SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, INC. - software designers
Theresa Smith

Last week I found an interesting presentation from Lost Garden blogger Daniel Cook explaining how games are designed to be fun and delightful to use. Much of what he says in the presentation titled Building a Princess Saving App - How to building learning and fun into your application, flatly contradicts what's being written on software product design outside of the game industry. Instead of using such techniques as segmenting features by skill level or moving less common used or expert features out of the way, which Daniel Cook calls hacks, he describes methods of incorporating exploratory learning into software applications. It is clear to me that we have a lot we can learn from games. How many enterprise software products or business products is a delight for people to use?