Productivity software should learn from game design
Shouldn’t productivity software make us want to work? I mean, it’s goal is to make us (and our company) more productive. 
Given that, the most goal-oriented software I can think of is gaming software. That industry is hyper-competitive. They know our attention and dollars are precious and they’re myopically focused on delivering value within their product. Conversely, there isn’t any competition for productivity software. Productivity software wouldn’t come close to cutting the mustard in the gaming industry. For one, we’d all be playing the same freaking game for the last 20 years. That’s 20 years of Donkey Kong. Don’t like it? Tough, sit there and play.
It’s crazy to imagine the things companies could do if they had a supporting market of hyper-competitive software vendors like the gaming industry has.
What if our current productivity software was a game.
It would suck. We’d be asked to save the princess but not be able to see a map, where the other players are, or how to escape the room we’re in. Our entire inventory would consist of a slow carrier pigeon that could deliver craploads of messages back and forth. We wouldn’t even know the score. That’s pretty much the productivity “game” we’ve been playing.
The tease of Social Networks
Then you look at social networks and realize that they’ve started to employ these devices. You can Sims your own interfact, see what percent complete your profile is, ignore and invite, tell it what you like. Ignore people. Stay connected with other “players” and see where they are in their game.
But social networks aren’t aimed at anything nor are they trying to be productivity software. Still, companies keep seeing enough there to generically ask for something like that inside the Enterprise. They’re not literally asking for friending software. They just want something that makes it fun (there I said it) and easy to keep track of people. But it’s a far cry from the complete picture.
Three things productivity software can learn from game designers
1. Help me make decisions
The thing that makes a game a game is the need to make decisions. Isn’t that what would make productivity software, productive? Both games and productivity software need:
- Goals
- Resource management
- Opposition
- Information
Goals
If you have no goal, your decisions are meaningless. Companies (and people) set goals all the time but they end up in someone’s drawer until it’s time to threaten you with them at the end of the quarter. And trivial decisions aren’t any fun. Those are easy. Productivity software should help us move bigger things that whether the icon is blue or green.
Resource management
The road to decisions are filled with choices, just like a game. Do I go left or right? Games help people make these choices. One big way they do this is by giving people resources to manage. Experience points, supplies, weapons, usually you have a diverse set of things you need to tradeoff in order to make your decision.
Opposition
It might sound odd to think that productivity software should contain opposition. But don’t we face that every day? Sometimes it’s competitors, sometimes it’s issues that challenge us. Clarity around obstacles is paramount to truly making progress.
Information
This one is obvious but again would fail with the same competitiveness the gaming industry has. We need just enough information to be able to make sensible decisions. That means I can’t get hammered with a truckload of it and I can’t spend my time hunting it down. Both of those make me want to give up.
2. Keep my interest
To bring all that together, gaming is 100% dependent on their user interface. It’s not enough to have all the above pieces you 
have to deliver them in a way that compels people to want to engage. World of Warcraft has a sick ROI because there are so many people playing it. The same is true for productivity software.
Productivity software designers should think of how advancement, attention, reputation score and other devices that can keep people engaged and productive. I bet if there was a push-broom role that allowed employees to score by pruning the old or irrelevant stuff that companies would have a whole new class of rock stars helping things stay fresh.
3. Make it pleasurable
Dare I say that software is emotional but it is. Productivity software is frustrating. Gaming software is exciting. Yes, I’m saying that productivity software should make me feel pretty good. It should be my favorite “person” to work with. Here’s some of what I want:
- Powers. The power to make decisions to do things.
- Things laying around just when I need them.
- To connect to other players, and I want us all to be in the same “game.”
- To assist other people toward their goal. Maybe even have incentives to do so.
- Color. Yes color. I have to stare at this screen a lot, so make it an atmosphere I want to play in.
- Randomness. I want my interactions and exploration to be have variety. If every encounter or activity is the same, I get bored. Then it’s back to Donkey Kong.
- I want to know my role in certain activities. Am I playing outfield? A spectator? Coaching?
Some people may read this post and think I’m literally thinking about making productivity software a game. I’m not. That would be silly. I’m saying, let’s learn from people who have had to do this for a living, apply it to our productivity software and get some competition going.
I’m ready to play.
Things people have said about this post
Interesting post! I’ve worked on some productivity software in the past (RS Project Manager, an open source project) but never thought about it this way.
