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Constraints

Thursday, November 1, 2007

This post over at juice analytics is rather descriptive of my latest project, one which I hope I can launch in January or February. The gist is that constraints really help you focus your thinking, unleash your creativity, and generally make better stuff. I’ve ascribed to this process a lot in my creative work, and with my latest project I’ve taken a more extreme stance by forcing myself to think around many basic things we take for granted.

Constraints are a workout. They require us to use more energy, something we are biologically averse to. We are ‘cognitive misers’, to borrow a term from psychology, as a full 20% of our energy expenditure is devoted to our brain. Constraints are also one of these paradoxes of the human condition – we strive to succeed to remove the constraints in our lives, yet without constraint we have partially undermined our drive to set goals in the first place. In comparisons between stress and performance, psychologists have found that a moderate amount of stress is actually where we achieve optimal performance – not without stress, or overloaded with it. It’s this hunger and uneasiness that moves us forward.

If we were to apply constraints to the world of video games, we’d see a similar pattern. Sony – a company riding off of the massive success of the Playstation 2 – had the least constraints when developing the Playstation 3. The needs of developers, the cost of the system, the desires of gamers for things like online support, and whether the system would be a success were all non-issues to Sony corporate. On the other hand, Microsoft could not afford to dismiss these issues, and consequently made a better product. Nintendo went even further, with a lower price point, less computing power, and most importantly, the least idea of what games would eventually look like on its very unique DS and Wii. The same constraints apply in the casual games market on the web, where the constraint of Adobe Flash has driven some great innovation, while traditional PC games with access to an increasing amount of power languish in the same old gameplay.

Assuming you can stay true to the course of solving your customer’s needs, the constraints theory can break down if you truly do have too few options to explore. Most constraints we would consider extreme still afford a huge amount of possibility, but if it breaks down to a few choices, your creative landscape is compromised. This may be analogous to the over-stressed condition described above.

Constraints are fascinating, and definitely worthy of closer consideration. Stay tuned, I’ll probably do that soon.

Filed in Games, psychology | Comments (0)

I Want What Amazon Can’t Give Me

Monday, October 22, 2007

The other day Jurassic Park caught my eye as I was flipping through some TV stations (yes, I watch, only sometimes though). Being a child of the information age, I’m both easily distracted and a big fan of factual data and the interesting connections between that data. At this time, my internal monologue was something like: ‘oh yeah, I read Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and probably half of at least two other Crichton books. I want to see what he’s up to these days.’

The first association I have in my mind whenever I consider books or literature is Amazon. They’ve done a great job of occupying that associative gold mine in my mind, and I can only assume this extends to many many other people. One day I look forward to exploring more about first associations and their importance in business, but for now let’s get back on track.

I quickly went to my computer and searched Crichton’s name on Amazon. I even put his full name in, not just his last name. As I hadn’t used Amazon in a while, my mind was fairly fresh and free from expectations shaped by prior experience.

What I get is a list of products from 1 to 16, showing ‘top results’. First reaction: disappointment. What I wanted was a pulse check, a sense of what is happening in the world of Michael Crichton. Instead, I get a shopping list, and one that isn’t even organized in a meaningful fashion (e.g. not by recency, by sales numbers, by rating, etc). How the world’s largest bookseller can get this wrong is beyond me. The questions I wanted to have answered were:

  • What books has he written (so I can see if I want to order some)
  • What has been the history of the author (what themes does he write about, how have they changed, etc)
  • What is the author thinking about now, and doing next

For the first question, I would have liked a list of books by date, and links to their respective editions. For the second question, I would have liked a professional- or user-submitted review about the author, a general overview that is up to date. For the third question, I would have liked either a user- or author-submitted description of what’s going on now, perhaps with links to relevant resources and articles (e.g. if an interview was in NYT recently).

Other things on this page I would have loved would be users discussing the author’s work, friends interested in his work, and similarity links for writing style, subject matter, etc.

Some of these are available on Amazon. They’ve done a lot of work on their UI and shopping experience to provide these tools. But they’re still relying on a single method of displaying results, instead of a portal / vertical search method that recognizes and structures data, such as ‘Michael Crichton is an author, therefore show author page’.

