alan wells

Last night I attended a Designer’s Accord Town Hall meeting at Lunar Design. I gave a quick five minute presentation about some ideas I’ve thinking about lately from my work at Zynga. Zynga is the largest social game company on the web, with 10 million daily active users across eight social networks plus the iPhone platform.

The point that I tried to make in my talk last night was that social games are exceptionally strong drivers of consumer behavior. Zynga and other game companies have shown that huge numbers of people will come back every day to play games. The success of these games is no accident – these experiences are designed to influence behavior and drive very strong engagement. In a world where sustainable living often costs more (or at least appears to cost more given current market structures), I think there are lessons from social games that can be applied to influencing consumer behavior beyond depending on altruism.

For years, single player games have shown strong engagement. Basic mechanics like achievements, unlocking, and leveling up have proven to be strong drivers of engagement. There seems to be something in these very clear reward structures (you know what you have to do, and you receive some reward when you do it) that appeals to human nature. These mechanics are part of social games as well. See the screenshot below of my Poker Profile on Zynga’s Texas HoldEm game. The visual representation of Achievements brings visibility to the things I can achieve in the game, which compels me to play more to hit those milestones.

With the help of internet-based communication platforms, such as Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone, social games have added another level of mechanics onto the traditional single player games. These mechanics deal with interactions between people – and more importantly, interactions between friends. The mechanics of this space – competition, comparison and cooperation – have driven aboslutely explosive growth in the social games industry. Again, these mechanics seem to appeal to something fundamental to human nature, and that appeal stretches across geographic and cultural barriers (social games are growing just about everywhere there is a platform to enable them).

A few examples:

Competition: YoVille is a virtual world, where you create a digital representation of yourself and customize your space in that world. You can then interact with others in the virtual world – having conversations, visiting their apartments, dancing, and giving gifts. The YoVille friend ladder, a persistent element at the bottom of the game, shows how highly your room is rated relative to your friends. By seeing how you rank against your friends, you are motivated to invest more in the game to rank higher in your social circle.

Comparison: Everyone in YoVille has an apartment to customize. You can visit your friends apartment and check out all the cool stuff they have. Really well done apartments get more visitors, and make you want to go back and improve your own.

Cooperation: In Mafia Wars, a game where you become leader of your own Mafia, growing your mafia is key. You can improve your odds for fighting, gain money, and increase your power faster by adding more people to your Mafia. When adding Mafia members that fill certain roles, there’s a synergistic effect – together, you can do more in the game than you would be able to on your own.

I think that there is huge potential for designers to learn lessons from the mechanics used in these games. By using these mechanics in our products, we might be able to spark widespread change in ways that wouldn’t depend on guilt or altruism. One idea that I’ve been thinking about lately that might serve as a useful example: “What if my local power company were a social gaming company? What would my energy bill look like?” A few thoughts:

• My bill wouldn’t be a monthly piece of paper, it would be a rich interface where I could receive up to the minute information about my energy usage and performance
• Every day, I would see my energy usage relative to those of my friends. By framing energy efficiency as a competition between my friends, I would be motivated to try to beat my friends every day.
• I might see how my city block ranked against others in my neighborhood. If my block was lagging, my neighbors would pester me to be more efficient so our block could win and get our efficiency bonus.
• Even if I couldn’t manage to change my lifestyle enough, I might have a way to trump my friends by spending more to buy wind or solar power.
• There would be a clear path to improvement, incentives to level up, and rewards along the way – from day one, I could see how to be an energy rockstar, and the competition would engage me to invest in this.

