Fun & Games at Work
Nancy Frishberg, Ph.D.
nancyf@fishbird.com
CHIFOO Meeting • 5 November 2008
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Tonightʼs meeting
• Who are we talking about
• How to engage with them
• Why play or fun in the workplace
• How to play in the workplace
• Letʼs play tonight (briefly)
• The worldʼs quickest overview of Innovation Games®
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Who are we talking
about?
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Many careers, one life
• Creative job titles, such as
• Research Professor for Interpreting Services (at RIT)
• Discipline Specialist for the Humanities (with IBM)
• User Interface Institute Fellow (with IBM)
• Licensing Engineer (with Apple)
• Evangelist for User Centered Design (with Sun)
• and now User Experience Strategist
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Who are we talking about?
Definitions:
Customers ≠ Markets ≠ Users
Aphorisms:
“You are not your User”
“Make many mysteries one”
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Listening to customers and users
Mark Hurst
Creative Good, November 4, 2008
“There's no substitute for having stakeholders physically present during
customer research. If stakeholders are there, they buy into the process.
No one needs a master's degree in human factors to understand that
three customers in a row failing at the same place is cause for
immediate improvement.”
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How to engage with
customers & users
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Methods to engage with users
• Observation • Focus Groups
• 1 hour? 1 day? 1 • Surveys, Questionnaires
week?
• Usability Studies
• Interviews (+/- structure) • “Scavenger Hunt”
• Card Sorting • “Compelled shopping”
• open • ...and many, many more
• closed
• Diary Studies
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Focus Groups
• Traditional:
• Someone writes a script and someone recruits
participants (sometimes the same “someone”)
• Moderator spends an hour with 8-12 people; team
observes (ideally through mirrored window in
observation room in real time, or via audio
transmission on mute)
• Several someones examine the transcript and
decide what it all means
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Why Play in the
Workplace?
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Power of Play
• Learning styles
• audio, visual, tactile
• Strong emotions tied to memorable experiences
• Large brained animals perform better when they are
having fun
• Multiple intelligences
• 7 or 8 kinds of smarts: How many do you get to show
at work?
• Managing to have fun
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Books about Play
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Multiple Intelligences
Book by Howard Gardner (1983)
• 8 “intelligences”
• Verbal, Linguistic
• Logical-Mathematical
• Visual-Spatial
• Bodily-Kinesthetic
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Musical
• Naturalistic
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Finite & Infinite Games
Book by James Carse
• Two types of Games
• Quick definitions and examples
• Goal of Business
• Is business a finite or infinite game?
• What parts of business, if any, are infinite?
• What parts of business, if any, are finite?
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Play in the Workplace
• Holidays, birthdays, life-cycle events
• Workplace-sponsored events
• Employee-initiated events
• Your experiences?
50 ways
52 ways
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Innovation Games - What?
• 12 Games
• Involve several customers in face-to-face activity with
each other
• Most take ~2 hours to complete
• 2 are more ethnographic and require longer time
• Recommended: use one or two in a single day
• Physically distributed play supported for one game
• Cultural differences and expectations are still being
explored
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Innovation Games - Why?
• Identify unknown market needs
• Direct market research that provides actionable results
• Generate rich understanding of customer/user needs
and desires to feed requirements techniques
• Support on-going relationships
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Innovation Games - What?
Game Brief Goal
Show & Tell Identify the most important artifacts created by your product
Speed Boat Identify what customers donʼt like about your product or service
Start Your Day Understand when and how your customer uses your product
Buy A Feature Prioritize proposed features
Prune the Product Tree Shape your product to market needs
20/20 Vision Understand customer priorities
Me & My Shadow Identify your customersʼ hidden needs
Spider Web Understand product relationships
Product Box Identify the most exciting product features
Give Them a Hot Tub Use outrageous features to discover hidden breakthroughs
Remember the Future Understand your customersʼ definition of success
The Apprentice Create empathy for the customer experience
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Letʼs Play!
