Gamer-influenced Design

Last year I blogged a little about how we can learn to design for Feedback and Problem Solving by drawing inspiration from games design: https://blogs.msdn.com/shanemo/archive/2007/05/22/discretionary-use-of-mandatory-tools-or.aspx

(Shameless plug: Sarah Bloomer and I also talk about this in our "Back to the Future" tutorial.)

Meanwhile, Greg Willis sent around this article today: SaaS vendor quits browser to boost sales.

The article which talks about how Entellium has drawn inspiration from gaming to make a 'liquid interface' for their rich client WPF CRM application.

In an earlier article (Gaming comes to business software), Phil Wainwright provides a great summary of how gaming fits with business software:

"games software does a much better job of keeping users focused on the task in hand, only reveals advanced features when you're ready for them, lets you try out different ways of doing things without penalty, and rewards you when you become more skilled at using the software."

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 20, 2008
  Interesting observation... And I totally agree - games are really good at building UI's that are specialized to the task you're doing. Lots to be learned from UI-rich games like Sim City, Real Time Strategy Games (Starcraft etc), or role playing games like WoW... It's easy to get caught up in conventions... Quite often I bump into apps with a "File" menu, that has nothing to do with file-management... :P