things that could happen.

Give your
players "save spots" in your gaming sessions, natural breaks in the
adventure where they can pull back, regroup, return to base, etc.

Finally,
don't overwork the game's backstory. Less can be more, so write as
little as you can to convey it. I emphasize this to the content
designers on my own project teams. Your players will appreciate that you
are creating plot and character links, but could probably care less
about detailed ancestries, hidden motivations, or involved descriptions
of locations and events that they will never encounter. They just want
to hit things and move on. Don't make success in your game depend on
reading multiple paragraphs of stilted description or dialogue.

I don't think it's too crazy a stretch to apply these lessons to design outside of a game context altogether.

*James Maliszewski is a somewhat-old-school RPG designer and author of the old-school gaming blog Grognardia. Paul Jacquays is a really-old-school game designer.

Identity Providers and 3rd -Party Authentication, Some Data

Identity, Interaction Design, Product Design

Inspired by Luke Wroblewski's Data Monday blog posts, I rounded up some numbers on identity and authentication on the web.

I'm particularly interested in the growth of third-party authentication, OAuth, OpenID, and Facebook Connect.

Here are some numbers from Gigya (a "social optimization" service), from May 2010:

  • Facebook is by far the most frequently used identity provider, with 46% of logins across the web, compared to 17% from Google, 14% from Twitter, 12% from Yahoo, 7% from MySpace, 2% from LinkedIn, and 1% from AOL.
  • Twitter does far better when looking at commenting on or sharing news stories, with 45% of the total compared to Facebook's 25% and Google's 16%.

Data from JanRain's RPX service, published in April 2010, shows a slightly different picture:

  • Google was picked for 39% of logins, compared to Facebook at 23%, Yahoo at 12%, Twitter at 6%, Windows Live at 3%, and all others totalling 15%.
  • JanRain had slightly different numbers for some verticals, with Facebook logins making up 45% of both logins at media company sites and on technology platforms.
  • When measuring publishing activites back to social networks using a sample set of sites, users shared to Facebook 54% of the time, Twitter 38& of the time, Yahoo 9%, and MySpace 8%.

Leah Culver measured logins and signups on TypePad's platform in September 2009 and found the following:

  • 73% were using Typepad accounts, but 27% were using another identity provider. The largest percentage were from Facebook (13%), followed by Google (5%), Twitter (4%), and Yahoo (2%).
  • When looking at signups (rather than logins), however, Typepad saw growth of 775% in non-Typepad identity providers from June to September. This growth is linked to redesigns that promoted use of alternative identity providers.

Facebook's own data contains a few tidbits about Facebook Connect:

  • A case study with SimplyHired showed that "users who log in with Facebook are twice as engaged as non-Facebook
    users."
  • They also state that "More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
    every month."

Sources:

“The age of surplus pixels”

Design Theory, Inspiration, Interaction Design, Quotes

I keep coming back to this short post by Russell Davies. (No, not that Russell Davies.)

By way of reexamining Being Digital and Pointcast, he says:

But we're about to enter an age of surplus pixels – screens sitting
there, resting, not showing much, perhaps the odd slide show, screens
that aren't the thing we're doing. In public spaces, in offices, in our
homes. iPads and iPad-killers are going to be sitting around our living
rooms, next to our desks, next our beds. And we'll soon want more on
there than our picture libraries Ken Burnsing slowly away to themselves.
But we're going to want less than most designers are inclined to
design. We'll need a restful, slow, quiet sort of
information/entertainment design. Stuff that's happy not to be looked at
that much. That'll be interesting.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and triggers a bunch of reactions, not all well thought-out.

