

The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions - replicatorblog
http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/the-art-science-of-seductive-interactions?type=presentation

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DTrejo
This is about how to make your app seductive, not you. It helped me think of
my app more as a service AND a videogame.

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derefr
In fact, you can go further: don't try to turn an already-created app into a
game. Instead, when you're first working on a business concept, make sure that
you _create a game_ first and foremost, and then try to figure out how to let
the user do some interesting thing (whatever your original app would otherwise
be about) as a _side-effect_ of play. This is how Flickr got off the ground:
first it was just an MMO, and then people possessed and traded photos within
the MMO, and then that started to become more and more the focus. It's still a
game at heart—just like Reddit and, to some extent, Hacker News itself
are—it's just shifted to achievement by means of photos, rather than whatever
else it had people do before, because that's what interested them.

Let me clarify, though, what I mean by "game." There's this idea in pen-and-
paper RPG game design called the _threefold model_. Basically, it states that
there are three reasons people immerse themselves into a virtual, social world
constrained by rules (a "game".) It's usually phrased, though, that there are
three archetypical players, one to purely seek each goal, of which any
individual may be a varied mixture.

1\. There are Simulationists, who want to explore the "reality" of the world
itself.

2\. There are Narrativists, who want to feel that they're part of an
overarching story, and that both themselves, and the world, are important and
have purpose.

3\. There are Gamists, who want to compete for resources, usually against the
other players or the game's universe itself.

This model is useful for more than pen-and-paper RPGs, obviously; the three
motivations people have for playing games are the same as the three
motivations people have for doing _anything_ , once they've sated their base
urges: _satisfying curiosity_ and feeling _in control of the world_
(Simulationism), finding _a sense of purpose_ (Narrativism), and _feeling
powerful_ and _having control of the other players_ (Gamism). Whenever you're
helping people to achieve one or more of those three goals, the means by which
you're doing so can probably be classified as a game: D&D, Facebook, the Stock
Market, Religion, etc.

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bonsaitree
Mistake #1: Distributing your presentation via Slideshare. Just about the
"least seductive" Web presentation interface around.

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rantfoil
However, it is a) functional and b) massively easy to embed.

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patio11
This is much, much better than the title suggests.

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swombat
To clarify, this is an excellent presentation about "seductive" UI/interaction
design... very very good, with lots of great examples.

Really worth a read and a bookmark. I've also forwarded to my team and we'll
no doubt lift a few ideas from there.

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alex_c
A lot of the points this presentation lists (make it a game! reward with
points and levels! make users curious by hinting at hidden information!) are
techniques that have been used extensively by the most successful Facebook
applications. I look at Facebook apps as a bit of a primordial soup of
Darwinian evolution, because of the short development cycles and easy access
to a potential audience... and the fact that the presentation sums up many of
the techniques I noticed succeeding on Facebook is what makes me take it
seriously.

Highly recommended for anyone working on consumer apps. Even if you know a lot
of the concepts already, it brings them together nicely.

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falsestprophet
Thank god. I thought this was another #1 link about getting laid.

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Agathos
Me too. It seems that I reliably click on the titles I like least, just to see
if they're as bad as I expect. Isn't that odd?

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mahmud
That was an unusually pleasant and very interesting presentation. Thank you.

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noamsml
The iLike app looks terrible. What happened to simplicity and non-
interference?

