Yea, I found myself and the people who I have introduced it to getting higher and higher level in strategy with every game we played. This review explains the game pretty well (but you don’t need to read it to understand what I’m talking about).

• The first time playing the game: learning the basic rules of the game.
• The second time playing:  planning in order to accelerate one’s own success.
• The third: playing assumptions of opponent strategies against them more than 2 turns ahead, ultimately improving the chances of one’s own success.

The simple game becomes very complicated very quickly, with near limitless possibilities and strategies for success. It reaches an apex of over-planning when playing opponents who are playing on a simpler level and can ultimately lead to “overthinking” and “beginners luck” which can always level a playing field.

Buy why? How does it work this well? How is this game so balanced? How is it so simple yet so complicated?

Intransitive Game Mechanics

Scary sounding, but a simple concept. It basically comes down to Rock, Paper, Scissors. The relationship of two of the options does not imply the relationship of the third. If it were transitive the rules would go as such:

if Scissors beats Paper => and Paper beats Rock => Scissors therefore beats Rock

You would imply that scissors also beats rock as it would be the lowest in the hierarchy. However, this is not the case since we all know that rock beats scissors. There is no true hierarchy and each choice has a weakness. Thus, the mechanic is intransitive. The Wikipedia entry is quite good at explaining this further

What makes this game interesting (up to a point)? The basic game is just pure chance and playing with the rules to try to win. However, there is actually some strategy to the game. Players can get play hands in order to influence their opponent’s assumptions about player’s next hands. Players can also try to guess what their opponents are about to play based on behavior observation and inference on future behavior. (http://www.wikihow.com/Win-at-Rock,-Paper,-Scissors)

Now take this very basic mechanic and put it inside a larger version of this mechanic which itself is inside a larger version of the same mechanic. Think russian dolls of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

What does this mean for the game play? Bluff strategies start to come out more often as they do in Rock, Paper, Scissors. It allows for changing strategy mid stream as a reaction to an opponent decision. It also allows for playing a variety of strategies at different levels, e.g. playing defensively in micro turn-based moves, while playing aggressively with larger meta moves that may cost time or resources (saving up).

As soon as I realized that this is what was going on with Citadels, I felt like suddenly saw the Matrix code. There is no unseeing it now. This mechanic can be found all sorts of games. Chess, Poker, Street Fighter, etc.

Enjoy the rabbit hole.

Further reading on this mechanic: Game Balance Concepts Blog: Intransitive Mechanics

Photo credit: http://gameshop.com.au

The methods are similar, the goals are similar, and they only differ in the medium. CX is user experience on a macro scale. Executed well, it seeps into the lifeblood of an organization. From the minute a current or prospective customer first hears your name, to the feeling they get when they interact with your customer support with a problem with your service or product.

This type of approach is driven from the CEO down. John Pepper (of Boloco) specifically spoke of how negative social media blasts become addressed with superior PR-type response. Regular customers of Boloco would have surely seen the great emails from the CEO himself to address potential criticism. The staff is encouraged to do whatever they have to in order to make a customer’s bad experience a good one. They are instructed to do whatever they must, in order to rectify the situation. If the intention is to improve customer experience, employees will never get in trouble for that.

Investment in to User Experience (UX), much like CX requires a large commitment and faith that the return comes in the form of word-of-mouth and brand loyally. Both of which are difficult to measure, but are integral to a growing business.

I applaud CEOs who can successfully make either of these concepts an integral part of their philosophy. If it’s not coming from the top down, thought leaders and individuals may find themselves swimming upstream. The cogs spin more efficiently when they work together for a common goal.

Over the years, this has not been a problem for me.  At this point in my career I have spent more time doing agency UX work than internal UX or Dev. What comes with that? A lot of experience with a lot of different projects, users, and businesses. (I wrote about this sort a thing a while back for UX Booth).  Over the past year or so, I have been working with a small startup project on the side called Hitchery. It keeps my mind sharp and working with a very different type of product. I easily forgot to stay conscious of my depth of knowledge of the mechanics of Hitchery and how someone foreign to the application perceives it.

What’s the solution? Well the first step is admitting you have a problem. The rest is easy once you can do that. Bring in users. Watch them use the product. Ask them the elementary questions that seem obvious to you at this point.

