Often around major events such as Christmas, New Year, Corporate events companies will build an application that offers the user a bit of fun with the dual purpose of promoting the company that created it. That is why we wanted to think around a small application that Headshift could build in time for Christmas that might generate a bit of buzz as well as promote our ability to build a social application with mass market appeal.
In order to focus the session we wanted something “fun” and “targeted” in that we wanted the user to be able to get something out of the process. The application should be simple (to allow enough time to build it) and easy to use and focused on Christmas.
If you want to try this week’s example, do your design now (no more than 10 minutes, remember) and then go on reading.
The various designs we submitted had the following shared outcomes:
- Christmas iconography – be it a snowball, mistletoe, Christmas tree, Santa, Advent Calendar
- Use of social media to promote and as part of the workflow of the application: we saw the need to use social media, esp. twitter as part of the user journey this enabled the application to not be wedded to the application but could exists outside and within the user’s social graph
- An emotional attachment – we realised for an app to be successful, the user must feel an emotional attachment to it, we discussed nostalgia, friendliness, amorousness as potential methods for user engagement
- Data visualisation – many of the suggestions had an element of data visualisation, either as an outcome of user input or as a system view of the collected data – we were keen to monitor and track user interaction so as to extract potential meaning out of smaller meta-interactions
The main take aways from the session was that social media and broadcasting would be essential as part of the user journey, not as a by product. Also the use of gaming and social interaction (both positive and playful) we key in getting users to interact with the system. Further is was key that there was a reason why the user should use the system, our favourite idea – A twitter mashup recreating kissing under the misteltoe had the outcome of tow twitter users kissing or rejecting each other, introducing a will them/won’t them gaming aspect – with a potential failure/success metric.