June 2010
5 posts
3 tags
Writing great documentation →
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...
4 tags
Designing game mechanics into calendars →
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...
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What UX can (and cannot) learn from games →
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...
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“I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can... →
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.
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RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about... →
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.
May 2010
5 posts
7 tags
Wordcamp 2010: Why we turned Microsoft Office into... →
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.
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Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money →
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
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Storytelling for non-storytellers →
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...
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Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010 →
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...
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The Pushbutton Web - Realtime becomes real. →
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...
April 2010
10 posts
3 tags
On Writing →
The lack of the updates on the blog recently has been mostly due because I’ve been writing my Game AI Conference presentation. I have done tons of research and prototyping the past 9 months, and now it has been time to draw conclusions and somehow wrap things up. Whilst doing so, I have tried a couple of new work habits too. I’m one of those people who has a bit hard time concentrating...
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Browser market shares in Europe →
It is interesting for all browser-based games, but also for client-based games websites and funnel design, to have an idea of what the dominant browsers are on the market.
The analytics solution StatCounter gives browser market shares for Europe and individual countries, based on hits on the 3M websites using their solution. It is interesting to look at them and realize that there are indeed...
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Inside Pixar’s Leadership →
There were plenty of high profile people at the Economist event in March, but hands down the best session was a simple interview with Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.
Martin Giles from the Economist did the interview, and did an excellent job letting Catmull cover some excellent territory.
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Ewan's Presentation for TechCrunch's GeeknRolla →
5 tags
IPAD ALS CHANCE FÜR MEDIENBETRIEBE: Hoffnung und... →
Mit dem iPad hat der Hype um Apple in den Medien erstmals die Ausmasse desjenigen im Internet erreicht: Weil Journalisten und Verleger das Gerät als relevant für ihr Geschäft betrachten. Das dürfte eine übertriebene Hoffnung sein, und jedenfalls wird sie mit dem, was die Medienkonzerne bisher liefern, nicht erfüllt werden.
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Developers vs Cybercriminals: Protecting your MMO... →
Developers vs Cybercriminals: Protecting your MMO from online crime
View more presentations from En Masse Entertainment.
5 tags
What My 2.5 Year-Old's First Encounter With An... →
On Monday night, I handed my 2.5 year-old daughter a new toy: My brand-new iPad. What happened next turned out to be a fascinating lesson in product and user-interface design, and what it takes to create the kind of technology that anyone can use and embrace.
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REWORK Illustrations →
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Erklärungsbedürftiger digitaler Butler →
In mancher Hinsicht hat das iPad dasselbe Problem wie die ersten PCs: Es ist erklärungsbedürftig. Für was soll man das Ding benutzen, wofür man nicht schon ein anderes Gerät hätte, ein Notebook oder ein Handy, eine Spielkonsole oder TV? Selbst Steve Jobs räumte ein, nicht wirklich zu wissen, was man mit Apples neuester Kreation alles anfangen werde.
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Social Media Graphics →
collecting all kinds of social media related charts, graphs and infographics
March 2010
5 posts
5 tags
Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and... →
Sketching and wireframing are a specialized style of drawing, used for fleshing out preliminary complex ideas, group brain-storming, a lo-fi method for evaluating interaction concepts, and as a way of roughly perfecting a design technique.
Sketch and wireframe paper is essentially drawing paper that is designed specifically for this purpose. You could use it for web page design, web app design,...
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Visualizing Fitt's Law →
In preparation for the redesigns and overhauls we implemented in Wufoo, I took some time to revisit a few HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) fundamentals with the hopes of gleaning something new out of the decades of research dedicated to making interfaces easier to use. One thing that surprised me was how most of the material was pretty dense, heavily geared towards mathematicians it seemed and...
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Subtractive Design →
Subtractive design is the process of removing imperfections and extraneous parts in order to strengthen the core elements. You can think of a design as something you build up, construct and let grow, but it’s pruning away the excess that gives a design a sense of simplicity, elegance, and power.
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” —Albert Einstein
First...
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WatchGames like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
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Fear and Loathing in Farmville →
GDC 2010 is now in the books, and it will be a hard one to forget because the whole conference seemed to be obsessed with one thing, which I summed up in this tweet. Or, as Sirlin puts it here: “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.” Off the top of my head, here are the highlights and lowlights of this fixation
January 2010
1 post
3 tags
The Psychology of Video Games →
psychologyofgames.com aims to use the science of psychology (queue thunderclap) to answer three broad classes of questions:
Why do gamers do what they do?
Why do those designing games do what they do?
Why do those marketing and selling games do what they do?
Why do people get so excited about loot drops in games like World of Warcraft?
Why do developers keep dumping good money after bad on a...
December 2009
1 post
4 tags
November 2009
5 posts
4 tags
3 tags
"Ja, aber…" – 11 populäre Einwände gegen Social... →
Die Sätze hat wohl jeder Kommunikations- und PR-Berater schon gehört. Man hat sich Mühe gegeben und dem Klienten ausführlich und anschaulich erklärt, warum man sich im Rahmen der Kommunikationsstrategie mit Social Media beschäftigen sollte. Man hat von Cluetrain gesprochen und über den Wandel in der Mediennutzung, man hat Beispiele gezeigt und herkömmliche Kommunikationsstrategien...