Zynga Games (just a few – see more at zynga.com):

• Texas HoldEm
• MafiaWars
• YoVille
• Live Poker for iPhone

Useful Resources:

• Lost Garden: What Are Game Mechanics?
• Wikipedia: Game Mechanics
• Game Developers Conference: Lessons from Social Games

Ever since I created the Green Design Wiki, I’ve been interested in exploring the convergence of sustainability and technology. My work at Zynga has given me the knowledge required to orchestrate the production of an iPhone app, and I’ve been on the lookout for interesting ways to use the iPhone platform for environmental benefit. Last year, I did some work with Tim McNeil to help redesign the visitor center for SF Environment, a department of the City of San Francisco. A recent conversation with Tim sparked my memory of SF Environment’s Ecofinder web service. The Ecofinder is a search engine that provides information about where to recycle hard to dispose of goods in the Bay Area. This service seemed like it would be even more valuable – and widely used – if it were accessible from the palm of your hand, anytime, anywhere.

After thinking through idea a bit more, I approached the team at SF Environment about creating an iPhone version of their Ecofinder web service. They agreed to support the project and graciously provided their dataset for use in the app. Since then, I’ve been putting together mockups, designing the application flows and, most importantly, trying to figure out a way to get the application built with a budget of zero dollars. Last week, Andrew and Hernan from Nextive Solutions came through in the clutch and volunteered their time and expertise to create the app. I’m happy to say we started deveopment today, and are hoping have something live in the app store within 6 weeks. More details coming soon.

For the past few months, I’ve been doing some volunteer work with IDSA San Francisco. I’ve had a long standing interest in industrial design, and when I heard they needed some help with their email communications, I jumped at the chance to get involved with the organization. One of the projects I’m helping them with is a new take on the idea of a studio tour. We’ve been working on the pitch and branding for the event, and we’ve finally come to this graphic, which all involved seem to be happy with. Stay tuned for more news about the event!

There’s a great post over at Core77 on the language of form that exists in product design:

Form has meaning; it can touch us at such a primal level that our mind is left scrambling to rationalize our emotional reactions. Consider the visceral impression conveyed by a natural setting: The deep serenity felt, for example, while walking through a majestic grove of redwoods. The delicate lace of fern fronds wave as you drag your hand through them as you walk, and your heart jumps into your throat when startled by a deer caught wondering across the trail. These natural forms hold an innate meaning that not only transcends the human experience, but even predates our verbal expression, definition, and measurement. In other words, we did not create this meaning; it comes from the forms themselves, and existed long before we did.“

The idea that form is a language that predates verbal expression is fascinating to me. It feels like there’s a convergence between this idea and a notion mentioned by Eames Demetrios at Compostmodern a few weeks ago that he described as “way it should be-ness”. The post also eloquently describes a dilemma I’ve been running into lately – my job as a producer at Zynga is extremely data-intensive, but the problems I’m most interested in solving are in the areas of experience and form. In a business driven by statistics like clicks, installs and daily active users, I’m finding it difficult to justify time spent focusing on the less easily quantifable aspects of designing intuitive and visceraly attractive products. Not only that, but when we do put the time into refining these aspects of the design, as I feel we did with Scramble Live, it’s challenging to measure the impact of that attention to detail.

Just finished this graphic for the email promotion of an artisan fashion show my mom’s putting together. Mailer and poster coming soon!

More info: www.chicartisanfashion.com

In November, I resigned from my position as a product manager at Affinity Labs. I really enjoyed the time I spent at Affinity Labs – the team there is incredible, and I’m grateful for the opportunities I was given there to learn and expand my areas of expertise (during my time there, we grew from 6 sites to 13 sites, and were acquired by Monster.com). I left Affinity to take a position at Zynga producing games for the iPhone.

With the exception of a few small side projects, most of the design and product management work I did in 2008 was for Affinity’s sites. Here’s a rundown of some of great projects I was able to work on during my time there, and the part that I played in each project.

Affinity's flagship site.

During the time I spent at Affinity, I worked first as the primary UI designer and product manager for our community sites, and later moved towards more creative direction as Milan Phan took over the hands-on design responsibilities. Our approach was very collaborative – the executive, marketing, engineering and editorial teams all deserve credit for helping the product team to create the best communities possible.

