Last week I gave my Gamification 101 presentation to the local Refresh Dallas meeting. This was the second meeting since bringing Refresh back, and I was glad to see around 40+ Designers, developers, and other creative types attend.

Here was the description for the talk:

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work. See how these trends are effecting e-commerce, entertainment, and even non-profit organizations.

Jeremy will be presenting the latest trends and news around Gamification – updated from his Big Design presentation earlier this year.

Here’s my presentation:

or view on speakerdeck to download PDF.

And here are some photos from the event:

See all photos of last weeks Refresh Dallas meeting.

When talking about Gamification in regards to UX/UI Design there are two sides: the surface UI view of Gamification – where you add elements to your project to make them more game like, but without the underlying understanding of “why” an element may or may not work. Then there is the very deep psychology understanding of what makes us tick. Why we do what we do, and how to effect us to do something different. You can do one without the other, but you’ll end up with something that fades quickly.

Ready to dive in to the world of Gamification? Stop by Refresh Dallas for some good conversation!

Refresh Dallas

Thursday October 13, 2011
7:00PM to 9:00PM

Improving Enterprises
16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 100
Addison, Texas 75001

Hope to see you there!

This week the local Dallas UPA held a Big Design Preview event, where 40+ people got to hear 10 minute previews on some of the great upcoming talks here at the GameStop office.

There was a large turnout – and as always, the Dallas UPA is a great place to meet new people, get introduced to the local User Experience community, and hear from peers on new methods, books, resources, and more.

After the opening mixer, we heard from:

@BrianKSullivan
Designing for Awareness

@digitalcandy
Remove the Suck: Lessons in Product Differentiation

@mattdonovan
Defending Creative Designs

@marcelosomers
Use the Force To Build Your Strategy

@suredoc
Narrate This: How You Can Own Your Own Story

@schubox
Critical Thinking for Creatives: How to Make Decisions Faster

@AdamtheIA
Innovation: Ideas are Just the Beginning

Be sure to check out all the great speakers at this year’s Big Design: http://bigdesignevents.com/speakers

I also previewed my talk:

Game On: Everything you need to know about how games are saving changing the world

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work.

With “Game On” Jeremy Johnson will take you on a tour of gaming trends – which includes everyone’s favorite gaming buzz words: gamification, gameful, game layer, gamestorming, game mechanics, gameplay, game theory and good old video games. How’s that for a extra helping of games? Let’s top it off with a Call of Duty deathmatch – who’s game?

Along with the preview I handed out a list of books that will go well with this talk:

(Download PDF)

Big Design is this month! Get you’re tickets, and get ready for the biggest meetup of Designers, coders, technologists, and social media gurus in the DFW area!

I was lucky to have been asked to be part of the TEDx Dallas Idea Week. CoHabitat hosted a Mobile Salon, where myself and others talked about and answered questions about mobile design and development.

Before the panel, Vijay Thakkar (Technical Director at Newtoy – aka. makers of Words with Friends) gave a great talk on how their team works, and how they’ve released some great software – all in a short amount of time. It was one of those great small-teams-kicking-ass type of stories, and how you can bring this type of process to your organization.

After the presentation, I sat on the mobile panel where we answered questions around mobile development, design, and general mobile business questions.

Here are some photos from the event:

You can view all photos from the event here.

Today I gave a short presentation on “Taking Your Content Mobile” at Open Camp here in Dallas. It’s now easier than ever to quickly create a mobile specific version of your site using a few simple tools/plug-ins. If you’re not ready now, you’ll need to start thinking about it – and I’ll show you your options.

Surprisingly when I asked how many people had a mobile version of their site, less then half raised hands. And this is coming from a more tech focused audience at Open Camp. I should of asked what’s stopping everyone, and it could be the “why?” – why go mobile?

While Apple continues the marketing of the iPhone viewing “the real web”, many sites are easier to navigate, view, and scroll around when modified for the small screen (not to mention load faster).

The options breakout something like this:

• hosted
• plug-ins
• custom dev
• themes / templates
• style-sheets
• adaptive-layouts
• auto-generate

In my presentation I go over each of these, with examples and links:

If you haven’t gone mobile before today, now is your chance!

I’ve received some great comments, questions, and kudos from my IA Summit and Big Design talks on Mobile Strategy, and I’ve heard from a good number of people that they’re using the presentation to make decisions about mobile strategy on their own (which is great!). I did put together a couple of quick worksheets that could help turn the presentation into a mini-workshop for anyone trying to make decisions about what to do in mobile.

The first is really just a follow-along worksheet, where you can take notes, and fill in the blanks:

Download PDF

The second is a sketch sheet, where you can start to vision out and do a little designing of your own. Sketch out a couple pages, and see if your interactions and flows make sense.

