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.

I recently finished reading Geoffrey Moore’s tech marketing classic Crossing the Chasm. After finishing it, I can see why this was such a popular book when it came out in 1991. Coming from a design and ecology background devoid of marketing experience, I appreciated the easy-to-read primer for marketing disruptive technologies. Because of the stage I’m at with the ideas I’m thinking about lately, one of the most helpful sections was The Claim: Passing the Elevator Test. A few notes:

The elevator test: “Can you explain your product in the time it takes to ride up in  an elevator?”

Why it’s a bad sign if you can’t pass the elevator test (pg 152-153):

• Whatever your claim is, it cannot be transmitted by word of mouth.
• Your marketing communications will be all over the map.
• Your R&D will be all over the map.
• You won’t be able to recruit partners and allies.
• You are not likely to get financing from anybody with experience.

• For (target customers – beachhead segment only)
• Who are dissatisfied with (the current market offering)
• Our product is a (new product category)
• That provides (key problem-solving capability)
• Unlike (the product alternative)
• We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application)

A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence

…people should already understand the building blocks of the pitch: buses, bombs, Jaws, space, the seven deadly sins, Flickr, Firefox, MMOGs, et cetera. The pitch combines the building blocks by using analogy, synthesis, juxtaposition, combination, whatever; e.g. “Jaws in space.”

“Taking actions to create, grow, maintain or defend markets.”

“Winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond. If we are very small, then we must search out a very small pond indeed.”

“Cross the chasm by targeting a very specific niche market where you can dominate from the outset, force your competitors out of that market niche, and then use it as a base for broader operations.”

“… because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus, chasing every opportunity that presents itself, but finding themselves unable to deliver a salable proposition to any true pragmatist buyer.”

“A vertical market with a broken mission-critical process creates an attractive beachhead opportunity… The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm.”

“Success through subtraction is the key lesson here. And that subtraction was made possible by a vote of confidence in design esthetics and in target marketing. By contrast, the companies who failed had over-designed for their target market because they were hedging their bets.”

“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”

“Expect that the best scenarios will be ‘whole product challenged’ – if it were easy, someone else would have done it. Indeed, the fact that it is hard will create a barrier to entry in your favor once you have stepped up to the solution.”

“The best sub-segmentation is based on special interest groups within the general community. These typically are very tightly networked and normally form because they have very special problems to solve.”

“…your market alternative helps people identify your target customer (what you have in common) and your compelling reason to buy (where you differentiate). Similarly, your product alternative helps people appreciate your technology leverage (what you have in common) and your niche commitment (where you differentiate). Thus you create the two beacons that triangulate to teach the market your positioning.”

“…market alternatives call out the budget and thus the market category, and product alternatives call out the differentiation.”

“Time to establish a sustainable market position, and not cost or breadth of sales is your critical success factor. You simply cannot afford to lose one day of opportunity, and the only channel that would ever be that responsive to your needs is your own.”

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 »

When I went to Stanford for their annual entrepreneurship conference, I wished that I could have cloned myself and gone to more sessions. So many of the topics and panelists were relevant to the things I’m interested in right now. I was excited to hear that many of the sessions would be filmed and posted online. The best one I’ve found so far is Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, speaking about writing business plans and pitching VCs. The video isn’t embedable, but is available here.

I watched the video twice, once to listen and once to take notes. My notes are after the break. 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.

After reading “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative” by Ken Robinson on and off for the last year, I finally finished the book on a plane flight home from San Diego tonight. Since I’ve spent so long finishing the book, my thoughts on it are biased toward the last few chapters:

“Creativity often comes about by making unusual connections, seeing, analogies, identifying relationships between ideas and processes that were previously not related. This is precisely why some of the most effective creative teams are interdisciplinary.” (pg 188)

This bit comes to me at an interesting time, as two weeks ago I was reading a post on Futuristic Play that discussed models of viral growth in Facebook applications. I was surprised to find graphs and models that were similar to those I worked with when I studied ecology. One important component of the post I was reading about viral growth discussed the difference between growth in an unlimited vs limited market – when growth models account for the 60 million or so user population of Facebook, they change from looking very healthy to showing a scary looking crash. Interesting to me, as these look eerily similar to the concept in ecology known as carrying capacity, and the crash idea similar to what happens when a species or ecosystem surpasses the carrying capacity of it’s environment. The similarities between these two ideas lead me to believe that there might be some useful overlap in models I studied in school as an ecology major and my current interest in social networks and web apps. Hopefully more to come on this in the near future (by hopefully I mean two things: 1) hopefully I’ll make more interesting connections and 2) that I’ll be able to write them down and post the them here). 

One more bit from Out of Our Minds, this time a bit that is applicable to challenges I’m working with at Affinity Labs as we grow from a small startup into a bigger division of Monster Worldwide:

“The most creative periods in the lives of organizations are often in the early stages of its work where there is a rush of excitement about the possibilities to be explored and before the organization itself has settled into fixed institutional structures and routines. Stimulating or reviving the creative impulse in organizations often requires that existing borders be perforated or dissolved so that ides can flow freely between different specialists who are too often kept apart from each other. The point of these collaborations is not for different specialists to impose their own ways of working on each other. It is to benefit from the stimulation of each other’s expertise” (pg 188)

It’s also worth noting that the reason that I started reading this book in the first place was because I watched Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk, which I found to be both entertaining and thought provoking. I include it here for convenience, but I recommend downloading the higher quality MP4 file from TED.