Continuing my experience, as I had heard about Amazon allowing authors to have blogs a while back, I hoped I could find one for him. I clicked around on his name within a book and in a few other places, but I couldn’t come up with one. I even searched a few times on Google. Next reaction: annoyance. I hear about something – Amazon’s author blogs – and I can’t find any mention of it, other than a few posts within Amazon’s daily blog. No ‘this author does not have a blog’, instead no trace whatsoever. Maybe I’m crazy and this feature never existed.

I mentioned I came in with a fresh mind, but I did come with some expectations – namely, the experiences of other sites, such as Wikipedia and IMDB, which provide cross-linked, factual resources for different media. These sites are just a better way to provide information. They both make sense and are very logically structured. The question that I brought with me, ‘what is happening’, is an incredibly common question that people have about authors. Although I wouldn’t argue that ‘I heard about this book’ is the most asked question, I would argue that the ‘what is happening’ question is the second most asked question. Yet 12 years after launching, Amazon still cannot answer that question.

I think that the vast majority of users out there that use Amazon, aside from those that simply want one book and to be done, are what I would call an aspirational casual reader. That is, they aspire to know more and be more literary, but they haven’t the time to be expert hobbyists. Why do I assume this? Because most users across almost all product types are exactly like this – they want easy ways to raise their commitment and interest levels. We are inherently curious, and if we can get data points that build off of where we are ever so slightly, we can get more engaged in things. Products that are well designed understand where people are and give them easy ways to do this.

In the end, it was my job to put together a composite experience between what information was on Wikipedia and IMDB, and what was for sale on Amazon. This composite was both disjointed and time-consuming, and the spark of interest that I had in reading a particular book was lost due to time waste and a feeling that Amazon isn’t meeting my needs as a consumer.

Filed in product design, psychology | Comments (0)

Wii, Joy, Counter-Hype

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Just mere months after a brutal counter-hype cycle of Second Life bore its ugly head, I’m predicting we’re going to have some of the same counter-hype coming to the Wii. But first, allow me to take a slight (large?) tangent and take a step back from the (legitimate or otherwise) complaints about either product to talk about hype.

There exists a perpetual flaw in the media world that any darling like SL or the Wii is bound to not live up to the breathless expectations of journalists. Although I doubt this is an entirely deliberate phenomenon, journalists get a great deal of benefit from the waxing and waning of hype that in aggregate they largely create - cycles of over-hyping followed by over-griping, and then sometimes followed by consolidation and acceptance.

If we were to turn the tools of emotional manipulation we wield with alacrity in game development to this phenomena, we’d find journalism and news have actually become quite good at what we do. First, the hype creates anticipation and excitedness, and translates it into feeling emotions now that are emotions that will come in the future. For instance, just reading about the Wii makes you *feel* the simple joy of playing games, and the social reward of playing with friends, even though you are actually doing neither. Next, the counter-hype plays of your emotions of judgment and naysaying, and branches off into either a sort of “i told you so” even though you probably said nothing, or - if you really bought into the hype - a disappointment that paradoxically drives you to further seek the emotional up and down the news provides. Finally, sometimes the hype ends with consolidation, where you feel closure and a general sense of contentment, possibly with a slight feeling of hope for the future as the story ends on a good note.

With these emotions, the hype model is just plain good story writing.

So, back to the topic at hand: the usage patterns of the Wii are different from other game consoles, yet expectations are the same.

For instance, people aren’t playing the Wii. Or rather, 67% of people aren’t. This is according to publisher Famitsu, although many other Japanese developers are jumping on board to say things like the Wii is a fad. Others may point out that Wii software sales aren’t that great, not even breaking Top 10 sales, that sales figures mean nothing unless people play it, that none of the follow-on titles had the appeal of Wii Sports, etc.