  • I really, really like the idea of "restful, slow, quiet" design. I'd like to see more of it in the digital realm. I love garish and loud as much as the next person, but the eyeballs, they get tired.
  • What are the print equivalents of restful/slow/quiet design? What are the architectural equivalents? Is this a call for the digital equivalents of the arts and crafts movement?
  • (Is that why we're seeing so many fake wood-grain apps on iDevices? I'm not sure William Morris would approve: plopping wood imagery on silicon/glass/aluminum devices is hardly "truth to material".)
  • Dragging this post back to the subject at hand, my fear is that instead of restful/slow/quiet, we'll get twitchy/fast/loud, particularly in the form of ads/ads/ads. We've already got extra screens at the grocery store (ADS!) and the gas station (ADS!) and there's talk of adding some to license plates (ADS!).
  • The opposite of an arts and crafts approach to all the surplus pixels, then, is a cyberpunk-style dystopia where behaviorally-targeted ads follow you from screen to screen down the street jabbering at you incessantly until you go postal. So that wouldn't be good.
  • Which in turn brings to mind projects like this LCD TV zapper kit as one possible response.
  • A pretty safe prediction (based on our culture's track record so far) is that which types of screens you see will split on class lines. In the same ways it does already, money will buy peaceful and tranquil spaces for those that have the money, and the twitchy/fast/loud will dominate mass culture.

Quora: How third-party auth can go horribly wrong

Identity, Interaction Design

A while back, I requested an invitation to Quora, a newfangled question-and-answer service. Yesterday, I got my invitation email, and clicked on the link.

I vaguely knew that Quora was doing vaguely social things, so I wasn’t surprised to see the account creation flow lead up with a Facebook Connect prompt (with Twitter as an option). Here’s that page:

Quora_1

I clicked on the more link, and read some nice words about what Quora will and won’t do with their new powers over my accounts. I’m not sure a teeny-tiny more link really cuts it, but it’s something.

So, let’s connect with Facebook! So far, so normal, I’ve you’ve seen one of these before.

Quora_3
Next, I finish up the Quora side of account creation. Quora displays a Facebook-derived picture of me (plus my full name). The latter is clearly editable, the former — unclear? Anyway, this screen confirms what I suspected but wasn’t really clear on, which is that Quora has it’s own account for me which is linked to my Facebook account, rather than solely using my Facebook account. This could confuse folks: that Facebook logo in my picture is awfully close to the “New password” field, possibly leading to a misimpression that I’m changing my Facebook password. Let’s forge on.

Quora_5

I have no idea what this means, and the alert dialog is disconcerting. I sense trouble, but click OK and try again.

Quora_6

Oh my. Twitter too? Of course, since OAuth 1.0 works differently from Facebook Connect, I’m seeing a Twitter page rather than a wee pop-up dialog. But that’s “normal” these days. Why is this coming up, though, as I selected account creation with Facebook Connect? I did play with the toggle a bit, so it could be a bug, but it’s also possible Quora just wants both connections and is being heavy-handed about it.

What the heck. Let’s OK it, and forge on.

Quora_7

This stays up for a while. That’s probably not good. Eventually I click the “click here” link, with a distinct doom-ey feeling.

Quora_8

Yep, blank page showing code. Always good. Hey, I wonder if something is going on in another tab?

Quora_9

Well, that’s a little better. It’s an actual web page, with the logo of the site I dimly remember trying to create an account with. (Normal people would have given up long ago, of course. Designers, we take screencaps of the carnage. It’s an unsavory habit, like ambulance chasing.)

At this point I start doing the usual flail-ey reloading of this and that tab and etc. I get one of these:

Quora_10And, after more clicky flailing, I eventually I get a proper page which seems to indicate that I have created an account. Hooray!

Quora_11

Now, why is this interesting? It’s not that a startup might have some goofy bugs. That’s normal, and presumably Quora will fix them. (It’s also entirely possible that my setup was doing me some damage, as it’s often in the weird states that come with doing web work.)

Two things are interesting. First, that was twelve or so screens from invitation to a page I could do stuff on. Even removing about half of them as optional or caused by bugs or whatever, that’s a hugely long account creation flow. And so drop-off must be huge, why, I bet if Quora measured it …

Ah. But they can’t! At least, not completely or easily. And that’s the second thing. Because the flow is not entirely under their control. In fact, I just spent a good amount of time on other sites domains, with their branding and UI. Also, complexity. There were so many access tokens whizzing back and forth in the ether during this process it was like a snowball fight.

