The following checklist identifies core principles and best practices to assist software designers and developers to produce software that stands out in the marketplace.

1. Concepts from the product’s subject domain (for example, systems management) should be central and apparent in the software design – The relationships among user interface objects in products should be accurate, so that users can rely on their previous experience in the domain when learning and using the software.
2. Keep it simple – Give easy access to the features that most users will need most of the time; features used less often or by only a subset of users are placed less prominently.
3. Optimise the design for the most frequent or important tasks – Understanding how users will use the software you are designing is critically important. Designers should use that understanding to anticipate the information, task flows, and features that users require at key points within the user experience.
4. Make the interface accessible and visible to users – Design your Web site or application so that users can view and easily access objects or information within the interface. Choices should be visible to users rather than hidden with cryptic key sequences. When objects and choices are immediately visible, users learn and complete work tasks efficiently.
5. Use proper default values when supporting complex tasks – Use good defaults so that users can complete tasks relatively easily and quickly rather overwhelming them with choices.
6. Be flexible – Let users customise the application to meet their unique needs. For example, specialised users could be given a way to make secondary choices more prominent in the product. Also, don’t limit users by artificially restricting their choices to a “correct” sequence. Flexibility is also enhanced by letting users select options in various sequences and in letting them modify default values.
7. Keep your users informed and in control by providing informative and timely feedback tailored to the current situation – For example, progress indicators let users know that their system is healthy and is carrying out their request. At a minimum, alert users when they take actions that will result in the loss of data. (Ideally, such choices would be disabled or even eliminated when they are inappropriate in a particular situation.) All the information included in the feedback should be meaningful to the average user.
8. Things that look the same should behave in the same way, and an action should always produce the same result – Avoid modes that change the effects of actions. Where modes are unavoidable, make them clear to the user and easy to change.
9. Provide the ability to undo and redo actions – Applications must provide users with the ability to freely explore applications (which includes the ability to make mistakes) without fearing permanent damage.
10. Make your application predictable by using industry standard user interface conventions wherever possible – For example, users should be able to use standard selection models and keyboard equivalents like Ctrl+C and Shift+→ (to copy the currently selected object and extend the current selection one unit to the right, respectively) everywhere they work with data. Use a common set of design patterns and guidelines so that users don’t have to relearn how to perform common tasks.
11. Always keep your target users in mind as the product is designed – Developing personas and identifying and defining the roles your users fulfil can help you understand how various roles will use your product. Designs based on typical workflows and the other software that users might use in conjunction with yours will delight users.
12. Avoid adding features just so they can be ticked off a list – Remember that every additional feature equals a set of choices added to what is likely already a wide array of choices. Too many choices can overwhelm users.
13. Design your user interface so that it can be localised for other geographies without redesigning the interface – For example, don’t crowd form controls too tightly so they can accommodate longer German translations.
14. Consider persons with disabilities when designing your applications – Many users of your product may have impaired vision or physical limitations that affect their ability to use a mouse or a joystick.
15. Design the application so that contextual help is available to users when they need it – Users should not have to refer to Help constantly to complete their tasks.
16. Bring objects to life through good visual design – The goal of visual design in the user interface is to surface to the user in a cohesive manner all aspects of the design principles. Visual design should support the user model and communicate the function of that model without ambiguities. Visual design should not be the “icing on the cake” but rather an integral part of the design process. The final result should be an intuitive and familiar representation that is second nature to users.
17. Create user interfaces that promote clarity and visual simplicity – The following visual design principles help create that effect:
    • Subtractive design – Reduce clutter by eliminating any visual element that doesn’t contribute directly to visual communication.
    • Visual hierarchy – Understand the importance of users’ tasks and establish a visual hierarchy of these tasks. An important object can be given visual prominence. Relative position and contrast in colour and size can be used to convey task importance.
    • Affordance – When users can easily determine the action that should be taken with an object, that object displays good affordance. Objects with good affordance usually mimic actual objects.
    • Visual scheme – Design a visual scheme that maps to the user model and lets the user customise the interface. Do not eliminate extra space in your image just to save space. Use white space to provide visual “breathing room.”

Products designed with appreciation for these natural principles will tend to be better received and more easily utilised by the general public. But what are some of these elements, laws and principles? Below is a list of 11 to whet your appetite.

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s razor (also spelled Ockham’s razor) states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness): all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one. One consequence of this methodology is the idea that the simplest or most obvious explanation of several competing ones is the one that should be preferred until it is proven wrong.

But how does this relate to design? 37Signals’ book Getting Real provides a good overview: deliver just what customers need and eliminate anything they don’t. Start with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. Begin with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong. It’s about keeping things simple, iterating the design and lowering the cost of change; it is about launching, tweaking and constantly improving.

Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law, or the Hick–Hyman Law, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has. The Hick’s Law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick’s Law is known as the rate of gain of information.

Hick’s Law can be expressed with the following equation:

This law has implications in areas such as website navigation and getting people to take action. Since the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases, the more options you offer, the less likely any one of those options will be taken.

