Applying Engaging, Interactive Game Design Approaches to Everyday Applications
Amy Jo Kim · Wednesday, April 20 · 8:30am – 5:30pm
Deep dive into the approaches top game designers apply to engage users. Get to better designs faster, honing in on what makes users love your application.
Optimize the discovery and onboarding experience to hook first-time users. Encourage habit building and product mastery to increase long-term user engagement.
Amy Jo has explored, more than anyone else on the planet, what application designers can learn from how compelling games are designed.
The Day’s Agenda
Morning
Shift your mindset and think like a game designer with Customer Narratives
- Create a Customer Narrative for user discovery, onboarding, habit building, and mastery
- Optimize the discovery and onboarding experience to successfully pull in first-time users
- Encourage habit building and product mastery to increase long-term user engagement
Create a Social Action Matrix to describe common user motivational patterns
- Identify the social actions and key user activities that result in passionate and engaged users
- See the common “player types” and user actions to effectively target your product to the right audience
- Learn the 4 common usage patterns for a successful game: Explore, Create, Compete, and Collaborate
Afternoon
Use Job Stories and Habit Stories to add speed, agility, and focus to design efforts
- Understand user motivation and context with Job Stories describing your users’ point of view
- Deliver user value and uncover unmet needs and product opportunities with Habit Stories
- Entice users to return to your product with Core Loops—the activities and feedback that best motivates users
Outline your design strategy and assumptions with an MVP Design Canvas
- Rigorously plan and test your product ideas with the MVP Canvas
- Create clear, specific, and testable experiments to vet your product concepts
- Articulate your product, customer and market hypotheses and prioritize the assumptions to test
Take advantage of gaming techniques to engage and motivate users
Deliver rich product functionality without overwhelming your users
See how to ensure first-time users become immediately productive, while experienced users take advantage of all the power you’ve built them.
Accelerate your design process and save weeks of time when creating your product MVP
Use the Customer Narrative and Core Loop framework to quickly select and build just the right features for a compelling MVP.
Expand your portfolio of design tools to create best-in-class product experiences
Designers can become complacent and fall back on traditional design techniques, such as personas. With novel techniques such as Job Stories, Habit Stories, and the MVP Canvas, you will take your designs to the next level.
You’ll see how to:
- Help customers learn the ropes with an engaging on-boarding arc
- Drive customer re-engagement with the Core Loop and regular feedback
- Identify the biggest factors and habits that motivate users
- Write Job Stories instead of personas to save weeks of design time
- Prevent flawed design decisions by planning with an MVP Design Canvas
- Create an experiences that makes your users more proficient with your product
Learn the gamification tools to bring your products to life
Deep dive into the approaches top game designers use to delight users
Go way beyond simple gamification tricks, such as points, badges, and leaderboards, to effective engagement techniques that promote user growth.
Master tactics to achieve a sticky “player journey” that provide users with huge value
Design for the important stages of the user journey, including onboarding for first-time users, habit-building for new and regular users, and mastery for experts.
Sketch compelling Customer Narratives to deliver a solid MVP
Create a high-learning MVP and sketch out a four-stage customer narrative with Job Stories that capture how customers will use your product over time.
Distill customer insights into Job and Habit Stories
Identify what early customers actually want and need, and use those insights to influence your design choices. You’ll use Job Stories—and their superhero cousin, Habit Stories — as shortcuts for turning customer insights into design-ready stories that will help you drive adoption and engagement by piggybacking on existing habits.
Practice how to think like a game designer
Throughout the day, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to practice the gamification techniques. You’ll also get a draft of Amy Jo’s new workbook, Elevate, which will give you need to put her methods to work back in the office.
Amy Jo Kim Expert, Advanced Game Design Methods
With every discussion Amy Jo and I have had, I’ve walked away with a ton of ideas on what to do to make my projects a success. She has this magical ability to explain, in easy-to-understand terms, what any interaction designer needs to know to create applications loved by their users.
I find it hard to imagine anyone who has put more energy and passion into uncovering the hidden secrets of what’s happening inside compelling, hit games. Amy Jo has spent her entire career inside and outside of game companies, extracting the methods, practices, and frameworks that will make any application engaging to use. Her design studio, Shufflebrain, has worked with Netflix, Rock band, eBay, NYTimes.com, and many others to create irresistible designs. Bring an empty notebook when you’re listening to Amy Jo in her workshop. You’ll find out, like I have, that it’s impossible to capture everything you’ll learn without it.