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

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!

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.

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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:

During the summer of 2007, my roommate Porter Felton and I had an idea about where mobile technology might be going. It was before the release of the iPhone SDK, but the potential of mobile, location aware technology was still very clear. We began working on an idea for a location aware service that would find the most popular events around you based on popularity within your group of friends.

We decided not to pusue the business idea after looking at a number of other companies doing similar things (Loopt, Whirled, etc), but not before I designed and coded a working prototype for nightlife destinations in San Francisco. I learnd basic PHP and MySQL to write this site, which has CSS skins for both iPhone and desktop browsers. You could link it up with your Facebook account to see venues your friends were attending, and see lists of venues ranked by proximity and popularity.

Doing all this in a web browser seems rather quaint now that the iPhone SDK is available, but at the time I wrote the prototype, Safari was the only place for app developers to make iPhone services.

The prototype is still functional (except for the Set My Location address mapping feature), and can be accessed at www.gettoutt.com

Buy Smart – A Strategic Consumption Campaign: A graphic campaign designed to be applied to the built environment to drive awareness of the impact that consumers can have with their choices

California Lighting Technology Center: Working with my partner Ashley Brown, we redesigned the CLTC exhibit space and designed a modular case system to support their needs for flexibility in the space. I used Illustrator, Photoshop, and SketchUp to bring the designs together.

Green Design Wiki: a resource for exhibit designers interested in sustainability. I still maintain this site, and it gets about 1,000 hits a month.

During fall quarter of my last year in college, the final project of my web design class was to create an online portfolio. I built mine in Flash, and it serves as a mostly complete catalog of the projects I had completed up to the time I built the portfolio. It doesn’t include the work from my last quarter of college, the most important of which is the Green Design Wiki, which I still maintain.

This flash portfolio includes print, web, and exhibit desing projects, complete with brainstorms, sketches, and final implementations.

View the flash portfolio.