What becomes difficult is explaining the concept that the phone represents a bus that is attuned to real locations and that each user has autonomous characters that are out in the world in real locations (but not real characters). Users who are familiar with digital games or a certain type of lateral thinking have no trouble understanding the nature of having independent and dependent representatives in real life locations. The difficulty is trying to explain this to new users to whom this concept is completely foreign.

We are currently trying a tutorial approach for new users (with some hand-holding) to walk them through the game the first time through. Tweaking copy here and there (to account for the fact that users simply skim over instructions) has had mixed results. Our next approach is to try it with graphical overlays over the interface to explain how things work without so many of those pesky words.

At the end of the day, I don’t think anything could beat a great info graphic that simplifies the experience even more. Time will tell.

I’m open to suggestions.

Is it fun?

It has been a guess and check process since I became involved in the project. That’s not to say that it isn’t progressing, because it most certainly is. The trouble is that it is difficult to measure fun. The methodology isn’t all that much different than it would be on a standard project.

• Speak to users;
• Come up with some wild idea which we presume would add to the fun-factor of those users;
• Implement;
• Conduct usability test (and fun testing?);
• Fix pitfalls, bugs, usability issues;
• Then do it all over again.

The problem comes in between the fixes and the iteration. Did we actually add any value to the game or just add complexity? It’s hard to tell on a small scale.

Maybe engagement is somehow correlated to fun. This was a hypothesis that I quickly learned would not work. My thinking was this: What is it that would make a user open thn app during their idle time? What would make the user go out of their way to stop their lives to open the app and engage? What would engage users enough to transcend their mobile experience, and explore the game through their browser through the web interface?

Solution for measurement: Notifications. We could test the quality of key events in the game by measuring the engagement based on notifications that are sent out about game occurrences that affect the user. Notifications of passive events that occur in the game while they are not using it will possibly increase the chance that they will be reminded of its existence. This is no measure of engagement or even desirability, but rather succumbing to an alert that demand attention. This type approach has two sides:

• Either the user opens the app upon receiving a notification and enjoys what they see;
• Or they become increasingly annoyed at the notifications because the experience tied to it is predictable and not satisfying.

Once again. It doesn’t solve the problem or measure the solution accurately until the app is truly fun.

Iterations and time will tell. Until then, it’s a race to iterate quickly with a guess and check philosophy where the guess is incredibly subjective to a small sample size. Once my experience in this domain grows, I will hopefully be able to make better educated guesses and ultimately come to solutions more effectively and efficiently.

For this guide I will be using Axure RP 6. This technique should work in previous versions to some extent since it uses basic interactions. Download a free trial if you don’t already have it.

Step 1: Make a primary navigation bar (as a master) using the Menu Item, table, or arranged static text.

Step 2: Place a Dynamic Panel the width of the page that generously extends across the navigation in every direction. Name it something meaningful like “MegaDrop”. Make sure it is layered on top of the navigation.

Step 3: Add a state to the Dynamic Panel for each primary navigation item and name them appropriately for easy reference.

Step 4: Enter the edit mode for the first state. Place an Image Map Region that fills the Dynamic Panel region. This Image Map Region will act as a sort of negative space since it will close the dropdown when the user moves their mouse away from the navigation area. With the Image Map Region selected, and the widget properties visible, go to the Interactions Tab (Ctrl + 2). Select OnMouseEnter and click Add Case… Select Hide Panel(s) under Dynamic Panels. Then select “MegaDrop” (or whatever you called it in Step 2) and hit OK. You can add an animation to make it flashy, but I’ve found it can be a little buggy if the user is mousing over and out of the navigation items too fast.

Copy and paste this Image Map Region onto every navigation state.

Step 5: Make a box in the first state that will hold the dropdown content. The top of the box should away from the edges of the Image Map and in front of it. Populate the mega dropdown with whatever it needs for the navigation item it’s associated with. The tricky part is getting it to align with the top level navigation. You can try moving it to the top of the state list with the dynamic panel set to visible. Then it’s just a question of going back and forth between the state edit tab and the primary navigation view to get it right.

Repeat this for every state and navigation item.

Step 6: Go back to the primary navigation view and add an Image Map Region on top of each navigation item. It helps if they extend between each item to touch to make a solid area of separate Image Maps. Make sure that all of these Image Maps are in front of the “MegaDrop” dynamic panel with the dynamic panel extending in every direction outside of the Image Maps. We want to make sure that if the user moves their mouse above the primary navigation, they will hit the negative space.