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WatchHear Dan Roam talk about persuading people with pictures. Whether convincing leadership to back a project, getting a VC to fund a business, building consensus on a project team, or selling a new technology platform within an organization, nothing is more powerful than a simple picture for discovering and developing technological concepts and business ideas. This session shows how to use the...
Why [fill-in-the-blank] Fails? →
Is asking ‘why something fails’ the right question to find or solve the real problem? Michael Krigsman reports on Information Technology (IT) project failures, a great topic deserving of attention. On his hosted phone discussions, featured speakers share their stories.
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Die 15 häufigsten Fehler bei Gewinnspielen,... →
Gewinnspiele, Preisausschreiben oder Verlosungen sind ein beliebtes und wirkungsvolles Marketinginstrument. Aber das Wettbewerbsrecht und das Datenschutzrecht schränken ihre Ausgestaltung erheblich ein. Die folgende Übersicht zeigt 15 typische Fehler, die einem unterlaufen können. Einige davon sind offensichtlich, andere dagegen, wie die Datenschutzverstöße, nicht. Gemeinsam haben all diese Fehler...
October 2009
8 posts
3 tags
Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop...
Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)
View more documents from David Gillespie.
2 tags
Treating User Myopia →
I try not to talk too much about the trilogy here, because there’s a whole other blog for that stuff. But some of the lessons I’ve learned in the last year while working on them really put into bold relief some of my earlier blog entries on usability and user behavior. One entry in particular that I keep coming back to is Teaching Users to Read. That was specific to dialog boxes,...
3 tags
What's Next In Augmented Reality? →
As the sensors and chips in portable electronics become more powerful, augmented reality (AR) is starting to give consumers new ways to blend virtual and real-world information.
The iPhone and devices powered by Google’s Android OS already have some AR apps, but these are mostly limited to overlaying directions or tourist information on a view of the real world.
At this week’s...
5 tags
CNS Lecture Archives →
CNS Lecture Archives. Web casts and presentation documents have been provided by the permission of the invited lecturer. Not all lecturers release permission for the web publication of their video, lecture notes, or talk slides.
3 tags
In Bb 2.0 →
In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.
The videos can be played simultaneously — the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.
Learn more in the FAQ.
4 tags
Preparing and Planning for a Redesign →
So many businesses out there set up a website and then think, “There, that’s done with” and never bother to re-evaluate their website’s design or position in the marketplace.
But looking at a website as a static, unchanging bit of advertising will put you at a disadvantage sooner or later.
Trends in website design change over the years (and even months). What looked cutting edge in 2006 is...
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Can an Online Community Shape a Strategy? →
We are reaching the end of the first stage of our work supporting Wikimedia’s strategy development process (check out the progress at http://strategy.wikimedia.org) and I hit my first soul-searching moment. The catalyst? An email from Wikimedia strategy project manager Eugene Kim a couple of weeks back sharing his thoughts on how to think and act in a wiki way.
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20+ PHP Tutorials & Resources →
Hi, I hope that you have enjoyed and learned previous posts on Web Design i.e. 25+ Tips and Tutorials of HTML & CSS & 25+ Tutorials & Resources on jQuery. This time I have compiled some great tutorials over PHP, so you can now work on server side scripting. So go on and make use of these tutorials and resources. And yes, for the beginners the Diving into PHP Video Series is great to...
September 2009
4 posts
3 tags
World Science Festival 2009 Videos →
The World Science Festival, an unprecedented annual tribute to imagination, ingenuity and inventiveness, takes science out of the laboratory and into the streets, theaters, museums, and public halls of New York City, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating.
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No we can’t →
Wie die SPD im Netz Wähler gewinnen wollte und kläglich scheiterte. Ein anonymer Insider berichtet aus der Mitte der sozialdemokratischen Wahlkampfmaschine
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Watch“A 4-minute mini-documentary that drew from the 20 ethnographies Gravity Tank did with app users, and how their perceptions about apps evolved over the course of the study - from fun games to valuable tools that have a potentially profound impact on unexpected industries.”
5 tags
Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret... →
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we’ve all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.
July 2009
2 posts
4 tags
The Future of Advertising
What’s Next In Marketing And Advertising (2009)View more documents from Paul Isakson.
3 tags
Philips Design: Spark →
In an exploration into how games can add value to the innovation process, Philips Design has created ‘Spark’, a board game that stimulates creativity and innovative thinking.
June 2009
7 posts
7 tags
Peer Code Reviews at Loose Cannon →
Now that the game is basically done (though weirdly still being kept under wraps by Konami), I plan to write about some of the things we did, both good and bad. I’ve learned a lot from my experience at Loose Cannon so far and need to write about this while it’s still fresh!
I’ll start out with something I think went really well, all things considered: Peer Code Reviews.
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WatchLawrence Lessig’s final talk on Free Culture.
January 31st 2008, Stanford University.
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RiP! A Remix Manifesto →
RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. You can contribute to the film, and follow the conversation on the social networks below.