Check out Jesse Schell’s awesomely inspiring video on the future of ‘gaming’ delivered at the DICE conference.

Here are a couple of juicy points:

* There are more Facebook Farmville players than there are Twitter accounts (that is 80 million players on Farmville, vs 75 million on Twitter, vs the population of the UK which is 61.4 million)

* Social, casual games play with new business models that engage the player by giving away free well-designed games, then monetizing with a virtual currency that needs to be bought with real money or traded for by signing up for products like credit cards.

* He notes a shift from the desire in people to escape through fantasy games to the desire for ‘authentic’ games, both in terms of authentic content (the authentic rockstar experience of Guitar Hero) and authentic rewards (bonding with friends via Mafia Wars).

* And he spends the last 10 mins with a great overview of how ‘gaming behaviours’ are being designed into services to motivate people into participating (i.e. points system on ebay, collecting facebook friends)

Inspiringly Awesome

Facebook status is a great tool for holding a conversation when you’re doing some lightning-fast user research. What other ready-made tools do you use to source insights from your crowd?

User research on Facebook

User research in a pinch

We’ve begun a series of mini design exhibits curated by the multidisciplinary designers at IDEO London. The first 3 in the series represents interaction, communications and industrial design disciplines. I hope in the coming months we’ll be able to showcase the broad range of thinking and approaches toward design that make our teams unique.

Here are the first 3 exhibits…

Jessie Cutts
Communications Designer

The test of time
Some things just don’t need to be redesigned, have technology or extra features added. Everyday objects that help us in our everyday lives, just as they are. These are objects that work as well today as when they were first designed and made.

How might we create products that stand the test of time?
How might we design products that are stripped down to the very basics?

Pontus Wahlgren
Industrial Designer

It’s as big as…
We often use objects as references when we want to describe the size or volume of things. Certain objects have since become archetypes of size and volume. We speak about credit-card sized objects when we describe something very thin and small. Or pocket-sized when we want to describe something which is of a certain size – this has in turn reflected back on the object now called pocket book. The 15th century Venetian printer Aldus Manitus, embraced a new technology (printing press) and measured the saddle bags of merchants then created books which would fit into them. This simple observation allowed knowledge to spread throughout Europe.

How might we introduce new reference objects reflecting today’s world?
How might we design something new which already seems familiar?

Haiyan Zhang
Interaction Designer

Things we lost in the fire
As we move toward increasingly digital tools and artifacts, let’s not forget the affordances and beauty of the analogue experience. As our photos and memories have become intangible digital bits, we are slowly losing the traditions associated with our analogue memories. The family photo albums gather dust while photos and videos are spread across digital cameras, computers, mobile phones, in emails. We find our memories everywhere and nowhere, and the tradition of enjoying these memories together has become one of peering into a computer screen.

How might we give digital memories a tangible presence in our lives?
How might we support the occasion of digital memory sharing?
How might we introduce the character and dreaminess of film to digital photography?

IDEO London’s mini design exhibit

NPR has a great podcast on what credit card companies are doing to try and predict whether you’ll be a bad credit risk. Credit card companies are basically taking your purchase history and data mining it (in a similar way to Netflix), to profile you. One study cited is Canadian Tire (a Canadian retailer, kind of like Home Depot), who took all the purchase information from their credit cards and ran an analysis on it to find correlations between purchase and credit risk.

The results show two extremes. People who purchased the product premium wild bird seed are most likely to pay their bills on-time. While people who buy chrome-skulled accessories for their car are the worst credit risk, defaulting on their bills 4 times in a year on average.

Whereas before the recession, this information may have been used to market more credit cards to you, nowadays credit card companies are scrambling to get their money back from all those chrome-skull afficionados.

Since the 1980s, credit cards have been making the bulk of their money from bad money management having realized that “the biggest profits didn’t come from people who always paid off their bills but rather from less-responsible clients who never paid their entire balance, and thus could be milked through silently skyrocketing interest rates, late fees and other penalties.”

It turns out, after the recession hit, people couldn’t even afford to pay those interim late fees anymore.

This leaves credit card companies fire-fighting to recover all that debt, and one approach that’s working is to establish an emotional connection with customers. Call center staff are becoming agony aunts to debtors, offering words of comfort and advice, trying to solve problems rather than just demand their money back.

