Game Changing: How you can transform client mindsets through play

Game Changing How You Can Transform Client Mindsets Through Play Jess McMullin | nForm User Experience

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A significant barrier to success on many consulting projects is lack of buy-in from business stakeholders. Sometimes this shortfall of support simply requires IAs to be fluent in the language of business and communicate the business benefits of a project. However, the challenge is often deeper when business stakeholders hold a mindset that doesn't appreciate the approach or objectives of a project. It's these mindsets that are often dismissed with a rejoinder that they just don't get it'. Instead of this abdication, IAs can actually change mindsets to increase project success. Changing mindsets takes more than talking with business people in their own language, it takes transformative experiences that make perspectives flexible and open to new views. These reframing experiences most often come through participation in successful projects, but this leads to a chicken-and-egg problem - how do we provide success with IA projects for an audience of people that are causing failure? The common answer is to run a pilot or prototype to tackle low-hanging fruit and build buy-in with a track record of success - but what happens when you don't have time, budget, or support for a pilot? One avenue for accelerating mindset change is playing design games. Games create low-risk situations that let stakeholders experience new perspectives, approaches, and methods without the time, expense, and commitment of a pilot. By scaling human-centered design principles and methods down to the level of games, we can rapidly expose entire teams to new ways of thinking, opening up their world views, and offering valuable perspectives that can bring new appreciation for IA to their mindset. This session will mix principles with examples to help IAs use games that can change business mindsets and develop increased buy-in for human-centered design and information architecture. Fundamental principles will lead to a discussion of various game options and outline how IAs can pitch games as a serious tool to facilitate project progress. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in some gameplay during the session.
[Your Mileage May Vary]

Blue Sky Barrier

about buy-in
about games
games + you

The Tie and the Turtleneck

Turtleneck

User Faces

Develop Business Fluency

Conceptual Fluency

Cultural Fluency

Design Maturity

Reframing

Creating Shared References

[more deliverables]
Persona
Sitemap
Wireframe
Web Analytics Roll-up
(removed)

We Need Better Shared References

My Mary _ Poppins Moment

“… you find the fun, and <snap> the job’s a game.”

about games

Why Games
Game examples: board games, card games, roleplaying games, tag, sports, war
Games as rehearsal
Games across learning styles
Games tap tacit knowledge
Games are fun
Games create a shared narrative that acts as a bridge for conversations

Objectives Constraints Outcomes Competition

Frogger Screen

games + you

3 Approaches
Modify Existing Activities For Play
Use Existing Games and Formats
Create New Games

Design Game Examples
Design the Box
Improv
Interactionary / IA Slam / SlamCamp
MetaMemes

Participatory Design

Teamwork

Improv

Live Case Study

Brainstorming - MetaMemes

Selling Games

Selling = Reframing

We’re going to work through a case study exercise.

Let’s Play A Game

We drew 5 Cards from MetaMemes Deck:
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
Gross Out
Anti Aging Gene
Connection
Swarm Intelligence
Now make banking relevant to a 10 year old boy by combining 2 terms to brainstorm an idea

Thank you!
Jess McMullin
nForm User Experience
Blog: b plus d.org
Web: nForm.ca
jess.mcmullin AT nForm DOT ca

References
Kes Sampanthar, MetaMemes Designer www.metamemes.com
Rules of Play
Game Design Workshop
Brandt & Messeter (2004) Facilitating Collaboration through Design Games, Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference.

Game Changing: How you can transform client mindsets through play

by Jess McMullin on Jul 23, 2007

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Game Changing: How you can transform client mindsets through play — Presentation Transcript