It’s been a while, a long while, since I’ve written here. My last post, on June 11th, was written a few days before I graduated from college (UC Davis), and began life in this crazy place known as the “real world”. I suppose it was slightly prophetic to end my last post asking, “Will I blink? Or will I take the step forward?”I think I’ve taken steps forward. I’ve probably taken almost as many backwards, but progress is being made, at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Much has happened in my world in the last four months. I finished school and continued my freelance design projects, and managed to build a business that made enough money that I thought I was going to continue freelancing for the foreseeable future. Things change quickly though… more on that later. At the end of July I moved out of Davis, a place that’s been a great home to me for the five years I spent in school (minus a long trip, and then a shorter one, to Australia). Although I didn’t think much about it when I was moving out, Davis is and was a wonderful place to be a student, a great place to do some serious growing up. I grew fond of that place, maybe more so now that I don’t live there anymore, but looking back 5 years to a time when I lost sleep over deciding between UCLA, Cal, and UC Davis, I’m fairly certain that I made the right choice.—

“Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than its worth.” – Baz Luhrman.

—A few days after I moved out, I spent almost a month traveling in South America with my dad and my brother. I haven’t spent this much time with them since I moved away to college, and it was great to reconnect with them and spend sometime learning about the person that my once little brother has grown into.I have a lot of thoughts about some of the things I saw in South America… I think I’ll save them for another day, but it was an eye-opening trip in many ways.I came back to California ready to get back to work, and moved into San Francisco the day after I got back… Unfortunately, my once burgeoning freelance business had pretty much come to a halt in the August slowdown that (apparently) is typical of corporate america. It was a nerve wracking few weeks until things finally started to get rolling again, but that kind of slowdown was new to me, and it spooked me. A re-evaluation of priorities (the flexible schedule student life becomes less important, a steady paycheck and professional development becomes more important) and a very strong desire to continue living in San Francisco sparked me into looking around for a full time job.Serendipity stepped in, and I figured out that what I’ve been doing in the freelance world is called web production, and after finally figuring out what to call the skills that I have, I found a job with an exciting startup (Affinity Labs) as a web producer, with my first task being to help grow an online community for artists and designers (ArtBistro). More on Affinity in a future post, but a month to the day after I started and I’m still challenged and learning new things every day, and that’s exactly how I want it to be.

Louis Pasteur, the scientist famous for confirming the germ theory of disease said once said:
"Chance favors the prepared mind."

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot lately, mostly because I’ve recently acknowledged that the only thing I’m lacking in my aspirations to run my own business is that great idea to base it around. I feel confident with the idea of running my own company, and would start doing so tomorrow, if I had an idea that I felt was worthy of that commitment. Knowing this, the next question is naturally: how do I find this great idea? Perhaps it is just chance, and great ideas are things that wake you at night with a start and force you to write them down before they slip down into the subconscious again. But I’m inclined to agree with Pasteur, and I think that there might be a method.

A few months back, I watched Ray Kurzweil’s TEDTalk. A few days ago, I read an article by Kurzweil in Inc Magazine, and I was reminded of his lecture. Kurzweils’ point that interested me was that certain things in the technology world are very predictable. You may not be able to predict what Google’s stock price will be in two years, but you can very accurately predict how expensive computer processing power is, or how cheap bandwith will be, or how much a gigabyte of storage will be. Furthermore, these trends increase not in a linear way, but in an exponential way.

The implication of this is that things that today seem impossible, prohibitively expensive, or too far ahead of the technology will be possible in the future – and the future is coming sooner than you think. In his words, "With the doubling of price performance each year in every kind of
information technology, you just need to wait a short while to find
that you can have your cake and eat it too."

OK, so what does this have to do with the next big thing? The way I figure it is that the secret to finding the next big thing is being able to recognize what is theoretically possible in today’s world but unfeasible due to financial or technological constraints. Take that idea, look down the road after 2-3 years of exponential growth, and try to see where the idea stands. Since data about bandwidth, processing power, and storage are so accurately predictable, the secret to the next big thing is being able to figure out what we can’t do today but can do three years from now – and then be the first one to do it, and do it well. I think this applies particularly to disruptive technologies – things that really change the rules of the game. In these cases, a certain market application is made possible when the growth of those predictable trends reaches a level that suddenly makes something possible that wasn’t before, in a critical point/threshold kind of model

Examples of this:

- Declining prices, increasing availability of broadband internet, digital camcorders, and consumer-level video editing lead to the YouTube explosion of user generated video content.

- Declining price of computer hard drives and digital video hardware allows the creation of a reasonably priced digital video recorder – say hello to TiVo!

- Decrease in bandwidth costs and increase in processing power make Vonage and other internet telephone services possible.

I’m not saying that coming up  with a great idea is easy – the conceptual connection between recognizing the predictable trends and realizing what (successful) products those trends will make feasible in the future is no small feat. But it’s one step closer to a methodology for identifying these ideas. And I’m convinced that the time I invest in keeping current with tech trends and learning about the bleeding edge of technology is worth the effort for the insight it may give me into the future.

More accurately, this would be a job decision update, as I was fortunate enough to have some really awesome opportunites dropped on my doorstep. Last week, I decided to move forward with a job at SNP. I’ll be doing a lot of things there, including some web design and web 2.0 kinds of things, but so far the people have proved to be great co-workers and I’m enjoying the work.