It’s hard enough designing and developing an account creation flow that you have complete control over. But when you hand over critical bits of it to third parties, you lose control, and you increase complexity. When you increase complexity and reduce control, you make it more likely something will go horribly wrong and simultaneously harder to diagnose and fix the thing that went horribly wrong.

There are lots and lots and lots of benefits to linking third parties to your application. But there’s a cost as well.

(Also, in case it’s not clear, this post isn’t meant to beat up on the fine folks over at Quora. I’m trying to make a general point, and they just had a blip at an opportune time.)

A Pragmatic Designer’s Guide to Identity on the Web

Identity, Interaction Design

Quora:

I'm still not sure if I'm claiming to be a pragmatic designer with this title, or merely to be offering a guide for other people who might consider themselves pragmatic designers.

In any case, the title was largely a way to narrow what is potentially a huge topic—identity on the web—to something I could reasonably talk about in an hour. Really, it should have been called something like: "An idealistic designer trying very hard to be pragmatic about one subject and partially succeeding. The subject is the user experience of identifiers and authentication, and this is a partial picture at best, but it's possible that the audience will end up a little more educated after the presentation than they were at the beginning." But that's not very succinct.

I gave this talk in May at WebVisions 2010 in Portland. WebVisions is fabulous. I don't think I'm done with this topic—I assigned it to myself because I thought I had some learning to do, and learned, but there's more I'd like to learn. Plus, stuff keeps changing.

Missing from the SlideShare presentation are the breathless ranting and manic handwaving that are characteristic of my presentation style.

Pragmatic Designer's Guide to Identity on the Web

Facebooked

Interaction Design

Fbkd_1Sometimes the difference between thinking about design and having design happen to you hits you in the face. This happened to me yesterday — I’ve followed the launch of Facebook’s Beacon program and ensuing controversy, and had seen screenshots of the feature, but had never seen it in the wild. Yesterday I was printing out tickets from Fandango for Sweeney Todd (quick review: well done but not for the squeamish and/or those recovering from the flu) and this little creature popped out at me (with a nice transition animation). Suddenly the theoretical was real, and frankly a little jarring.

My immediate reactions:

  • I noticed this, in a way that I would never see much similarly positioned pop-up ad crap. This is probably a combination of the smoothness of the animation and the clean design — I’m not sure if I immediately clocked that the message was from Facebook, but the design definitely cued "Not an ad."
  • I knew what it was. Unclear if I would have without being pre-informed, but it is pretty clearly messaged.
  • It was shocking in a way I didn’t expect — it’s one thing to intellectually grapple with the implications of a thing and another to actually be shocked by it. Apparently on some gut level I didn’t expect my personal habits to be (potentially) publicized in this context, even while I’m in the industry and know at a different level that it’s possible.

Fbkd_2At this point I was dragged out of the house by my wife, who wanted to make sure we didn’t let the process of design inquiry make us miss the movie. Afterwards, we talked it over and I thought a little more about my reactions, and also checked out the Facebook side of the interaction.

My slightly more considered reactions:

  • What is happening is pretty clearly messaged but what to do about it is not — it feels like they’re got disclosure down reasonably well, but the copy sets a pretty aggressive "this is hapening but you can make it stop if you must" tone that I’m not comfortable with, and which ends up being confusing (e.g. the uncheck-the-box-and-hit-OK opt-out interaction, which is a classic way to muddle folks up). I’m not sure whether this is intentional aggression or cluelessness.
  • Movies are actually a pretty good area for a feature like this — letting other folks know what movie I’m going to fits in well with the continuous partial attention-feeding nature of Facebook, Twitter, and etc., and they have a lot fewer downsides than other areas Beacon covers (movie-going is pretty low-risk from a privacy standpoint, and is less likely to ruin a surprise gift than broadcasting product purchases). If it had been, say, a book purchase, my negative reaction might have been even stronger.

So, not that last word on Beacon, or even my last word, just an interesting (to me) experience.