Der Phonoeingang

I love Django’s documentation. It clocks in at about 700 pages printed, and most of it is clear, concise, and helpful. I think Django’s among the best documented open source projects, and nothing makes me prouder.

If any part of Django endures, I hope it’ll be a sort of “documentation culture” — an ethos that values great, well-written documentation. To that end, I’m writing a series of articles laying out the tools, tips, and techniques I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent helping to write Django’s docs.

This advice will mostly be targeted towards those documenting libraries or frameworks intended for use by other developers, but much of it probably applies to any for of technical documentation.

The exercise was to take typical calendar events (a day of four events was provided as an example) and turn them into a game. The notion that this is possible comes from Danc’s post about Ribbon Hero on Lost Garden, where he writes:

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.

Each pair of designers was to apply the following game mechanics to their calendar schedule: points, levels, quests, feedback and inventory. As no concern was to be given for the interface itself, wireflows were used to illustrate the mechanics in use.

Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games is a great presentation by Sebastian Deterding examining the currently popular fallacy that adding points to a system is enough to make it into a game or enough to transform a website or service into something fun (something that has spawned some argument lately on Twitter, in fact).

I do think there is much for UX design to learn from games — and vice versa — but I also very much agree with the core thought here, which is that the two disciplines are different, and thinking that you can get by with a superficial understanding of one or the other is a mistake — they are not small disciplines!

Why do I blog this I really enjoy this quote and find it exemplifies the ever-increasing delegation of decisions that are embedded/inscribed into technical objects. The Ubik door might certainly be the ubicomp posterchild in a parallel (and dystopic) environment but it seems highly plausible nowadays. Let’s accumulate this kind of examples and see what patterns one can find.

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

At the start of May, I gave a talk down in San Francisco on how game design can plug a gaping hole in the current practice of application design. 

Here is the pdf with the speaking notes included. This contains a bit more than the actual talk.

I just stumbled across this 2006 post, but Rob Walling hit it out of the park. Here’s the short version of his post about what developers really want

Troy White has just posted a blog which I think is both very good because it encourages people who don’t think they are storytellers to have a go and practice, yet I feel doesn’t go far enough because there is a chance readers will not get to a story based on his list of triggers. Mind you I think Troy’s story prompters are a great place to start. I would like, however, to make some additions to each one to make doubly sure people tell a story rather than just express their opinion.

The crew from our most popular VizThinkU webinar to date, Visual Note-taking 101, took their show on the road a few months ago with a session at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. Last week, the conference organizers released an audio podcast of the session – which was great, but not all that useful for a session discussing visual thinking and sketch noting ideas – so Austin Kleon took the time to gather slides and images from the session and has added a visuals to the Audio and posted a slidecast of it.

Embedded below is the full 60 minute session featuring Austin Kleon, Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown & Dave Gray. If you find this session of interest, be sure to check out the full Visual Note-taking 101 VizThinkU course here on VizThink.com. (three full hours of content!). Use the discount code “sxswi” when you register and we’ll even take $15 off the registration fee before May 31, 2010.

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.