Johan Brand
Friend of Playgroup
- Loves: Salt water... where my sail boat floats, Wind (heavy ocean storms), Snow (loads of fluffy white stuff)
- Hates: Spelling (Dyslectic Norwegian living in the UK = disaster), Melting snow, Crammed tubes
- Inspired by:
- Hirosi Sugimoto
- www.carls-cars.com
- www.onedotzero.com
- intelligent people
- the ocean
- My links:
Jargon, bbc, Full Moon, Waver, Wave, Cancer Awareness, video, digital, Venn Diagram, Fans, Bart Bonte, Adnams, Winner, Brand, genius, collaboration, Social Media, Playful09, simple, Docs, GoogleWave, Colour, GoogleDocs, Facebook, games, Trending Topics, Email, Google, Raffle, Playgroup
When designing a playful experience there are many factors to consider. I have in previous posts briefly covered behaviour patterns, the need for a genuine approach and the potential in the unconnected social network of your brand.
The flow of play
Another factor you should consider are the different mental states that a playful experience takes the users through. Scott Eberle's six-step process of play (see above) is a good framework to have in mind when you map out a playful experience. It is not an exact user flow, but it does encapsulate the important mental states that the user goes through.
My advice is that you tailor the experience to the users different play personalities. This will ensure that you have a fully absorbed user, who is experiencing the euphoria and creativity of being engaged in a playful activity tailored to their specific mood and personality traits.
Quick tip
Let's say you are designing an online service for a youth market. You can then leverage the inherent strength of social media technologies to enable playful behaviour that suits the different play personalities. We have defined these enablers as follow:
- Ownership
- Sharing
- Personalisation
- Creation
- Participation
- Socialising
- Competing
Of course none of these will really work unless the users feels like these are genuine and actually give them the freedom to fully discover, connect & interact with the service and each other without too much governance. The clue is that if you have an honest and genuine approach you can trust your users and let go.
Moderation is a difficult topic and we had several questions at our Play talk regarding this. We believe that with the right approach it can be limited and does not have to become a big burden on your project team.
How?
Send us an e-mail or give us a call. We are more than happy to discuss your organisations needs and challenges.
Stuart Brown defines 8 different play personalities and they are a very good as a starting point for the different user profiles you need to consider when you create playful experiences.
Let's say you are designing a playful user experience online, then it will be useful to look at these different personalities as a mix of mindsets and mental states depending on the situation the user is in. Users can display multiple personalities traits at different stages in an experience, however the user has one dominant play personality.
For example the personality of the explorer has three variations:
- Physical - loves going to new places
- Emotional - exploring new feelings or deepening their understanding through music, movement and flirtation
- Mental - researching a new subject or discovering new experiences without moving
All of these personalities have a deep spectrum of character traits that we can draw upon when we design experiences tailored to their needs. We recommend designing these in context of your organsiastions values & needs, the play stages and behaviour patterns that we have identified.
Send us an e-mail or call if you are keen to find out more.
This slideshow presents a series of real life examples, mainly from the digital world, that you may or may not have heard of.
Stimuli slideshow @ Slideshare
It should help to create stimuli for a conversation or debate about playful experience and provide inspiration for do’s and don’ts when it comes to creating your own genuinely playful projects.
Some of these come across as apparently playful - traditional ads and marketing with a veneer of irony, piss take and other youthful traits and behaviours. Whereas others are well into the space of being genuinely playful by engaging in truly playful behaviour with users and customers, and some will be somewhere in the middle .
Whilst looking at these, it’s worth asking ourselves:
- What constitutes a really genuine playful project?
- How can the success of real world events such as music festivals and life style sports events be transferred, retained and leveraged online?
Facilitating a conversation
What do all of your clients have in common? They all interact with your brand, but are most likely not interacting with each other.
So unlock the power of your client network by connecting them and let them share their experiences, frustrations and opinions. Enable and facilitate the conversation and social connection between your users and you have taken a huge step closer to form a deeper understanding and relationship with them.
No more focus groups, these are real people in real situation that will discuss real problems.
"Brands are a network of the unacquainted" - Contagious Magazine
What did we do?
Hosting an interactive conversation about Play and engaging youth is one of our strategies to create an open conversation where Playgroup, clients, suppliers and even competitors can share ideas, frustrations and experiences regarding a topic that we all care about.
Result
It provided us with real insight, some new friends and hopefully by giving something back we established a deeper trust and respect within our network. We also provided the attendees a chance to connect with each other... we feel Playgroup can only gain from this in the long term and hopefully the same goes for our ever growing network.
Here at Playgroup we talk a lot about a genuine approach. Tell your clients, employees and investors the same story, preferably a transparent & true one.
Organisations that are genuine are inherently playful. They have adopted an authentic approach which is the default behaviour for the organsiation, next step would be to adopt an open approach.
Give a little back
Adopting playful behavior does not mean that you need to become a clown. Engaging with your audience on level terms is a good start. Dare to give a little of yourself. Just as in life, deep relationships with clients are formed when you dare to open up and give something back.
Image credit: Innocent
Inside out approach
Play is participatory, sensory, and irresistible to anybody that gets exposed to it. We recommend adopting playful behaviour based on your organisations values, this will ensure a loyal and engaged audience, but also a sustainable authentic approach. There are key play enablers that you can work into your organisation, which also will filter through to your interaction with your audience. This will be discussed in a later blog post.
Apparently playful organisations hide behind a facade of playful marketing material, which reaches the masses and ticks the box for playful engagement. But only until the client interacts with the brand through a transaction, unable to facilitate a genuine one-to-one experience, it shows it's true colours.
So adopting an inside out approach starting with your employees and values is key to develop a long term strategy that will stick.
I recommend reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Harvard Business blog which discuss P&G new value based strategy and how they have worked this into their organisation.
Another interesting case which we discussed at the talk is 'GE Adventure, a series of field trips through GE'
To really understand playful experiences we need to look at behaviour patterns:
Facebook is a persuasive technology - with loads of Play enablers - Psychologist BJ Fogg at Stanford University teaches Facebook-psychology and we can learn from these patterns of behaviour and leverage them when designing playful experiences.
The following patterns are based on a study of the most successful facebook applications:
Group Exchange (Belonging and communicating with a larger group - SuperWall, Quizzes)
Self Expression (we all have a need to be seen and express ourselves, Graffiti & iLike)
Reveal & Compare (reveal things about ourselves as long as it gives us better relations with others and strengthens our group belonging: Likeness, send Hotness)
Provoke & Retaliate ( We love to be provoked by friends, particularly when we can get back at them: Kiss Me, Zombies, X Me etc.)
Competition (Show off and accomplishment: Scrabulous, leaderboards)
Deception (Practical jokes like fake buttons etc)
We had a good interactive session this morning on the role of play in engaging the youth market. We will post the presentation and related content soon, so that we can continue the conversations.
Here are a few of the questions we tried to cover:
Why you should play?
How you can design a playful experience?
How can you actually have a genuine dialogue with young people?
Where are brands and agencies in regard to communicating with youth?
What new ways are there for young people to get themselves heard?
How can we connect (more academic-based) brands with young people?
Closing the youth-government gap?
Can you make young people loyal?
What is a genuinely playful brand?
We will also post links to all the case studies
Sometimes unique original ideas can be so simple, but yet so compelling. 100 Days of Fry is basically one illustration per day for 100 days based on the daily tweets by Stephen Fry.
A Cloudworker is someone who uses on-demand technology and collaboration tools, such as unified communications, to work anywhere and anytime, and uses the resulting freedom to enable a my-size-fits-me career path and lifestyle.
It is a term coined by blogger Venkatesh Rao and I recommend reading his series of blog posts around the subject. The cloud is here to stay and we all better get used to it, and as Rao says:
You and I weren’t born in the cloud, like today’s kids are, but we will certainly die in it...
