1-2: Human-Focused Design vs Function-Focused Design

Hey there. Welcome back to the actionable Gamification online digital course. I'm Yu-chi Chao. And today we're going to talk about Section one Lecture two, which is about human focused design versus function focused design. So I believe that the center of gamification is what I call human focused design as opposed to function focused design. Most systems are function focused. It assumes that people in the system will take the desired behavior and it optimizes for efficiency, for usability, for ergometry, it's kind of like a factory where you assume the people in the factory will do their work because you pay them to do it, and then you kind of figure out how to maximize your production, your your efficiency, your workflow. Human focused design remembers that people in the system have feelings, have motivations, have insecurities, have reasons why they do or do not want to do something and then optimizes for that. So that's kind of like a theme park where you design it to be really, really fun and then you can predict that people automatically want to line up for hours and hours just so they can enjoy the experience. Now, what's interesting about this is that in the case of a factory, you're paying these people to do the relatively mundane things of working in the factory. But in the case of human focused design in the theme park, people are paying you to stand in line for hours and hours so they can enjoy the experience. Now, the reason why we call this gamification is that I believe the gaming industry is the first to master human focused design because there's really no purpose to playing a game. You never have to play a game. You have to do a lot of other things like do your taxes, do go to school, do your training, even if you don't like it. Just kind of have to suck it up and do it. But again, you never have to play a game. The moment a game is no longer fun, you leave the game, you play another game, you go on YouTube, you go check your email. And so because the gaming industry has spent decades or even centuries, depending on how you quantify a game, to figure out how to get people to do relatively mundane, repetitive tasks like throwing at a bird, throwing out a bird, throwing at a bird, or matching three, matching three, matching three gyms over and over and over for three, four, five, six, seven hours a day when there's no mandated purpose at all. We're now learning from that discipline. And that's why we call it gamification. And this is especially useful and interesting to understand when you're launching a new product or a new program, because almost by definition, your customers, your users don't need your program, your product, right? Because their lives are semi-okay before existed. So just because you're useful doesn't mean they're going to use it. They'll use it if it's motivating, if it drives their engagement, if they're really interested, excited about it. Now, gamification has grown to be a big field. A lot of industries, companies, countries, departments are all using gamification to increase their behavior. But the problem is that still a lot of these gamification campaigns are failing. And the reason is because a lot of people are doing it backwards. A lot of people are very obsessed with the fancy things we call game mechanics or game elements, you know, things like points, badges and leaderboards and to a greater extent things like quests or narratives level up and they think that, Oh, if I just take these game elements and put it into my product and my training program in my health care system, in my exercise program, it automatically becomes fun and successful. And that doesn't really happen that way. So let's look at an example from a bad game designer standpoint. A bad game designer might think, Oh, so what game elements should I have in my game? Well, we need, you know, monsters, swords. Where can they go? We need know friends. Well, how about, you know, we want cows. People can, you know, ten and have fun with, oh, why not add some birds with attitude? Why not add some peas that shoot plants? You know, puzzle games are interesting. Let's add those. And you can see here that a game can be extraordinarily stupid and boring, even if it has all the fun and exciting game elements in it. If you think about it, every single game in the market has game elements in them, but most games are still failures. Most games are not fun. So it's not practical to think that, hey, if I just take all these game elements that are even found in boring games and put it into my system, my program, my product, it automatically becomes fun and successful. It just doesn't have happen that way. And only a few well-designed games achieve mass success. So if you think about it from a good game designer standpoint, a good game designer may think instead of thinking about what game elements they want to use, they can start off thinking about how do I want my users to feel? You know, do I want them to feel proud? Do I want them to feel inspired, even scared in some horror games? And once they understand that, they understand, okay, what are the game elements? I need to accomplish that purpose to create those feelings. It could be cows, it could be monsters, it could be swords. But the key here is that good gamification design does not start. Out with the game elements, but it starts with a core drives that motivate us. So soon we're going to learn about the Octalysis framework in the next lecture and how the eight core drives drive our behavior. So the exercise at the end of this lecture, I want you to identify something in your in your life that you use regularly that uses function focused design, which means that you just have to use it. And it's functional, it's there, there's technology. Perhaps you just have to use it, but you don't necessarily enjoy it. And then think about something in your life that you use daily. That's a human focused design that you just enjoy. You love it. You have a hard time staying away from it and think about what are the differences between these. So this concludes lecture two in the first section and I'll see you in lecture three.