Q & A With Josh Knowles: Social Media Development Consultant, SXSW 2010 Speaker & Game Design Aficionado
While attending SXSW last month, I had the pleasure of listening to social media development consultant Josh Knowles present “Add Some XBOX To Your UX”. The presentation focused on ways game design techniques can be applied to non-games to improve user experience. Living and working in New York City, he has worked with various companies and institutions such as MTV, Nokia, Houston Astros, Sprint, and Columbia University. I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Josh to discuss a range of topics including his process, electronic musical instruments, the challenge of simplicity, individual vs. group game experience, and location-based applications.
Nancy Garcia: At what point did you start noticing the influence of game design on social media?
Josh Knowles: I think it’s more that I noticed the influence of game design on a variety of things including social media. One of my earliest observations along these lines had to do with electronic instruments. I’ve been tinkering with electronic music and synths since about 1994. They tended to be very technical and almost like scientific tools, requiring one to understand a variety of obscure acronyms (VCF, HPF, LFO, etc.) and to learn to how to handle dozens of knobs, sliders, and buttons to get your desired sound. At least, that’s how it went until around 2000, when software synths started hitting the scene. At first these more-or-less imitated hardware synths, but eventually developers learned to make their digital instruments much more accessible and toy-like—some very, very much like toys—which didn’t require much of a background knowledge in sound design to be creative with. Now we see a ton of these sorts of things and I think they helped make the genre of electronic music absolutely explode over the past ten years as these fun tools made musical production much more accessible to kids around the world. In the past five years (or so), now that games and casual games in particular have hit the mainstream, I think we’re seeing a similar sort of effect in all sorts of places. People are spending more time thinking about how to make things approachable and fun, and naturally they’re gravitating towards game design as a tool towards this end.
NG: As a developer, what are the biggest challenges you face in your quest to create fun and accessible applications?
JK: Honestly, it’s dealing with simplicity. The natural tendency of both designers and clients is to add complexity. As both parties go deeper into the process, their creation feels more obvious and they become aware of weaknesses—it feels natural to want to patch problems or add artificial depth by adding more “things” to project. They forget, though, that users do not have this same experience with the app, and that the real design challenge is creating that very simple thing that does exactly what they user needs in a clear and understandable way. Whether it’s a game, a social tool, some combination, or something else entirely.
NG: Right. As you said in your talk at SXSW this year, the simple yet most important question you are trying to answer is “How do you get the person to do the thing?” How does your process change when the interactive experience you are attempting to create involves a larger group of users like, for example, a mobile application for a “big game”?
JK: Well, generally I approach groups as individuals. A “group” won’t do something on its own—you have to appeal to each individual member of that group and offer them something compelling.
I often work on public screen games, though—usually using my PhonePlay phone-to-public-screen gaming platform. In cases like this where you literally have dozens or hundreds of people watching a few players play on a single screen, it’s just necessary to design the game so that it’s interesting to play and also so it’s interesting to watch other people play.
NG: So it’s not just about the individual’s experience, but also about fulfilling the surrounding community’s expectations.
JK: Yeah, but without an individual experience, there is no surrounding community experience. So I feel the individual has to be the first priority. There’s a philosophy of social software design that you can’t get to one thousand users unless you can get to one user—if you can’t get one person to come to use your service and have a meaningful experience, then you’ll never get to the point of having any community at all to worry about.
NG: During your SXSW talk, you spoke about how game mechanics are being used to filter user-generated content on sites like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot. Can you talk a little bit about how these mechanics work and how they benefit the community of users?
JK: The core idea is that in situations where there’s too much content for a dedicated team of moderators to manage, sites like these can create points systems that essentially open up the moderation process to the public in some structured way. They offer points and rewards for virtuous behavior: Submitting the best new content, making the best comments, etc. And then (in different way) each of these sites translates those reputation points into things like the having one’s comments show up more visibly on the site. Slashdot also lets users with a certain level of karma actually take over a chunk of comment moderation duties. It’s a virtuous cycle, rewarding users in a way that makes them want to interact with the site more, that creates a dedicated user base that makes these sites effective at finding the best links and highlighting the best conversation.
NG: Location-based social apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown, each have their own strengths and weaknesses. More specifically, one of Foursquare’s strengths is that it integrates an element of surprise because it’s not really publicized what it takes to unlock a badge. This makes me think about the newly created series of opt-in interventions in the Admin / Dashboard section of WordPress by Artist Evan Roth and Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, the “Surprise Me” button. Do you think we’re getting to a point where the act of social networking and online publishing is getting repetitive/rote and we’re starting to look for more meaningful feedback from the platforms themselves, and not just from the people we’re trying to connect with?
JK: Well, the first level to this is simply that as more competitors come to market, these businesses need to differentiate their offerings. We’re well past the era of the neutral channel of communication when it comes to the web. Sites like Flickr and Delicious—the early “web 2.0” successes—basically just had to open a new channel of communication and get out of the way. That’s not good enough at the moment. Start-ups like these need more of a hook—because simply creating the communications channel is too easy. There are a ton of blogging services out there, for example. In order to remain a leader, WordPress will need to not just innovate on their functionality but also innovate on new ways to make simply using their service a fun experience that people will come back to. This “Surprise Me” thing with Evan Roth is awesome for that reason—it makes the relatively mundane act of poking around a blog’s admin page more fun.
Games certainly aren’t the only ways of doing this, obviously, but they certainly offer a huge variety of suggestions and starting points for designers trying to make interaction more satisfying. And what’s even more interesting, I think, is that games (which are inherently social) allow designers to tweak and modify the social nature of their service in sometimes rather subtle ways. I believe businesses like this will in the next few years get very savvy about this and we’ll see more and more little game-like tweaks that have some social end. Which makes sense. Because one other major way to differentiate your social media service from another similar social media service is the quality of the content and the mood and friendliness of the users.
