Sunday, 8:30am, Grand Salon A
Games have a central goal in their design: to keep people playing. A successful game is measured by the time and investment that people put into gameplay. The longer users play, the better the game is. This is the ethos of play and the metric through which games are judged. Games use a variety of interactive and immersive techniques to create a play space, techniques that are useful to designers of more work-oriented or transaction-based interactions. However, these other interactive spaces are not expressively created for the purpose of extending the time spent on the interaction. In fact, they have the exact opposite goal: to reduce the time users spend on the task or interaction. How, then, given this contradiction in goals, do we borrow from the field of game design for the design of other types of interactions with the intent of improving the overall user experience?
In an effort to answer this question, we examine the redesign of a money movement tool at a large investment firm and analyze how the design team used games, particularly children’s games, to help solve design problems. The design goal was to provide a user experience that mitigated the complexity of opening an investment account by streamlining the task flow and eliminating tedious information gathering. Given that the task domain includes a number of account types and the complexity of investing, the design team aimed to orient users to their overall goal without the interference of redundant or unnecessary tasks and to provide a sense of working toward a final state of closure. In order to do this, they needed to place users immediately into the activity context and to provide a design that was intuitive and actionable from the onset. Thus, the goal was to reduce the time and number of steps to perform the task while providing an environment that was comfortable and inviting. The design team found that some techniques from games helped accomplish these goals, particularly the use of animation and movement to provide focus, the use of graphics to tell the interactive story, and the use of a single-interactive page to build context.
This presentation demonstrates how the design team incorporated game design techniques into this redesign project. We examine the strengths of this approach as well as the limitations. In providing an in-depth, grounded example of the use of game design techniques within the design of a transactional interface, we hope to provide attendees with a framework of how to assess and incorporate design techniques from other fields into their own work. We talk about how the formation and use of clear design goals guide this process of incorporation. We argue that clearly articulated design goals can provide a touchpoint that allows designers to keep the focus on the user experience throughout multiple iterations and not get caught up in the newness or fun of techniques when incorporating different design discourses.
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INSTRUCTOR
Dominic La Cava
Dominic La Cava is a Senior Information Architect at the Vanguard Group, working to improve the company’s Retail website. His work includes improving prospect investors’ experience on the Vanguard website and accommodating cost basis tax reporting to investors. (It’s sexier than it sounds.) Dom is also an adjunct professor at Drexel’s Ischool, teaching courses in Human Computer Interaction and in Information Organization, Retrieval, and Use. Dom has published on scenario-based design and has reviewed and critiqued various institutions’ websites. He is widely involved in many user interface communities, especially PhillyCHI.
Kellie Rae Carter (PhD) is a User Experience Researcher at Comcast Interactive Media working on improving the user experience on cross-platform and interactive media sites. Previous publications and presentations have focused on cultural usability and social computing, particularly in the role played by different technological spaces in the formation of online communities.