“Today the goal is for customers to get a warm-and-fuzzy feeling from their credit-card company,” said Carl Pascarella, a former chief executive of Visa USA. “If we have a deep relationship with you over a range of products and experiences, if we trust each other, you’ll listen when we give you advice.”

Hopefully beyond the recession, card companies will adopt this design approach as a way to prevent untenable debt, rather than just dealing with its consequences.

For example, how might my credit card company offer tools to help me manage debt, or become a partner in my finances rather than a pain point?

Read Charles Duhigg’s New York Times article for more details

Credit card companies get emotional

After reading this New York Times article on the Netflix Prize , I thought it might be cool to register and play with some movie data.

Netflix is offering a chunk of their movie rating database (2 GB worth) for download, it contains ratings for 17,770 movies and TV shows from about 300,000 customers. With it, contestants in the Netflix competition have to write an algorithm that can predict how customers will rate movies they haven’t seen before, thus enabling Netflix to better recommend movies. This algorithm has to do 10% better than Netflix’ existing recommendation engine. And the prize is a million dollars.

And people are close. Really close. If you check out the leaderboard , the top team PragmaticTheory is at 9.65%!

So given that my hard drive only has 2.5 GB free (after the data download from Netflix), it was pretty obvious I didn’t have the processing nor storage power to handle all the data at once. I decided to start with a very very small subset (like 11 movies) and get a little taster for what it would take:

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Rushmore, Miss Congeniality, Pretty Woman, Forrest Gump, Twister, The Patriot, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Con Air, The Green Mile

The process was to take each person on file, look at how they had rated all these movies and try to classify them into a group. Completely unexpectedly, the program created a very simple model that revolved around… Forrest Gump.

Forrest Gump turns out to be a strong predictor of whether people will like other movies (ie. people who love Forrest Gump also love the Green Mile, and surprisingly also really like The Patriot). But it doesn’t work in reverse, other movies are not as good a predictor of whether someone will like Forrest Gump. I wonder if there are a handful of movies which act as strong predictors, from which preferences for other movies can be surmised. Forrest Gump is effectively at the top of a giant movie decision tree, the thickest of trunks leading to more subtle differences in movie tastes.

A good analogy is the 20 questions game. Where the power of a decision tree can narrow down to an exact thing, through asking questions that would make the biggest differences first.

And decision trees are set to become a hot topic again with the creators of flickr soon to launch a new web service all about decision trees, called hunch.com. Only they’re using humans instead of computers to build’em. Hunch lists any decision you could make (including ‘What movies should I watch?’), building giant decision trees based on user contributed questions. Then (I’m guessing) it uses statistical analysis to figure out what questions sit at the root, the trunk, the branches.


Not all movies were created equal

At some point in recent years, the Internet got away from me. My gmail inbox filled to 7,866 unread messages, I let my google news reader bloat to 1000+ unread blog posts, and a dozen lifelong friends have poked my lifeless corpse on facebook to no avail. It’s tough sailing out there in the ocean of all human knowledge – and there seems to be no letting up on the amount of stuff I have to keep up with.

I retreated to a few key sources of information, which has surprisingly kept me well-informed if in an often serendipitous nature:

1 – Work conversations. Or rather adhoc conversations in the kitchen with a few key people I have identified who seem to be very passionate about the subjects I’m interested in (gaming, technology, nerdy stuff) and presumably do the laborious task of trawling the blogs daily and then distill those juicy nuggets of information for me. If I’m lucky, these conversations are followed-up with email links to the actual article or youtube video.

2 – Magazines. Printed. I have not ever come across an online resource that is as informative, wide-ranging, and able to be completely consumed in a short amount of time as an issue of the New Yorker or Wired magazine. No, not even the New Yorker online. Possibly a podcast of This American Life, and possibly because that doesn’t have hyperlinks to distract you endlessly.

3 – Delicious. I opened a delicious account because I wanted to save and publish my links. Then people I knew started to subscribe to me on delicious, and before long I realized that my delicious network was a really good Internet filter. My online friends were sorting through the information out there and filtering out the good stuff to save. Not only that, some people I didn’t know subscribed to my links, and they turned out to be even better filters! (http://delicious.com/network/haiyan)

In the ever-growing expanse of information we’re going to need filters – and the best filters are still people. Tools like delicious are helping to tap into the power of the collective to create new filtering tools.

So what (and who) are the filters that you use?

Will you be my filter?