Whatever. Part of opening a new market is discovering that it doesn’t work the same way the old one does. In the case of the Wii, this means that people aren’t buying new titles every 3 months, or counting down the days until the Big Game is released and then dropping a collective $200mm on it. They’re being… how shall we say… a bit more ‘casual’ about their usage. Game publishers, used to catering almost exclusively to a forgiving and predictable gamer customer base, are caught off guard. This doesn’t fit their model of reality. Why would someone buy a game console if they only played it once a month? Don’t they know games get old fast? Meanwhile, the non-gamer with the console under the TV goes about their daily life, barely using the damn thing, but - I posit - still deriving satisfaction from it. How?

For this new audience, usage doesn’t equal value. It’s not an iPod, though it’s small, glossy white, cute, and media-savvy. Nor is it a consumable, defined by it’s rate of replacement. Usage has little to do with it in fact.

Think of some outrageous clothes you have purchased, probably for halloween or a costume party. You wear them maybe twice a year. Yet they occupy a part of your mind and identity, at every thought providing you with an anticipation of positive emotions (just like hype) in the off chance you have the opportunity to show them off. In fact, you’re always on the lookout for those opportunities. Alternately, think about the home fitness market - if it was usage-driven, there’d be no market, nor late night television spots with Christy Brikley and an ageless Chuck Norris. Or perhaps a better analog is a social one - the dining room table. You probably only eat on it when guests are over, preferring a more practical spot to munch on your normal meals. But you know it’s there, in that off-chance you get folks over.

I think the Wii is really an item that exists nowhere near games, and instead in the same space as the above examples. It’s an identity item, something that has a property that you want to be associated with. It’s a novelty item, something you thought you’d use a lot more than you actually did. It’s a social tool, something that once you have you seek opportunities to use it, although rarely actually use. All of these touch on what it actually provides people. The Wii is about simple joys, shared with others - something that is actually not that easy to find in modern life, and something very difficult to distill into a product. And it’s the actual zig-zag, drunken stumble, half-rational path that people take in pursuit of these simple joys that is the market.

Filed in Games, business, culture, product design, psychology | Comments (0)

Poor User Experience: Microsoft Support

Monday, October 8, 2007

My Vista experience on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet been a rather large disappointment: wireless constantly needs to be re-configured, start times are atrocious, the interface is extremely unresponsive, bugs and crashing, etc. Today I got handed my latest disappointment today when I got back my thinkpad from servicing – I have to re-activate windows in 3 days or my computer will stop working, and Microsoft thinks my key is being used on another system. Wonderful. My user experience is as follows:

  1. Windows Activation interface - 4 options - tells me my key is invalid. I press the ‘Contact Microsoft to help resolve this problem’ option
  2. Windows Help and Support interface - 4 option categories (ask my friends, ask the windows community, search the knowledge base, or contact Microsoft) - chose contact Microsoft.
  3. Vista Solution Center website - 12 option categories, each with 10+ options. No forwarding of my particular issue (key in use by another system), just a generic screen with ‘top issues’.
  4. Vista Solution Center product activation section - 8 options - I am not receiving an error messages thus none pertaining to my problem.
  5. Vista Solution Center contacts section - 5 options - ‘Contact a support professional’ selected.
  6. Help and Support website - 10 options - presents the 10 Vista SKUs. No knowledge of my system requirements. Vista Business All-languages non-64 bit edition is selected
  7. Help and Support for Windows Vista Business website - 3 option categories (email, chat, phone). On quick glance, I see dollar figures associated with such services. Trade-off presented: once you contact support, you begin your allocated 90 days of support. Invalid option presented: my software must be activated to get support. I choose to call.
  8. Phone product support system - Many options, 3 choices, 2 times having to describe problem to separate techs who did not forward info, 10 minutes of waiting, 48 numbers recited to a customer support representative, and 48 numbers read back to me. Problem solved.

In total I had to consider at least 41 options and spend 25 minutes resolving this problem. What is additionally frustrating was that this was an anti-piracy measure, though given the levels of piracy out there I understand their position and need to put some protective measures in place. But this was just unreasonable, and punishing a customer for purchasing their product.

Filed in product design | Comments (0)

New Blog

Monday, October 8, 2007

Today I decided to relaunch my blog.

Filed in life | Comments (0)