Customer Clues Sponsors Skilful Minds Blog
The Skilful Minds blog is widely regarded as a thought leader publication in experience design, and syndicated with several online community portals in elearning, social learning, social media, and customer experience. Customer Clues' Principal, Larry Irons, regularly offers insights into experience design with the breadth and depth required for the range of topics involved.
Most Recent Posts at Skilful Minds
Social Flow and the Paradox of Exception Handling in ACM
by
Larry Irons
Description
There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time. Interestingly, I noted in a former post, Social Learning and Exception Handling, that John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contend that "as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling.” It is not coincidence that the two numbers are aligned.
A Learnability and Experience Design Update
by
Larry Irons
Description
One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it.
On the Roots of Social Computing
by
Larry Irons
Description
I recently received an invitation from Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief at Interaction-Design.org to offer those who read this blog an early view of a new chapter on Social Computing in their encyclopedia. I’m a little late on this writing for you to get a pre-publication view of the chapter but I wanted to make sure and point it out for [...]
Social Flow in Gameful Design
by
Larry Irons
Description
Don't Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Play is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time. Specifically, my point is that those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles. To echo the position taken by many game designers on the subject of gamification, you can't simply add game mechanics to employee participation in business processes and expect continued voluntary engagement by players over time.
Social Flow and Collaboration in Gameful Design
by
Larry Irons
Description
Social Flow in Gameful Design made the point that social flow contrasts to Csikszentmihalyi's original concept of individual or solitary flow, in which a person's engagement in actions is optimal, where they lose a sense of time and awareness of self in an intrisincally rewarding feeling. Social flow implies a qualitatively different order of the flow experience, a group-level experience. As Simon Wiscombe recently observed , "Gamification is inherently flawed because it focuses on rewarding players for the end-state." He adds that gamification design is best when it focuses on the journey rather than the outcome, especially if the aim is to evoke voluntary, ongoing engagement of participants. I emphasize the importance of voluntary experience because if you can't quit playing the experience is not a gameful one. Recent social psychological research supports Simon's point.
