Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

screen maps that show where gates are. Great UX. But they also have scanners for reading
your boarding pass, to show you the right gate, and when I tried this, the scan failed—and
no information was given about where to go to locate your gate if the scan didn’t work.
This was a great reminder that sometimes it takes only one flaw for a great UX idea to
crash and burn.
The design of theme parks is a treasure trove of ideas for designing children’s apps,
as the Netflix example I gave earlier shows. The designers who came up with the idea of
using beloved characters as guides may not have drawn the concept from Disney World,
but the resulting experience is certainly an online version of the larger-than-life-sized
Disney characters who greet entrants to the Magic Kingdom.
Being a New Yorker, I’m fascinated by the signs in subways in New York and around
the world and how sign placement and clarity of message can make the difference between
people taking the uptown train when they want to go downtown, as often happens in the
New York system, or easily figuring out how to make their way through many twists and
turns to switch from one line to another, as in the bowels of the London tube system.
Honing your ability to recognize great examples of user experience design all over
your world and break them down into their essentials should be part of the daily routine of
anyone who wants to be a good UX designer. And a vital part of this learning is to make
astute translations into the software environment, not cumbersome ones.
I’ve referred many times in this book to video games as inspirations for UX, and of
course gamification is becoming increasingly popular. It’s also become a four-letter word
to some, so I think a little discussion of how to do it well and where it goes off the rails fits
into this discussion.
Foursquare is a company that has made an interesting go of it, and it is cited often in
the discussion of the rise and fall of gamification. The app, by rewarding people for
checking into locations with points and badges and allowing them to become the “mayor”
of a place, built up a huge following of smartphone owners early, every advertiser’s dream
market. In fact, the app’s success with the concept is part of the reason gamification has
become so popular in UX design.
A former coteacher of mine at General Assembly, Alex Sarlin, begins his lecture on
gamification in digital products by pointing out that games have developed such avid fans
because they’ve tapped into the neurological channel that releases the pleasure-inducing
neurotransmitter dopamine into our brains. They are the ultimate in goal- and rewardbased
behavior. Every time our avatars leap a tall building or shoot down a helicopter with
a shoulder-fired missile, we get another dopamine hit, and this creates a powerful
feedback loop. But the real artistry doesn’t come from just offering rewards; it’s in getting
the blend of challenge and reward just right. The powerful pull of a task that requires full
engagement because of the skill needed for execution was explored by the Hungarian
psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who developed the theory of flow, the cognitive
state we find ourselves in when we are engaged in such a task and are totally absorbed.
Our perception of time is warped, and when we emerge from the state, hours may have
passed when we think it’s been only a short time. Video games have harnessed the power
of flow brilliantly. The better you are at a game, the higher the level you move to, and you