I will say, I’ve been using iGTD for the last few months and part of the reason I keep using it is the interface. It’s attractive and entices me to move things up and check them off before I get the big red past due date warning.
I can see it now, Sam — a project management software application that pits you, the project manager, against the evil opposing forces of delay and cost overrun! But what color tights would they wear?
Great post. I think that we are so use to the horrible customer experience associated with business software, whether enterprise apps or desktop productivity apps, that we have resigned ourselves to the abuse from vendors. Let’s hope managers at the apps companies read this.
I design help software, and every time I try something more visually interesting or inviting I’m told that it’s “too flashy” or “distracting.” Anything with color or interest is going to be distracting in an environment of green-screens and ERP mundaneness.
I’m also running into walls when trying to provide information in new ways to help people make decisions. Tools that help me cut away the stream of data to get at what I need are priceless to my productivity, but are far too esoteric for most folks to use today. No one above a certain level appreciates the valuable information being left as scrap on their information worker’s proverbial shop floor.
The key so far is to be subtle and bland to get funding – and to be approved for most large company workstations.
[...] Sam Lawrence just published a great post on what productivity software can learn from game design. [...]
Delightful. I think you’ve hit on something. Not sure how Word to Warcraft will play, but you’re right. I want machines to think MORE for me.
Sam – you are very clever. Including a screen shot of my childhood favorite “Donkey Kong” was a sure fire way of getting me to comment. Great post btw.
Aaron (@astrout)
Timely Sam – there are a number of companies focused on making interaction highly personalize, competitive, rewarding, and fun…but mostly on the consumer side. These traits however have universal appeal to humans so, it makes a lot of sense for enterprise providers to be focused on these things.
Awesome. This explains why Jive stuff is what it is. The problem the decision makers (and game breakers) have with this type of concept is linking the word productivity with anything involving the words exciting, games or fun. They CAN be connected and be all those things. Web 2.0 and social media is teaching us this lesson. We need to breathe new life into our stale old business tools and mindset. Think outside the xBox, if you will.
Pai
I think I get your point, but the illustration of comparing the evolution of Word to gaming doesn’t seem to be the best analogy. I mean think about it… Word is *supposed to* allow us to type text… the UI changes have certainly not improved as much as one would like, but for many reasons that games don’t have to deal with.
For one, each game is completely independent of others – WoW doesn’t require backward compatibility with Donkey Kong. In fact, Call of Duty 4 doesn’t have to be compatible with Call of Duty 3. Each new game can easily take leaps forward because there is no boat anchor tying it to past software.
You can believe that if games had to offer backward compatibility and support of previous titles, there advancement would be hindered greatly.
Another thing – not all game UI is great. In fact, the thing that makes the WoW UI good is not the UI itself, but the fact that it is customizable. I would guess that the majority of WoW players customize their UI with the hundreds of user created UI mods out there.
It’s this user customization that makes the WoW UI great and it would great to see similar capabilities with productivity software. Not an easy task, but one can dream right?
Love it…I wish more people would realize that social networking is very much like a game and that often they have pulled elements of games to keep users coming back.
LinkedIn, for example, also uses the “your profile is not yet complete” method of getting you to use every feature. In your use of each feature, you have to contact other people who then also join LinkedIn and the cycle continues.
Great idea – my game was Defender. Now off to blast those pesky tasks from the sky before they morph into evil supersonic robots that will take down my ship.
Soooo…. Do the marketing guys at Jive have enough chips to pull this off on your end?
I love how you guys bring distinctions from the gaming industry!
yes, distractions is a conversation – let’s keep shifting the context for productivity and see the world come alive!
the “type in the box” graphic is classic
[...] Three things productivity software can learn from game designers Sam Lawrence asserts, “Shouldn’t productivity software make us want to work? I mean, it’s goal is to make us (and our company) more productive. Given that, the most goal-oriented software I can think of is gaming software. That industry is hyper-competitive. They know our attention and dollars are precious and they’re myopically focused on delivering value within their product.” [...]
[...] a thinly veiled swipe at Microsoft, Sam Lawrence, CMO at Jive Software challenges readers to question why productivity software is so clunky: Shouldn’t productivity software make us want to work? I mean, it’s goal is to make us (and our [...]
