Scott Lawrence
SPHERE OF INFLUENCE, INC. – software studios and services
Lately, one of our executives has been playing a lot of World of Warcraft (WoW) in off hours. Having experienced its addictive qualities, his question to us was what we can do with enterprise applications to give them the same qualities.
Our team spent a lunch hour discussing what successful design elements from multi-player games (and heavily-used websites and applications) we could borrow to approach that goal. These are some of the attributes we identified:
- High scores
- Mission checklists
- Constantly changing/new information
- Simple controls
- Intuitive/context-sensitive interfaces
- Something other than "input-process-output" operation
- Community/social networking
- Peer rankings/ratings/voting
While I'm certain our next enterprise application won't include high scores, many of the other attributes we found would certainly make welcome enhancements to current and future products.
The community aspect of multi-player games is a large part of their appeal. The best games give players the ability to play with or against people all over the world with little to no noticeable difference in the quality of gameplay. Similarly, many enterprise applications serve a geographically-distributed user community. If such applications gave their users the ability to interact with each other directly, they would become more appealing to use.
Rally Software is one company that has taken this approach with their flagship product, Rally Enterprise Edition. Their product integrates forum functionality so they can get constant feedback from their customers and to communicate potential changes to the application, including new features. In addition to making the product more appealing to users, it's a great example of an agile software company practicing what it preaches.