Turbo-Charge Product Design with Game Thinking
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What is Game Thinking - and how can it help your startup succeed? Find out here.
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Turbo-Charge Product Design with Game Thinking
- 1. Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. amyjokim.com Co-Founder & Game Designer shufflebrain.com Creator & Head Coach getting2alpha.com Lean Startup Conference 2015 Turbo-Charge your Product Design with
- 3. Is this you? • need to accelerate early design process • tough to find the right early customers • hard to make a stripped-down MVP
- 4. What You Will Learn Actionable techniques for creating a better product in less time with Game Thinking
- 5. As a child I loved to play
- 6. As a child I loved to play But I didn’t love to compete
- 7. one night on a beach in Greece my creativity was re-ignighted
- 8. I found another way to play
- 10. then one day, I got THE CALL
- 11. we created a breakthrough hit
- 12. which led to more breakthrough hits
- 13. and insights into Game Thinking
- 14. Design your experience to evolve over time1 Design is not just what it looks like & feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs
- 15. is for Enthusiastswhat is my customer’s end-to-end experience? Discovery Onboarding Habit-Building Mastery how does it evolve over time?
- 16. is for Enthusiasts Discovery Discovery is for Visitors Is this right for me? What’s the value proposition?
- 17. is for EnthusiastsOnboarding is for Newbies Discovery Onboarding How do I learn the ropes? When do I start getting value?
- 18. is for EnthusiastsHabit-building is for Regulars Discovery Onboarding Habit-Building What pulls me back? What am I getting better at?
- 19. is for EnthusiastsMastery is for Enthusiasts Discovery Onboarding Habit-Building Mastery Can I leverage the skills & knowledge I’ve built?
- 20. is for Enthusiasts Discovery Onboarding Habit-Building Mastery end-to-end customer experience
- 21. is for EnthusiastsStage 1: Discovery is for Visitors Social Discovery via Friends & Colleagues
- 22. is for EnthusiastsStage 1: Onboarding is for Newbies Learn the ropes with a friendly bot
- 23. is for EnthusiastsStage 1: Habit-building is for Regulars Customized group chat with emojis, bots & integrations
- 24. is for EnthusiastsStage 1: Mastery is for Enthusiasts Launch a channel, program a bot, integrate your app
- 25. a conversational, extensible environment — built to enable UGC & player creativity Slack evolves to match your skill level
- 26. Find the fun within your Core Loop2 Fun is just another word for learning. Raph Koster author, A Theory of Fun
- 27. Fun means different things to different people
- 28. What is a game? a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome* * Source: Rules of Play
- 29. Zero-Sum Game We are opponents I Win You Lose
- 30. Head-to-Head Battles War Simulations Rank-Ordered Competitions Gambling
- 31. a structured experience with rules and goals that’s fun to play together* * Source: The Player’s Journey (forthcoming)
- 32. We are partners Non-Zero-Sum Game Win-Win Lose-Lose
- 33. Martial Arts Charity Walk Double Dutch Pictionary
- 34. What kind of fun are your customers looking for?
- 35. In a loop, you’re learning a skill and updating your mental model. That’s what leads to player delight. Dan Cook co-founder, Spry Fox
- 38. Skill-building = making customers more awesome
- 39. Skill-building = making customers more awesome
- 40. Core Loop = skill-building habit loop Skill-Building Core Loop
- 41. Finding the fun in a co- op music game
- 42. PartyTime! urge for a fun social activity Play a Song Together Get your Score, Accolades, $$ get better, play harder songs & bigger venues Core Loop Feedback & Progress Investment Path Activity Internal Trigger Beat the Song Engaged Trigger
- 43. Finding the fun in a team collaboration tool
- 44. Check Updates urge to connect with your team Read & Respond to Updates No More Updates Need Attention Customize your channel & expressions Activity Chain Feedback & Progress Investment Path Internal Trigger Core Loop
- 45. Check Updates urge to connect with your team Read & Respond to Updates No More Updates Need Attention Customize your experience Trigger Activity Engaging activity satisfies an urge or need Internal Trigger Core Loop
- 46. Feedback & progress promote learning & mastery EscapeTime! urge to dive into an escapist world Read & Respond to Updates No More Updates Need Attention Customize your experience Feedback & Progress Core Loop
- 47. EscapeTime! urge to dive into an escapist world Read & Respond to Updates No More Updates Need Attention Customize your experience Investment Path Investment & triggers pull people back Engaged Trigger Check Notifications Core Loop
- 48. Skill-building = making customers more awesome
- 49. Core Loop = making customers more skillful
- 50. Wanna build long-term engagement? Start with a skill-building Core Loop
- 51. Connect with your super-fans3 In a multi-player game, the people playing are more valuable than all the animations, models & game logic Gabe Newell CEO, Valve
- 52. Crossing the Chasm Geoffrey Moore, 1991
- 55. Find & delight a few passionate early customers
- 56. the fans out there are entertaining us, the developers, with their creations! Will Wright designer, The Sims
- 58. Slack came to life as a collaboration tool for a distributed team building a co-op game solve a real problem for a small group
- 59. Bring ideas to life with Game Thinking
- 60. How can you benefit from Game Thinking? Accelerate & focus your design process + Identify & leverage the right early customers + Build a stripped-down yet compelling MVP
- 62. Launching in 2016 Getting2Alpha Masterclass online course for entrepreneurs & product leaders Getting2Alpha MVP Club VIP coaching for innovative product teams getting2alpha.com
Editor's Notes
- Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. Today, I’m going to show you how to skyrocket your early product design efforts and super-charge your MVP process with Game Thinking
- I’m Amy Jo Kim - social game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach. Early product design is my specialty: I’ve helped dozens of teams bring their innovative ideas to life.