Step 7: Get to the interactions view for one of the Image Maps you just created (similar to how you did it in step 4). Add a case for OnClick. Select Hide Panel(s) and then “MegaDrop” under the Dynamic Panels heading. Also, select Open Link in Current Window under the Links heading and find the top level navigation page the navigation item is associated with. Click Ok

Add a case for OnMouseEnter. Under the Dynamic Panels heading, select Show Panel(s) and then “MegaDrop”. Under Dynamic the Dynamic Panels heading, select Set Panel state(s) to State(s) and select MegaDrop. Then in the dropdown (at the bottom) select the state associated with the top level navigation item. Click Ok

Repeat this for each Image Map Region on the primary navigation bar.

Final Step: Generate a prototype and test it out!

Each new version of Ubuntu has some surprising new interactions.  I love to watch the interface features that work, show up years down the line in commercial software. Particularly when they receive buzz for their “Bold Innovations.”  And yes, your shiny new version of Windows is far behind. They are naturally slow (and rightfully so) to adopt new experimental design and interaction. By the time the average user gets to play with multiple virtual desktops and snapping windows, Linux users have been testing and perfecting the interaction for years.

One such innovation that drew my attention is the proposed new scrollbar for Unity. I know I’ve written about scrollbars in the past, but this is pretty cool and makes a lot of sense. We waste a lot of screen real-estate on scrollbars. We know where they are and we know how they work. Why do I have to waste my precious screen space on it? The open source community took, from what we are learning with mobile devices, and applied it to a desktop environment.

Take a look at this demo video. Then think about the benefits of a scroll bar:

• It tells us that there is more content on the current page
• It shows us where we are in relation to the size of the page
• It allows us to slowly or quickly scroll to different parts of a page

This proposed interaction accomplishes all of these things while saving screen real-estate for what we really need windows for: the content on the screen. With the growing number of touch interfaces each day and shrinking screens, why waste precious pixels on such an archaic interface element?

So what does the future of your operating system look like? Do yourself a favor and download an Ubuntu live cd and take a look.

A few weeks ago I was at the grocery store, and saw this amazing deal. Buy one Thomas’ English Muffins, get 2 free!

So I bought them… and some eggs.

I then went on a breakfast sandwich kick for 3 weeks. It was probably the greatest few weeks of my life. I laughed, I sang, I got a lot of protein.

But then one day the english muffins ran out. Things got a little stale in my food cabinet.

I went back to the grocery store looking for more english muffins and I saw another deal! Buy one get one free

But this time… it was store brand. I thought, how bad could this be? Let me tell you some thing dear blog readers.

It is bad.

Real bad. 

They taste like bread that’s just pretending to be an english muffin. When I bit into that egg sandwich, we both knew, the egg and I,  that this is was no english muffin.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet. Do not under any circumstances, trust the marketing ruse of the store brand english muffin.

I’ll have to let the “muffins” off easy.

Maybe a donation to a hungy roommate, or a mutation into a french toast of sadness.

We brave the snow storms, the traffic, and the taxing exhaustion from the week. We wake up (sometimes) early enough for first chair/tram. We live in squalor during of the week to pay for our gas, food, and passes. We bundle up, and freeze on The Flyer which is easily the coldest lift on the east coast. We scrape our gear on windblown summits. We hike when it’s too windy for the lifts to run. We hold our secret stashes sacred. We live in between the trees both on the mountain and in the back country. Then we wake up the next day, and finish what our bodies and the lift operators wouldn’t let us on Saturday before making the grueling drive back to Boston running on fumes and redbull.

Why do we do it? For weekends like this one. We were ready for a warm slushy spring weekend. There were no expectations for quality snow in the woods. Flurries were in the forecast. Maybe a dusting of a half of an inch. To be honest, I was happy for anything extra after the 340 inches we were blessed with this season. The clouds decided to stick around all day. We woke up Saturday morning to a foot of fresh dry “champagne” powder with it still coming down. The kind that explodes with each turn. The kind, your snowboard and skis float on rather than cut through. The kind that carries the unrestrained laughter and woops of adults as they regress into childhood excitement in the howling winds of Jay Peak.

We can complain about how much of a disgusting resort Jay Peak is becoming with its ice rinks, hotels, water parks, and parking garages… Yea there’s a freaking parking garage (so you don’t get snow on your car). Gross. They even started selling green cards to rich foreigners to pay for all of this. But at the end of the day, no amount of greed can ruin the splendors that nature rewards to those who are dedicated (to use the term lightly).