In this unit, I'm going to give you a design framework to apply all of the basic concepts about gamification that we've talked about so far. But first, I need to talk to you about just what design is. Design is not just art, or illustration, or creative expression. Design is a process of attacking problems. And we tend to think about design as something that designers do. Something that is used in creative pursuits, whether it's advertising or graphic design or user experience design online. But design is really a general approach to addressing challenges. Which is particularly useful in gamification. There've been a number of, leading commentators and experts in recent years who've talked about the concept of design thinking. People like Rodger Martin, who's the dean of the business school at the University of Toronto and David Kelly who, was one of the leaders of IDO the, a well known product design company in Silicon Valley. They have argued that design thinking should be a process that all business engages in for any purpose and while I'm not going to go into all of the details of design thinking, it's worth having an understanding of some of its major principles in order to apply them to gamification specifically. So, what is design actually mean? And this is my synthesis of a bunch of different viewpoints of many people that highlight some of the major aspects of design thinking. The first thing about design thinking is that it's purposive i.e., it has a goal. You're not just trying to make something beautiful. You're not just trying to create a process that does certain things. You're trying to achieve some objective. And everything in the process has to tie into that purpose. So. if you're building a gamified system because you want your employees to generate more ideas for innovation in your company and you want to promote that kind of innovative activity, that's the goal. And the design of the gamification system needs to constantly refer back to achieving that goal. The second aspect of design thinking is that it's human centered. So, what does that mean? What's not human centered? It's not cow centered or cat centered. No, the idea is it's designed around people. Early on, I talked about the notion of calling your participants in a gamified system players. And I talked about some of the healthy aspects of thinking of someone as a player. As opposed to a user or a customer or, god forbid, a consumer and that relates to this notion in design thinking that everything should be based on the person. We are coming up with solutions for people. People are going to use them. Robots are not going to use them, human beings are going to use them. And so, what that means is, we always have to think about the experience. It's not just a set of objectives or a set of metrics, although those will be important in, developing the system. It's real people, who have real lives, who want to do things, or to reach objectives in their lives and they're going to encounter this thing. They're going to encounter this designed artifact. Whether that is a website like amazon.com or a shopping cart or a gamified system. They're going to encounter it and they're going to encounter it as an experience. And I've already talked about the fact that the experience is somehow greater than the game and greater than the game element. Design thinking is about always pushing for the experience and trying to keep in mind what that experience actually looks like to people. And, and remember that the experience of the player is not the experience of the designer who's seeing all the moving parts of the system from the outside. Third element of design thinking is balance. The idea is, we sometimes use analytical thinking, we break things down into smaller parts. We try to come up with algorithms, formalized ways of solving problems. But, sometimes we also need to be creative. Sometimes we need to have hunches, intuitions. Sometimes things are artistic and beautiful and elegant and you can't reduce it to a formula. Design Thinking is about balancing those two things. If you just have analytics, just numbers, just quantitative formal structures, your process will be too dry and formal. You won't really address people's experiential needs and you'll miss lots of opportunities for creativity and innovation. Because those tend to lie outside of what the formulas tell us. We tend to use things like heuristics, vaguer sense of, vaguer kinds of frameworks, when formal algorithms don't solve problems. And sometimes we don't even have heurist, heuristics, we just have individual examples that we're trying to put together and find patterns around. So, design thinking is about balancing those two things. And in particular, focusing on what's in the middle. Focusing on what we do when there's some data, but insufficient data to give us a clear, clean, structured algorithm. And that often involves what's called abductive reasoning. Which was a term developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. A philosopher who was one of the developers of the philosoble, philosophical system called pragmatism. And Peirce talked about abductive reasoning as a number of things, but essentially about inference from insufficient information. So, we don't have enough information to reach a judgment. We don't quite know what the solution is, but we've got kind of a guess, or a rough explanation. We start with the best explanation that we've got, and then we make an inference from there. That's what design thinking is all about. Jumping that intuitive leap that we can make. But it's got to be based on a foundation. It's not just wild speculation. We've got an initial best available explanation and then we try and jump from there, make that abductive leap. Finally, design thinking is iterative. In other words, it inherently expects that we're not going to get it right the first time. We're not going to build a system that is perfect. We have to bake in from the beginning the idea of trying, failing, learning, trying again and iteration means doing the same thing multiple times but improving over time through the process. And it turns out this is critically important aspect of game design which is a design practice. The notion that you don't build a game just by sitting down and drawing out the art work and putting in the characters and building out the game. You start with a rough version of the game. This is also not so different from the way things like movies get made. You start with, a rough prototype, something that gives you the basic fundamental skeleton of the game play. There's a bunch of cards and we're going to trade them and they have these things on them and they get put together in the following way. And then, in games on you play test, in other words, create the roughest possible prototype. Just pieces of paper often, with scribbles on them. That just give some sense about the basic structural elements. The dynamics and mechanics, typically, of the game. And then give it to some people. Let real people actually try and play with it. It's not going to be a very good game at that point, in most cases, but when you actually let people use the rules, and use the mechanics that you set up, then you start to see how they operate in practice, how they interact with one another. What the experience is kind of going to be like and then based on that, either it works or it doesn't, you iterate and improve. And through a series of these iterations, you get prototypes that are more and more faithful to the end state, the ultimate game. That's a very typical kind of process in design and one that's useful to employee gamification as well. If you try to go from 0 to 60, if you try to start from nothing and then immediately implement a gamified system, you're almost certain to miss out on important aspects of what the player, the experience is going to be like. So, iteration is a way of overcoming that. That's a few sets of basic guidelines for design as a process. Specifically for gamification, my colleague, Dan Hunter, and I have developed a six step process for implementing gamified systems and this process is brought to you by the letter D. [SOUND] And the number six, because there are six steps and each of them happens to start with the letter D. So, let me give you the six steps really quickly and in the subsequent videos, I'll unpack each of them in more detail. Step one is define, define your business objectives. What is this system designed to accomplish? What are it's goals? Remember, design has to be purposive. Second, what are the target behaviors? What is it that you want people to do? Gamification is about motivation. It's about encouraging people to do certain things. And therefore, you need to start out with an understanding of just what those things are. Third, describe your players. Human centric, player centric, that's the essence of design and design for gamification. So, you need to have some understanding about who's going to be using this thing? What are they like? And how can the gamified system respond to the different kinds of players that you have? Next is, devise your activity loops. There are two kinds of loops that move forward the action in a gamified system. We call them engagement loops, and progression loops. This is where you structure the core micro and macro level game play aspects. Number five, don't forget the fun. This comes back to the discussion that we had earlier about game thinking. And just how important fun is, how difficult it is to define, but how we can look at certain kinds of characteristics that in different ways make things fun. Paradoxically, that's easy to miss when you're doing gamification because gamification is about coming up with structures and rules and processes and systems to achieve those objectives that I talked about before. And very often, people who are going down that road get so caught up that they lose sight of the fact that these systems should in some way be engaging, they should be fun. Whether consciously or not for the players, because if not, they're missing out on a lot of what makes gamification potentially so powerful. And then finally, deploy. Use the right tools for the right job. Use the right elements, use the right structures and put them into place in the gamified system. Six Ds for gamification design, which we'll look at in significantly more detail in the next few segments