- [friend] So what about you? What brought you here today? Do you and your team struggle to accelerate the pace of your early design and development process? Is it challenging to filter all the feedback coming at you - from all sides — and identify the right handful of people to listen to? Do you struggle to turn your engaging product vision into a simple, stripped-down MVP? maybe you’ve felt this way…I know I have on many projects
- My mission today is to share actionable techniques for creating a better product in less time. But before we launch into that — I’d like to tell you my story -and perhaps you’ll find some links from my journey to yours
- As a chid, I couldn’t keep my hands off the piano. I loved to play. When we’re ride in the station wagon, I’d hear Beatles songs on the radio - and then go back to my piano, and pick out the melodies by ear. So my parents got me music lessons - which I loved - until…
- My piano teacher said “You’re so talented - you should compete in the Regionals.” So I entered competitions - and HATED it. So much so that I quit playing music for many years. Perhaps you’ve had an experience like that to?
- and then one night… on a beach in Greece… on a post-college backpacking tour — I was sitting around a campfire with cute guys from Sweden who didn’t speak English. And one of them had a guitar. I knew a few chords - so I played Beatles songs around the campfire - and we sang together all night. It was one of those AHA moments - a pivot point - that changed the course of my life.
- I found another way to play music - something more powerful than ranked competitions. I found co-op play - people banding together to create something larger than themselves.
- I continued to develop my co-op design skills - playing in bands, and designing social gaming systems for eBay, The Sims, Ultima Online, and others. I even wrote a book about it that just got posted on Product Hunt as a key community resource.
- And then one day, I got THE CALL. Does anyone know who this is? Alex Rigapolous - CEO of Harmonix - came out to my house in Half Moon Bay on a sunny September day, and told me about his dream to create a multi-player music game where ordinary people - with no musical experience - with plastic instruments - could FEEL like they were playing in a band.
- That nascent idea turned into Rock Band - and bringing that game to life taught me how a top-notch, high-functioning team builds a hit product in the early stages - when they’re testing their hypotheses.
- Since then, I’ve worked on more genre-defining hits like Rock Covet Covet Fashion, Lumosity and Happify
- and along the way, I’ve learned some powerful strategies and techniques for designing experiences that bring people together - and drive long-term engagement. There’s a lot of overlap with Lean thinking - with a special, skill-building twist.
- The first strategy is to design your experience to evolve over time. This requires systems thinking - which is about how things work, rather than the look and feel.
- Here’s a technique I learned from games to implement this strategy. Ask yourself: what is my customer’s end to end experience - and how does it evolve over time? Then define key stages of the experience - and write a short Job Story or User Story to communicate the essence of each stage.
- Discovery is for visitors - who are wondering “””
- Onboarding is for visitors - who are wondering “””
- Habit-building — the heart of gaming - the Core Loop - is for Regulars - it’s the day 20 experience, the repeatable, pleasurable activity that pulls people back.
- .. and lights the path to Master - which is for enthusiasts - the ones who want to go deep, master the systems, and then sometimes - start playing a whole different game - the Elder Game, as we call it
- To bring this customer narrative to life, let’s look at the end-to-end customer experience for Slack
- How many of you use Slack? How many of you found out about Slack from a friend or colleague? How many of you were told to use Slack by your IT dept? Exactly. Slack gets distributed through Social Discovery - that was one of the key differentiators of it’s rapid growth. And social discovery is much more characteristic of games than enterprise collaboration tools.
- How does Slack teach you the ropes? By engaging you in dialogue with a friendly, helpful bot. That’s a single-player experience - with the rhythms of a conversation. And if you think about well-designed games, having an single-player onboarding dialogue to learn the ropes before plunging into the multi-player action is common territory.
- The Day 21 experience in Slack is co-op gaming - that is, cooperative interactions with your groups or teams, working towards a greater goal. By this time, you’ve learned the ropes, and perhaps started to customize your integrations, notifications, and emojis - as the folks here did, to basically play tabletop pokemon in a Slack channel.
- What does Mastery mean in Slack? It means mastering the systems and extending the environment - that is, MODding the game. In that sense, Slack is more like Minecraft than Yammer - because customizing and extending Slack is where the power lies - and what truly unlocks mastery.
- by creating an extensible environment, Slack encourages players - AKA customers - to create fun for each other and develop their skills. And that’s a deep part of what makes modern games fun, ,exciting and long-lasting.
- The next gaming strategy is to find the fun within your core loop.
- One textbook defined games as “A systems where players engage in an artifical conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” Well, that’s a good definition for SOME games. What kind? Zero-sum games.