Download PDF

I added some things to remember while sketching:

• Simplify the design
• Design for touch – not mouse
• Note common mobile UI patterns
• Think about context – traveling vs. at home
• Design for speed – let them get to what they need quickly
• Rank functionality – you don’t need everything!
• Follow usage patterns – what are your users doing on mobile
• Remember location
• Don’t cram too much
• Note phone features – GPS, Camera, etc…

Hopefully this will help you or your company come to a decision on your mobile strategy.

The signage was bigger and better thanks to fastsigns being a sponsor this year.

It’s really amazing the great talent we have in the area, and this year we augmented with some great out-of-towners like: Jared Spool, Bill Scott, Chris Bernard, and Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Stephen Anderson had us supplied with a mini-set of Mental Notes cards.

Many of the slide decks were out on Note & Point from the presentations at Big Design: Kelsey Ruger, Travis Issacs, and Joe Dyer. And a couple more presentations on the Big Design SlideShare group.

But what about the parties you ask? Yes we have those as well.

What does success look like for Big Design? A great group of people – wanting to connect, share and explore new topics.

Looking for more info about Big Design and how it went? Check out the #bigd10 hashtag, and some of the blog posts and photos that followed the conference:

My photos on Flickr

@michaelcummings flickr set

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-day-1-secret-entrance.html

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-conference-my-timeline.html

http://worldofdevign.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/putting-on-my-bigd10-yellow-hat/

http://www.mkanderson.com/portal/archives/1797

http://derans.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-design-conference-2010-recap.html

http://www.madmacgirl.com/2010/05/30/brief-reflections-on-the-bigdesign-conference/

http://baxie404.com/2010/05/big-d-conference-day-1/

First, I went over the general trends and numbers of what’s going on in the mobile space – nothing in my opinion moves faster, or changes more frequently. It hard to keep-up, and new stats come out everyday.

To start here’s my presentation (hosted on SlideShare), you can download the PDF here, or listen to the podcast.

The first step (after learning a bit about mobile in general) is determining what type of mobile project you have:

• Mobile First
• Content
• Application or ecommerce
• Entertainment

Each of these have specific properties that will help inform your strategy. As an example, if you’re creating a Mobile First product – you’re going to need to target multiple devices, starting with one of the dominate mobile OSes: iPhone or Android. You’re going to most likely go native, as your project being mobile specific will need access to many of the phones core functionality. That, vs a content site with a well established .com – who would want to go with something like a mobile formatted website as a companion to the desktop site.

The second step is to get into the design process, which has lots of factors:

• What parts of your existing site need to go mobile? (if you have an existing site…)
• Who are your mobile users?
• What devices are they using?
• How do you design for mobile?
• What devices do you need to focus on?
• What technologies do you use?

I try to answer all these, and almost like a decision tree, you usually come out with a solid plan to move forward.

At the end of the presentation I go over a number of upcoming trends surrounding mobile. I’f you’re looking to keep up with mobile trends, I’ve created a twitter account that posts all the mobile related articles I’m currently reading: @mobilefeeds

Luke W. (www.lukew.com) attended my talk, and posted a recap - IA Summit: The Mobile Question – and boxesandarrows just posted the podcasts, you can download my presentation’s podcast here.

My slides make a bit more sense with me talking to them ;-) so I’d like to see everyone in the Dallas, TX area come see me at Big (D)esign on Saturday, May 29th – and if you’re getting ready for a mobile project, see me at the conference for some one-on-one.

The thing about mobile is that it’s always changing. Today as I write this on a plane with my iPad (which just came out this past weekend) i’m wondering about the iphone event apple is putting on later today and how that will effect my presentation. Hopefully not much :-) Either way, I’m ready for tomorrow and interested to hear stories from all the UX professionals at the IA Summit.

In my presentation I have a snapshot of the current mobile space (side note: whenever I try to type “c” I try to use my fingernail, which doesn’t work on a touch screen…) and then I walk through a way to help you and your team to come up with a mobile plan. A plan that’s specific to your experience, users, and technology.

Mobile has been a passion of mine for a long time. I’ve had Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, Sony, iPods, etc… And never until I tried an iPhone did someone get it right, a light and fast experience that responds like an extension of your arm.

I’m not fully a iPhone fanboy – I really like a lot of the AI (After iPhone) devices. I’ve played with Android, and Palm Pre devices – all really nice, in fact some better than the iPhone in some ways. This “age” of mobile is just exciting! I don’t think since the first GUI devices have we seen so many new human-computer interactions developed in such a short time.

As i’ve mentioned before, as technology becomes smaller and cheaper – talking, connected, interactive, disposable, video cereal boxes here we come!

If you’re here at the IA Summit, I hope you stop by to discuss mobile design and development with me!

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!