I’ve seen a couple of posts about how game mechanics cam make your app more fun, and game mechanics applied to social media. I think it would be killer to apply them to our work culture itself. The first link identifies 5 game mechanics that would apply to making a social app fun: Collectiing things, earning points, providing feedback, exchanges, and cusomization. I could see these applying to Jive.
[...] Most insightful post I’ve read today day: Go Big Always – Productivity software should learn from game design. [...]
Great post Sam.
It is, and has been, a constant frustration of mine that ad agencies use the same process to develop a print ad as they do to develop a rich media banner. Agencies used to be fun places to work. Productivity software, especially a tool that is fun to use, would help agencies be more productive and bring some fun back into the biz.
Thought provoking post, Sam. I think another lesson to learn from advances in gaming is: “get out of the way of the user”. WoW did this, providing a fast and direct way to the heart of the multiplayer gaming experience. Half-Life managed it too, pushing immersion to new levels by having the story teach you how to play. (Portal did an even better job.)
As far as productivity software is concerned, we want to allow people to get their jobs done without having to fight the software they’re using. That requires understanding what users are trying to get done. Why do people write papers? I’m sure it varies, but it’s never just to produce a pretty 6 page two-column .doc file with some nice figures. But that’s the experience that Word is optimized for.
So, what are your users trying to accomplish? Communicating an idea? Collaborating on a living representation of an idea? Analyzing their world collaboratively? Running a business together? Collaborating with their customers on providing a better experience all round (increasing efficiency, reducing waste)? Find that out, support it, and let them get to it as quickly and easily as possible. Get out of their way.
Something is in the water, Sam.
I randomly ran into Brenda Brathwaite on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/826/25) a week or so ago, on the gaming front, which reminded me that I’d done an interview with Clark Aldrich back in November of 2006 (when I was still with Delphi/Perot – http://www.biztechtalk.com/2006/11/immerse_yoursel.html), who has spent quite a bit of his professional life bringing the ideas of gaming to play in an enterprise setting. If I still had the presentation lying around, I’d show how I used to demo DOOM in my Intranets/Web presentation about 10 years ago. Great excuse to game a bit while presenting!
The value of getting out of the way of users, and making it easy to follow the bouncing ball, is still tremendously ill-addressed.
That said, even though I’m a long-time Apple user, there are times when “simple interfaces” really, really blow. Take Numbers for example, from the iWork suite. Beautiful output (except when it overlaps numbers in a chart and is unable to let the user move them around so they can actually be read), and fairly simple use, except when it just hits a wall and falls apart (such as resorting data within an already created chart – and the labels refuse to resort with the data).
Even those that DO get it, don’t get it! (sigh)
Like you said over at the appgap blog, Sam .. great minds think alike
I enjoyed this post. Get out of the way of users, and let them have fun, do what they do. Do not force them to do what “you” think they should do ..
[...] Firefox plug-in reminds me of the productivity and gaming software post, I did. It helps me find pics (I find a lot of the pics for these posts this way), keeps my [...]
Great metaphor.
Blogging and social networks are already games. There are goals (i.e. Michael Arrington wants coronation. I’m an old Dan Farber fan), resources (i.e. I call them conversations), competition (i.e. Techcrunch versus CNet versus SAI), and information (i.e. GA, Alexa, compete). I’ve used the metaphor, Reality Journalism – where journalists compete in real time for the attention of fans. True competitors are obsessed with winning, just like my gaming teens.
Search and SEM are games – millions try to spam their rankings through natural and paid search. Can and should productivity tools become games? I don’t think the enterprises would find this amusing, but keep in mind that blogging has already displaced word processors.
It would be interesting to have a centralized scoreboard that tracks competition among bloggers and social networkers.
-Dash Chang
What a great idea! It would be cool to see if productivity software could somehow be modeled on the Get Things Done (GTD) approach (I haven’t used iGTD as Suzanna has, and it just makes me want a Mac even more).
Gaming influence upon the act of marking tasks complete would be an interesting initial focus. I love crossing crap off my list – might as well pump up that feel-good action with earned points or some other virtual reward. Of course, encouraging a high quality of work (measured by recommendations, perhaps? I dunno) would be another interesting bit to look at.
[...] while ago I posted about how productivity software should learn from game design. The consumer web UI/UX can evolve much faster than Enterprise Software because it’s easy for [...]