- One textbook defined games as “A systems where players engage in an artifical conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” Well, that’s a good definition for SOME games. What kind? Zero-sum games.
- BATTLES – WAR – RANK ORDERING – GAMBLING – all are classic zero-sum games. Howevr, after working the gaming industry for a few I found that MOST of the games I was working on did NOT fit this description.
- Ultima Online… The Sims (website) … Rock Band – These games don’t have clear victory state – there aren’t really winners and losers. Instead, they’re about having fun together – about value-added social interactions. So I made up a new broader definition for what a game could be.
- Ultima Online… The Sims (website) … Rock Band – These games don’t have clear victory state – there aren’t really winners and losers. Instead, they’re about having fun together – about value-added social interactions. So I made up a new broader definition for what a game could be.
- Now, we all know Eric Ries - and his core principle of moving quickly through the build-measure-learn cycle.
- An operant conditioning loop – such as the Habit Loop (from the Power of Habit book) or the Hooked model – gets you closer to a Core Loop, because it’s based on feedback and rewards.
- What’s missing, though, is any notion of skill-building or personal empowerment. Skinner Boxes and operant conditioning loops can shape behavior – but they won’t lead to player delight or true long-term engagement.
- For that, you need skill-building. People enjoy getting better at something they care about.
- The process of learning and mastery is deeply, intrinsically motivating.
- So - to create a robust Core Loop, you need to combine engaging activities - and compelling feedback - with the skill-building power of games.
- Remember when I told you I worked on Rock Band?
- Breakthrough innovator spend lots of time up-front getting this core experience loop right. I was on the original design team for Rock Band - here’s our basic core loop. Notice that the trigger is social - we knew from the start that this would be a party game, played in groups. We spent at least 6 months early-on protoyping and testing this basic loop – and didn’t add features or polish until the feel of that early play experience ROCKED. So to build YOUR core loop, think about what skill your customer is building - what they’re getting better at - and design your experience to support that journey.
- Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. Today, I’m going to show you how to skyrocket your early product design efforts and super-charge your MVP process with Game Thinking
- The heart of any Core Loop is one or more repeatable, engaging activities — triggered by an internal urge or need.
- To promote learning and mastery, you punctuate those engaging activities with feedback and meaningful progression.
- Finally, you close the Loop giving players compelling and meaningful reasons to return – and cues to remind them. There are many ways to drive investment — collect, earn, spend, and expressing your personal style and taste.
- So in summary - if you want to drive long-term engagement, your through-line is really about skill-building - about making your customers better than before
- And it starts by building a strong core loop that helps your customers become more skill-ful, and get better at something that matters
- Once you’ve identified a few key Habit Stories, you’ll need to translate those into a compelling design. That’s where the next design hack come in. A Core Loop is a gaming concept that describes the interlocking activities, progress markers and rewards that a player experiences during a gaming session. As game designer Dan Cook says, skill-building and learning are an essential part of what makes games compelling fun. This powerful concept is at the heart of gaming - and can be applied broadly to all kinds of game-like experiences.
- Have you heard of Crossing the Chasm – by Geoffrey Moore? This influential book shed light on the difficulty of marketing innovative products to a mass market - and opened people’s eyes to the key differences between early adopters and early majority.
- Moore’s book was based on work done three decades earlier -- Everett Roger’s Innovation Diffusion Theory is a data-driven model of how new products spread through existing communities.
- Have you ever heard of Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore? This influential book explored the difficulty of marketing innovative products to a mass market - and popularized the term “early adopter.” These are the people who’d be willing to make a personal sacrifice to help you create your product.
- To innovate successfully, your need to find and delight a few passionate early customers before you scale and grow.
- Now, we all know Eric Ries - and his core principle of moving quickly through the build-measure-learn cycle.
- The Rock Band team knew that social dynamics could make or break their ambitious multi-player music game – so we focused on understanding the needs and habits of avid social gamers and non-musicians, which helped to create a massive crossover hit
- The best way to reward Mastery is by opening up new powers, access, and privileges. Your Mastery Job Story should describe what your most talented and dedicated customers are looking for – the types of experiences that could keep them engaged, and give them real impact
- Since then, worked on genre-defining hits like Rock Band, The Sims, eBay, Ultima Online, Covet Fashion, and Happify.
- Each of these hacks is useful in isolation - but it you put them together into an integrated program, you will see MASSIVE acceleration in your path to product/market fit. you’ll quickly and effectively find the right early customers to validate your ideas and by running low-fidelity, high-learning playtests you’ll learn what your customers want -and get solid insights about what should - and should NOT - go into your MVP
- I think I know why we’re all here. We’ve all had that epiphany. We all want to stop wasting time building products or features that people don’t want - and we’re here to learn how to do that faster and better.
- Welcome to our webinar! Use the hashtag #Getting2Alpha to tweet comments and questions about this presentation.
- Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. Today, I’m going to show you five proven and powerful design hacks that will skyrocket your early product design efforts and super-charge your MVP process I’m Amy Jo Kim - social game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach. Early product design is my specialty: I’ve helped dozens of teams bring their innovative ideas to life.