New Site Launches:

• AllHealthcare – product management
• AdminSecret – creative direction, product management
• HRGuru – creative direction, product management

Site Redesigns

• InsideTech (relaunch of TechCommunity.com) – colorscheme and logo concept development, creative direction, product management
• Tickle.com (redesign) – creative direction, product management. Tickle was shut down at the end of 2007.
• WomenCo (redesign) – creative direction, product management

Channel Redesigns: Affinity sites have similar structures, so each of these channels exists on most of the Affinity sites. The best place to see examples of all channels in one place is Affinity’s flagship site, PoliceLink. In general, many of the projects I worked on at Affinity were about bringing a cohesive, intuitive user experience to their sites. We focused on standardizing styles and interaction patterns to speed development and improve the flow for users.

• News Channel – UI design and product management for channel homepage, browse pages, article pages
• Benefits, Education and Training – UI design and product management for channel homepages, browse pages, article pages
• Discussion Forums – UI design and product management for all pages in channel
• Photos (best seen on ArtBistro) – design direction and product management for all pages (interaction design by Milan Phan)

I’d like to thank the team at Affinity for making the time I spent there one of most interesting and challenging experiences I’ve had. You guys are awesome!

My mom is a textile artist, and she’s been working hard at growing her business. Her website is a bit outdated, so we’re working on an new one for her, based on the Wordpress platform so she can easily edit it herself.

For the site, I started with a basic skin and tweaked it for her needs (new logo, colorscheme, some layout modifications) and added a photo gallery plugin with some custom CSS work. The site is still in development, but you can check it out here.

Yesterday I gave a brief talk about web design at the Pixel graphic design club Alumni Day at UC Davis. Here are some of the notes I wrote down when I was thinking about the talk. The slides for the talk are included below, but probably aren’t as meaningful without the verbal component.

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The complexity and reach of the projects I’m working on has increased exponentially since I graduated. But the questions and process to solve the problems are fundamentally the same. Design provides a framework that is rarely taught in schools: a method for creating intelligent solutions to complex problems.

My advice to you: embrace the fact that everything in your life can (and should?) be a design problem. Think beyond graphic design, exhibit design, fashion design. See the world from a more holistic perspective – the world is a place full of complex problems in need of intelligent solutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

During my last quarter at UC Davis, I worked on an independent study project to build a wiki focused on sustainable exhibit design – it’s now called the Green Design Wiki. I put it up on the web during the project and have updated it periodically since then. I checked the analytics for the site recently, and found it’s getting more traffic than expected. On March 22, Paul Orselli mentioned the wiki in his interview with Tim McNeil, the professor at UC Davis who was my advisor on the project. In the interview, Tim describes the wiki the we created:

Above and beyond the Design Museum website and exhibitions, the wiki is the most practical resource we can provide to the museum community. It is intended to provide a basic grounding in sustainable design concepts and initiate an ongoing dialogue about greening the exhibition design field. The array of materials and products is rapidly evolving, a wiki based platform is the best model for having others contribute and for keeping it current.

I hope the wiki has become a valuable resource to those that have stumbled upon it. Related to this goal, I recently came across the Huddler GreenHome site, a new community based around sustainable living products. After joining the site I realized that they might be interested in the Green Design Wiki – it turns out that the products used in exhibit design overlap in many areas with products required for the home (lighting, heating and cooling, paints and finishes, flooring, furniture…). After some quick work from their community manager, much of the content of the Green Design Wiki is now mirrored at GreenHome. Hopefully this will help spread the ideas on the wiki to as many people as possible.

So after spending some time to migrate my blog from a $90/year hosted Typepad account to my self-hosted Wordpress install (since I’ve spent the last 6 months learning the basics of PHP this seemed much easier when I first looked into it last year), upgrading to WP 2.5, I’m finding myself inspired to start writing some things here again. Since I like to use this blog as a record of my own thoughts and work, I thought I’d share some recent work I’ve done. Last week we launched some new features on the Affinity Labs sites, probably the biggest release I’ve managed so far, and I’m pretty excited about the new UI we’ve created for our some of our channel pages and our article pages. First, the old design (thanks Google cache!)

And the new design: