Instead of rehashing what the site does, I encourage you to check out our blog post about it. The Ars Technica write-up on us is also quite detailed and accurate. Better yet, go to Raptr and sign up!

Those who have managed to remain in contact with me during this ride will know that it’s been many long days and nights leading up to this. To the friends and family that read this blog, I’m hoping to email/talk/see/phone you more often now that the product is out but don’t be surprised if I submerge again to really sink my teeth into writing my book.

Every time I write one of these blog posts talking about something I’ve been working on for awhile, I feel like I’m writing some sort of awards acceptance speech (“I’d like to thank the Academy”) so I’ll just leave it as a an announcement. Go check it out.

Stephen Anderson clearly has similar philosophies and this year at the IA Summit, he discusses some of the inspiration he’s gathered from games, cars, consoles, phones and more.

Continuing the Inspiration

Before I go into the notes I took, I’d first like to mention that the first think I thought when Stephen was presenting was, “he has the same hobby as I do.” I knew that we needed to share links with each other but even better would be for us to share links with everyone. So I created a Twitter account called Inspiring, where Stephen, Coley, Patrick Haney (who runs a web inspiration Flickr set) and I will post inspiring, innovative or beautiful artifacts. Do subscribe and check it out.

The Presentation

Stephen begins by discussing some of the objects he’s tried to convince his family he needs: the iPhone, the Nintendo Wii and the Toyota Prius. He’s succeeded in getting the iPhone thus far but he’s hoping his rationale of needing these items for research and inspiration will eventually fly (I also employ similar tactics when discussing World of Warcraft, but I actually do believe it’s one of the most immersive experiences today and as such, deserves to be studied – or so I shall claim).

Taking the iPhone as an example, Stephen asks how the iPhone has impacted web design. This question is interesting because the iPhone is undeniably innovative for mobile phone interfaces, but has it inspired changes in other medium? As it so happens, the iPhone has inspired such changes as the on/off controls in jQuery’s checkbox as well as interfaces such as Muxtape or Grooveshark which have iPhone-like interfaces for non-iPhone usage.

Stop Default Thinking

In an example which hit quite close to home, he asked where people would get inspiration from for redesigning an airline site. As one who has been involved with both British Airways and Cathay Pacific, I was feeling rather sheepish when I recognized that I fell into the trap of only looking at competitor sites for ideas and reference. As a contrast to the ubiquitous interfaces that adorn all the travel sites, he showed Wundrbar, a natural language flight search engine.

To further prove his point, he quoted a Forrester Research paper:

… look beyond immediate industry rivals for innovative design ideas. Why? Frankly, your competitors may be getting it wrong. But, more importantly, your customers visit Web sites outside of your industry, which their raises expectations about the types of experiences the Web can provide, expectations that remain intact when they come to your site.

With that, Stephen demands that we should all stop “default thinking” in a number of ways. First, to stop looking only within our industry or even medium and second, to think beyond what we traditionally think is our toolbox of drop downs, radio buttons, etc.

Anything is Possible

Just to get things straightened out, Stephen discusses how there are a great deal of hardware and software changes that have made many exciting things possible. Technologies such as touch screens, gesture interfaces, lightweight desktop applications, etc. are enabling much more. Further, Stephen claims that natural behaviours are better than learned behaviours, unless the learned behaviour greatly increases satisfaction or performance (e.g., QuickSilver).

He uses a Willy Wonka quote to illustrate the ultimate point, but I’ll paraphrase with a quote from Jonathan Trevor, the engineer behind the Pipes editor, when we were working on the project:

It isn’t, “can it be done?”. Anything is possible. It’s a question of, “how hard is it?”

Hiding Data Until It’s Needed

Although the examples provided by Stephen are set in the context of his projects, I’ll simply detail some of the sources he provide as inspiration and how they might be applied. These examples discuss how one can rein in a large amount of data and navigation to a manageable interface.

The XO Laptop utilizes the Sugar Interface which contains a frame with contextual actions. This frame, however, does not appear until the cursor is close to the edge of the screen and thus, stays nicely hidden until needed. Stephen applies this to the web by hiding information until needed.

The Wii, Club Penguin, iPhone and Quicksilver all employ what is called a “Hub & Spoke” model of navigation. Rather than illustrating the entire navigation, or going with traditional primary/secondary navigation, these interfaces have a hub which you return to before navigating to another top level action (e.g., the home buttons on the Wii and iPhone). This model can be easily applied to websites in a similar fashion to reduce clutter.

Games and advanced desktop tool such as Adobe products have often used panes and customizable interfaces to deal with a range of user ability. This level of customization and the breaking apart of panes through lightweight desktop clients or layers on top of a page can achieve similar effects.

Other interfaces discussed with regards to hiding data include Songza, which uses a radial menu, Picnik, which hides its navigation when in the context of a tool and the iPhone’s Mobile Safari tab structure which doesn’t display the tabs at al times and sacrifices clicks for screen real estate.

Communicating Content and Context

To illustrate some examples of visual interfaces that convey content and context in a clear and concise manner, Stephen showed Aaron Jasinski’s portfolio, Disco.app’s simplistic CD burning tool, Get Satisfaction’s clear indicators of mood through smileys, and Microsoft Popfly’s phyiscal representation of data objects as boxes.

Finally, Stephen wrapped up with a number of very visually powerful interfaces including Piclens (which I recommend and use), Jing, Schematic’s portfolio and the tag cloud from CookThink.

I let you guys play too many video games when you were kids.

Well it turns out that may have been true. Of the 114 games listed in this video (via DocPop), I’ve played 83. Here are the 31 that I somehow skipped. As a side note, the biggest omission, Civilization, was very deliberate.

1. Adventure 1980
2. Pitfall 1981
3. Final Fantasy 1987
4. Maniac Mansion 1987
5. Mega Man 1987
6. Commander Keen 1989
7. Civilization 1991
8. Micro Machines 1991
9. Sensible Soccer 1992
10. Dune II 1992
11. Virtua Racing 1992
12. Starfox 1992
13. Myst 1993
14. The Settlers 1994
15. Earthworm Jim 1994
16. Donkey Kong Country 1994
17. Chorono Trigger 1995
18. Rayman 1995
19. NiGHTS Into Dreams 1996
20. Pokemon Gold/Silver 1999
21. Ratchet and Clanck 2002
22. Call of Duty 2003
23. Wind Walker 2003
24. Warioware 2003
25. Rome: Total War 2003
26. Final Fantasy XII 2006
27. FIFA Soccer ’07 06
28. Sam and Max Episodes 1-6 2006
29. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion 2006
30. Viva Pinata 2006
31. Motorstorm 2007

As it turns out, iilwy is a fascinating site in terms of its experience design. There’s a lot of interesting aspects of the site I could discuss but I’ll focus on three:

• creating a barrier such that it takes effort to have social contact
• the emergent behaviour of an open system
• using a points system on a social site

It Takes Effort

The premise of iilwy is that dating sites are full of crap to wade through – especially if you’re a hot girl. I don’t have any personal experience of sites like Match.com but my understanding is that for a monthly fee, you earn the “right” to message x number of people a month. So as month’s end approaches, guys will feel that to get their money’s worth, they should contact as many people as they can.

The end result is that popular people on Match end up with the equivalent of spam or as founder Dan Albritton says, like every guy at a bar hitting on a girl without shame.

Iilwy is based on “games” each person creates. Players use the in game point system to “bid” on games. The top 5 bidders at the end of the game are eligible to be picked as the winner by the game owner and the winner and game owner are subsequently contacts who can contact each other through the site messaging system.

This filter puts the power back in the hands of each individual, no matter how popular. They can pick and choose who they actually want to be able to have contact them effectively creating effort to have somebody in your contact list. Not surprisingly, that jives extremely well with Dan’s “hittng on a girl at a bar” analogy.

As my coworker Sarah Cooper at Yahoo! mentioned recently, social network “friends bins” are terrible analogies of the real world. You don’t make a friend by clicking a single button. It takes effort, communication and most of all interaction to get to know someone.

Iilwy’s game system is actually a great system for meeting and filtering new people well beyond just the dating realm. In this case, a barrier that makes doing something harder is desired and very deliberate in its design.

Emergent Game Behaviour

The move away from just being another dating site is actually fairly pronounced on iilwy. The subtitle of the site is: “find. flirt. bid.” Dan Albritton says that they don’t encourage the games people create to focus on resulting in a date but that’s not reflected in the site. When you start a new game, there are a number of suggested games such as:

“I want to learn the merengue”

“Let’s go see some standup”

“Looking for a running partner”

All of these suggest the winner of the game will be picked for some sort of activity. Luckily, iilwy abides by a common design principle of late: leave it open, see how the users use it. Twitter is a great example of this. Twitter has but one box with a prompt, “what are you doing?” Many people new to Twitter take this literally and only update to answer that question – which can get dull pretty quickly.

But because there was no defined syntax, nor rules, Twitter became a soapbox for just about anything. People could express their opinions, tell people where the party is, ask for help or even use it to announce engagements.

In much the same manner, iilwy has evolved and the definition of “game” on the site has become more and more broad. The games are much more creative now, ranging from basic “what’s your favourite movie?” to intricate “haiku challenge” games to even more demanding “video dares“. Some, instead of offering a promise of a date, offer something in return such as a drawing or a greeting card.

As an experiment, I created a game that crossed the boundary between points and actual US currency.

High Score

There are a lot of inherent dangers of setting up any community with a points or scoring system that’s explicit but also a lot of inherent benefits. Obviously, one can incent their users to participate in certain activities by dangling points on a stick and equally, users can be dissuaded from other activities when the cost is prohibitive.

I’ve been playing MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft since ’98, including numerous betas. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of parallels in the design of a persistent world’s economy and in game point systems like iilwy.

One problem that many of them face is the crossover into real world wealth. Games attempt to design such that the economy is self contained and is not affected by how much “real” money a player has. In WoW, this has become a rampant issue as many sites (mostly operating in China) are offering “farming” services where you pay them to make you in game gold.

Currency, even in a game, requires time and effort. Time is worth money. So my experimental game was to see what kind of exchange rate I could set for the points in iilwy. Instead of paying for the points directly, however, I put the money towards charity. The result? One of the highest scoring games I’d seen on the system at 2060.

Another issue commonly faced by these games is the issue of inflation. In the real world, economics is defined as the science of unlimited wants and limited resources to fulfill those wants. Games inherently have unlimited resources, however and so artificial “money sinks” are necessary to compensate. In WoW, new “features” were introduced specifically to deal with such issues – armour and weapons went through decay and would have to be repaired and higher level spells required reagants to cast. Each of these sinks forced players to spend money in such a way that they were essentially removed from the world – no player reaped the benefits of the money spent.

This issue is one I think iilwy is going to find themselves facing. There are very few money sinks within the site at the moment: inviting a player to create a game costs 200 point, selecting a winner only yields 90% of the points bid, and adding someone to your watch list costs 10 points. But logging into the system daily yields 50 points each time and even with the cut, bidding on other players is still transferring 90% of your bids to another player, keeping the wealth inside the game.

Already, there’s evidence of inflation. Initially, inviting a user to create a game cost 10 points but this amount was too little and presumably, people were still getting spammed with invitations. As time progresses, the overall pool of points within the site will continue to increase. Unless iilwy sets up new ways to spend points that take the points out of the economy entirely, they’ll find themselves with an inflation problem and will need to increase the price of inviting users to create games over and over – making it prohibitive for new players to even consider doing so.

Overall, iilwy is incredibly well designed in its interaction. It’s not rich in features but chooses to do each little thing in a very distinct and deliberate manner. I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the better designed point systems was implemented in what’s essentially a dating site but I am. Hopefully, other sites that decide to incorporate game mechanics are taking notes.

Remember Monopoly? Remember the rules? Remember when you’d actually read the rules on about the fifth time you play and suddenly realize the rule you thought was a rule actually isn’t at all?

Every kid has their “house rules” for Monopoly and they range from obscure to geeky to downright universal. For example, here’s two rules paraphrased:

If you land on GO instead of passing it, you get $400 instead of $200.

If you need to pay taxes, it goes in the middle pot. When someone lands on Free Parking, they get the middle pot.

Neither of those rules are in the rulebook and yet, every kid knows these rules exist. Some are aware of their unofficial status while other believe it to be part of the basic rule set but either way, we just knew. How is this possible?! Every child around the world that played Monopoly somehow knew these same side house rules? I’d go back to Vancouver and the same rules were mentioned. Don’t forget, we’re also talking pre-internet.

It would be fascinating to have plotted how these rules propagated.

I was able to attend a Wired party during E3 where Will Wright of The Sims and SimCity (and really, anything Sim) fame was giving the latest demo of Spore. Spore is a game where you go basically from amoeba all the way up to intergalactic travel and all the evolutionary steps in between.

Much like how The Sims gave a lot customization in the design and building of houses, Spores gives the same control over the design of actual creatures, robots, buildings, etc. To show how easy to use the customization interface is, Will asked for a volunteer from the audience. Everybody knew that among the audience was Robin Williams.

“Is there someone in the audience who, oh I don’t know, might’ve played an alien on TV?”

Robin, an avid gamer, gladly stepped up. I managed to capture a video of most of the little sequence.

I’ll also be representing for Off Panel. We got all new business cards printed for that and we’re hoping to attract a few creators. We’re giving $100 to any referrals for people that sign with us or an iPod Nano for two referrals!

The week after, I’m part of LAP POP 2.0 which largely involves the same crew. It’s a celebration of the arts in techies – especially Asian techies. The event is curated by Min Jung with participation from Nicole and Robert (Courtney exhibited her photos in the first one). I’m still deciding what to talk about but it will likely be another immigration anecdote or two.

Finally, I’ve decided to go to E3 in May – also for the first time. I’m hoping to see some Playstation 3 or Nintendo Revolution stuff. Partly, I’m satisfying my video game geekery but I’m also hoping to get some inspiration in designing engaging and immersive environments.

Jamie and Mike, originally uploaded by kev/null.

My brother returned from Seattle the other day and said, “Penny Arcade is going to mention us!”

K: “That’s awesome! You’ll have the game for download by then?”
J: “Yeah.”
K: “Is it up on GameSpy yet?”
J: “Don’t know if it will be by then. I worked it out, we have 192Gigs of bandwidth available.”
K: “… did you do the math on that?”
J: “no … (tap) (tap) (tap) 192gb for 30mb download is 6400 downloads”
K: “…”
J: “That’s not a lot.”
K: “No, no it isn’t.”

Luckily for him, the game did show up on gamespy in time for download. It’s a good thing he’s better at making games than he is at logisitcal foresight!