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Remember the Future
• Goal: Understand Your Customerʼs
Definition of Success
Activity:
Hand each of your customers a few pieces of paper. Ask them to imagine that it is
sometime in the future and that they’ve been using your product almost continuously
between now and that future date (month, year, whatever). Then ask them to write down
exactly what your product will have done to make them happy or successful or rich or safe
or secure or whatever – choose what works best for your product.
Key point – ask “What will the system have done?” not “What should the system do?”
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The worldʼs quickest
overview of
Innovation Games®
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Innovation Games - How?
• Choose Game(s)
• Logistics
• Invite participants (to a place at a date)
• Determine staff roles, materials, equipment...
• Play!
• Process results
• Observer notes, photographs, artifacts, audio
• Present to client (and potentially customers)
• Act
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The term “games”
Mike Griffiths
“Leading Answers: Leadership and Agile Project Management Ideas,
Observations and Links”
I have never been a fan of suggesting the use of “games” in the
enterprise workplace, as in XPʼs “Planning Game”. The term does
not sit well with some traditional-type folks; to them it sounds
unprofessional and not serious enough for important work. Yet the
Innovation Games described by Hohmann are high performance
facilitated workshop exercises that produce great results. If the
project is serious enough to engage busy stakeholders then I think
we owe it to the business to use the most effective tools at our
disposal. If calling them “facilitated workshop exercises” eases their
acceptance then Iʼm all for it, because it is the results Iʼm really
interested in, not so much what we call them.
http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/2007/03/release_and_ite.html
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More alternatives to “games”
Nancy Frishberg
Private communication, October 2008
While I and some others call these activities \"games,\" there are
good reasons to refer to \"focus groups\" (but not your father's
focus groups!) for customer engagements, and \"visioning
exercises\" where management are the players. For internal work,
sometimes it's good to call it team-building, and sometimes it's
better to say, \"internal customer feedback\" or \"requirements
gathering\" or “designing for productivity” (as for your service
offering).
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Which Game?
To Understand... Consider These Games
• Product Box • Buy a Feature
Customer Needs • Me & My Shadow
• Remember the Future • Give Them a Hot Tub
Product • Product Box • Buy a Feature
Functionality • 20/20 Vision • Speed Boat
Product Usage • Spider Web • Show and Tell
• Start Your Day • The Apprentice
Shaping Future • Prune the Product • Buy a Feature
Products
Tree • Remember The
• 20/20 Vision Future
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If youʼre not sure, start here...
Use This Game To Understand...
Speed Boat What you need to improve
Buy a Feature What features you need to build next
Product Box New Possibilities
Spider Web How or Where your product fits in
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Innovation Games - How?
Playing
Preparing Post-Processing Action
2-6 months 6-12 weeks 1 week 1-2 weeks 1-3 weeks
Before After
Phase 2 Process
Phase 1 Final Letter to
Invite & Game
g 5 Wʼs Prep Participants
Prep Results
g Process Observer
Note Cards
(same/next day)
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Clients: Setting Expectations
• Why choose Innovation Games?
• Which Game(s) to choose?
• Open vs. closed
• Time available
• What question(s) is the client trying to answer?
• When to choose Innovation Games?
• Ideation stage
• Debate among staff on prioritization...
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Benefits of Innovation Games
• Benefits to client organization
• Find out what customers feel and think
• Learn what you donʼt know you donʼt know
• Benefits to customers
• Know that they are being heard
• Contributing to direction of product/service
• Contact with client staff
• Plus...FUN
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Provocative Questions
• What makes a good issue to be the focus of the
Game? Whatʼs a poor question for the focus of
a Game?
• Is there an order to the Games that is preferred
or that should be avoided?
• You want the client to pay attention to comments
exchanged during the game, rather than the
outcome. How do you do this? When do you
pay attention to outcome?
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Provocative Questions (more)
• Can facilitation skills be learned or are you born
with them?
• What to do with a participant who wonʼt play?
“Teams are the enemy of freedom”
• How many Observers are enough? How to train
them?
• What do clients want as a report or outcome of
the activity? What do you want to provide as
report or outcome?
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Questions?
Contact
Nancy Frishberg, Ph.D.
nancyf@fishbird.com
+1 650 804 5800 (mobile)
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