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.

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

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 ..

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)

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.

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.