Ribbon Hero turns learning Microsoft Office into a game

Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game:

This post has two goals. One, I want to share with you something amazing; a thing that according to most views of the tech universe should not exist. Two, I want to talk about a coming revolution in application design.

The amazing thing

Imagine Microsoft Office turned into a video game. One where learning a productivity app is a delight. One where the core loop of gameplay involves using and gaining skills in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

It sounds a bit unlikely doesn’t it?

Well, I’m happy to announce the availability of Ribbon Hero, a new download from Microsoft that turns using Office into a game.

The coming revolution

Ribbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. I made the following bet:

• If an activity can be learned…
• If the player’s performance can be measured…
• If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
• Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.

Not only can you make a game out of the activity, but you can turn tasks traditionally seen as a rote or frustrating into compelling experiences that users find delightful.

Danc goes on to make a supremely interesting case for merging User Interface / User Experience design (UI/UX) with game design. That is, using the principles of game design to improve, mature, and evolve UI/UX. His whole post is very much worth reading. I’ll summarize here:

The field of UI/UX tends to orient itself towards the “don’t make me think” approach — human computer interfaces must be simple and present all there is to be absorbed at first blush. In contrast, Dan recognizes that people are natural explorers and learners and enjoy doing these things. Further, he argues that slavishly following the “simple” user interface design model fundamentally limits the power of a full-featured piece of software and undermines users’ abilities. He advocates the principles of game design and gameplay to engage users in actively exploring and learning the advanced features of a piece of software. Early stages of a video game tend to prepare players for the later stages. Why can’t even office software do the same? Dan essentially states that the UI/UX design approach currently in vogue lacks depth — limiting applications’ power and treating users like invalids:

Of course, people stumble when they use an application for the first time. They don’t understand the interface because it is new to them. And users will stay at that inexperienced level if we do not make an attempt to teach them how to improve. We’ve diagnosed a burbling baby as a hopeless invalid, blind to the fact that babies grow, learn and flourish.

What a fantastic idea. Go ahead. Create complex, powerful software but design it such that it’s fun to learn as it reveals ever more advanced features in stages. Dump the manual. Have fun. Learn your software by playing a game and get some serious work done.

BBC: “Tetris, trauma and the brain”

Tetris, trauma and the brain:

In a remarkable experiment involving footage taken at the scenes of car crashes and clips of old public information films, Dr. Holmes is using the computer game Tetris to disrupt the processes in the brain involved in laying down painful memories, dramatically reducing the impact of recalled trauma.

The results showed that the volunteers who played Tetris experienced about half as many flashbacks as the control group, and that those memories were less vivid or disturbing.

The point about Tetris, Dr. Holmes concludes, is that it employs many of the same areas of the brain — to do with visual processing and coordinating thoughts and actions — that are involved in laying down memories.

“Memory is a very important component of our person-hood, our self-hood. We are what we are because of all the experiences we’ve had.”

What most stood out to me in this article was actually not the therapeutic aspect of play — though this is certainly exciting stuff. Rather, I was most intrigued by Dr. Holmes’ conclusion that the studied game play employed many of the same areas of the brain as are involved in forming memories.

I’m working on a future post that proposes a relational and collaborative focus for developing innovative and successful play technologies. My thought is that such an approach will yield far richer user experiences than can mere amusement. Taking into account the mechanics of memory formation could prove to be a key element of the concept.

(via Stuart Brown, M.D.)

Twitter was dreamed up at a playground

I simply had to specially highlight this quote from Fred Wilson’s talk apart from my previous post.

Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps:

… This slide is in South Park in San Francisco. There is a little area at the top of the slide where you can hang out. This is where Twitter was invented. A bunch of employees of a company called Odeo took some time off in the middle of a nice, spring day, and went to think about new projects they could build. One group was 4 or 5 people that sat at the top of this slide and basically conceived of Twitter.

Do I really need to say it? Play around at work and good things can happen.

Social Media (capital ‘S’, capital ‘M’) is a big deal right now. I find it delightful that Twitter, this behemoth of an Internet and cultural phenomenon that is so vitally important to the future history of everything (note the sarcasm), got its start at a playground.

10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps: #10 Playful

Fred Wilson is a successful venture capitalist. His investment firms have stakes in such technology companies as Twitter, Etsy, Boxee, Meetup, Foursquare, and Tumblr. In February 2010 he spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps conference.

Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps:

10. Playful

Last but not least, is playful…

… the ability to play in an application is really important. The game dynamic is what you can use to get users to do what you want. An example I like to use here is something that’s not even a web app [Weight Watchers does, in fact, offer a web app version of its service]. If you think about Weight Watchers, it’s a game. It has some really important game dynamics. You establish goals, measure yourself against those goals, and you report against those goals, and you get rewarded for meeting those goals. That game dynamic is the thing that ultimately makes Weight Watchers successful for some people.

That kind of approach should be, in some way, shape, or form, in every application. If you look at LinkedIn, when it first launched, I had friends who were manically trying to accumulate relationships in LinkedIn. You saw that with people trying to accumulate followers in Twitter, friends in Facebook, and that’s one kind of game dynamic. There are clearly other kinds of game dynamics out there.

Foursquare would be an example of taking very much game elements like status, badges, and things like that, and using that as a way to empower the development of what is, effectively, a local information service. You don’t have to be as blatant about it as Foursquare is, but I do think that applications need to be playful. It will make users have more fun using your application, and because you can incent the kind of behavior you want to create in your application.

Psychology Today: “The Art and Science of Play”

The Art and Science of Play: Creative play permeates the lifework of Desmond Morris:

Desmond Morris, now in his 80s, is a surrealist painter perhaps best known for his popular books on ethology, including The Naked Ape, Manwatching, and Animalwatching. In his early career, Morris was also an Oxford trained scientist… Over the many decades of work, what tied all these activities together, for Morris, was play.

For most species play primarily occurs early in life. But humans go cats (and indeed, all other playful animals) one better. In our species the evolutionary development of neoteny, which involves the retention of juvenile physical characteristics in mature individuals, has also prolonged the play impulse well into adulthood. This means that exploratory behaviors, driven by curiosity for the novel and pursuit of the effective, do not disappear with childhood or youth but persist, especially in the play-like endeavors of art and science. “[A]dult play,” Morris has said, “is what gives us all our greatest achievements — art, literature, poetry, theatre, music and scientific research.”

The play of art and the play of science meshed his [Morris’] different interests into one complementary whole. Ever the observer, Morris draws certain conclusions from this experience: “[T]here must always be time set aside for playful innovations, for subjective explorations; in short, for the poetic and the mysterious alongside the objective and rational,” he has written. The choice is not between work and play, but to suffuse work with play. The choice is not to separate people into artists or scientists, but to “encourage them to be both at once.” For “in reality,’ Morris believes, “people…are explorers or non-explorers, and the context of their explorations is of secondary importance.”

This post on Psychology Today is gold as far as I’m concerned. It speaks to two play-related topics that are discussed far too little (both primary interests of mine): adults at play & play in the workplace.

My belief is simply that play is deeply connected to the human experience. Current cultural norms tend to squeeze out play wherever it’s found, especially in adults (and now even in children, over-scheduled with extracurricular activities and over-schooled). Still, though, in adults the draw to play breaks through — video games and theme parks are proof of that.

Technologies are both manifestations of our world views and shapers of those world views. This is why I hold such hope for playful technologies and playful design. I think that well-designed, incredibly fun play technologies can be irresistible — drawing in all ages, becoming an integral part of daily life, and shaping our cultures to accept play as deeply human and not mere triviality.

(via Stuart Brown, M.D.)