Hick’s Law can be visualised with the following image:

The conclusion from Hick’s law is to provide less options or present only those options that are necessary or required to complete the given task. Instead of a long list of menu options, think about how you can group them into as few high level choices as possible. Present those few options in common places like navigation and only present more options as someone digs deeper into one level of categorisation. 6 – 8 main navigational links is a general guide.

Fitts’ Law

Fitts’ Law is a model of human movement in human–computer interaction and ergonomics, which states that the speed and accuracy with which a user can select an on-screen object depends on the size of the object and how far the user has to move the pointer. Fitts’ Law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device.

Fitts’ Law can be visualised with the following image:

Fitts’ Law is expressed with the following equation:

Where: T = Time, a = start/stop time, b = speed of device, D = distance, and W = width of target, or allowable error of tolerance.

Fitts’ Law has implications for designers: features that require user interaction (e.g., links and buttons) should be as large as practically possible given display constraints and that frequently used features should be grouped near one another to minimise the distance that the user has to move the cursor to activate them.

Gestalt

Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain positing that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analogue, with self-organising tendencies.

The Gestalt effect is the form-generating capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

The key principles of Gestalt systems are emergence, reification, multi-stability and invariance.

• Emergence – the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules.
• Reification – the constructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.
• Multi-stability – the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.
• Invariance – the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognised independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features.

Prägnanz

Prägnanz is the fundamental principle of perceptual segregation proposed by Gestalt psychologists. It states that during visual perception, the best, simplest and most stable shape of any possibilities will be perceived.

Prägnanz is defined by six laws:

1. Law of Closure – the mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (that is, to increase regularity).
2. Law of Similarity – the mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. These similarities may depend upon relationships of form, colour, size or brightness.
3. Law of Proximity – spatial or temporal grouping of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.
4. Law of Symmetry (figure ground relationships) – symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.
5. Law of Continuity – the mind continues visual, auditory and kinetic patterns.
6. Law of Common Fate – elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

These laws can and should be used in user interface design. The laws of similarity and proximity can, for example, be used as guides for placing radio buttons.

Miller’s Law

Miller’s Law is based upon theories of communication. The law instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The Magical Number 7, Plus or Minus Two

This law, also known as Miller’s Law, argues that the number of objects, or chunks, an average human can hold in working memory is 7±2. Later research on short-term memory and working memory revealed that memory span is not a constant even when measured in terms of a number of chunks. The number of chunks a human can recall immediately after presentation depends on the category of chunks used (e.g., memory span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around five for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, memory span is lower for long words than it is for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud.

Fibonacci Sequence

The Fibonacci Sequence is a list of numbers is created by repeatedly adding the sums of the last two digits. It begins with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and so on. What is fascinating is that this sequence appears repeatedly in nature, in tree branches, leaves on stems, in a wide variety of plants and the reproduction pattern of honeybees.

The Fibonacci sequence can be described as the function:

This is not the easiest function to punch out on your calculator but the concept is simple enough. You can easily determine the next or previous number in the sequence with a little old fashioned glance at the Fibonacci string.

The Fibonacci Sequence is often visualised in design with the following diagram:

The Fibonacci Sequence is closely related to the Golden Ratio.

Golden Ratio

The Golden Ratio is a term used in both mathematics and art. Two quantities are said to be in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The golden ratio is an irrational mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887. Other names frequently used for the golden ratio are the golden section and the golden mean.

The following figure can be used to express the geometric relationship that defines the constant:

But for those of you who are mathematically inclined, this is the ratio expressed algebraically:

The Golden Ratio describes the most aesthetically pleasing proportionate shapes and designs. A Fibonacci spiral, created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling (this one uses squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34), can be used to plan your design.

As a designer, you can use this ratio to place the elements on your pages to create mini golden ratio rectangles, which will be pleasing to the eye. It can be used for captions, text flowing beside images, advertising space and navigation buttons and menus. It is worth bearing this ratio in mind when creating rectangles for your pages.

You can read more about the Golden Ratio on the Smashing Magazine website.

Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or the four intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

In most cases it is neither possible nor useful to use all four points to highlight the most important functions or navigation options in a design. However, you can use some of them (usually one or two) to properly place the most important message or functionality of the site. The left upper corner is usually the strongest one, since users scan web-sites according to the F-shape.

You can read more about the Rule of Thirds on the Smashing Magazine website.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle, also known as the “80-20 rule” and the “Law of the Vital Few”, states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Use the 80-20 rule to focus your resources in order to realise greater results. Identify what 20 percent of a products features are used 80 percent of the time and concentrate design and testing efforts on those resources. Or identify what critical 20 percent of a product’s features are responsible for 80 percent of the revenue and concentrate on that.

The 80-20 rule can help you decide what to redesign, what parts of a product or your time to downplay, what to throw away, or where to invest your scarce resources. It can help you resist efforts to correct and optimize designs beyond the critical 20 percent as more would yield diminishing returns.

Have you have discovered other guidelines that can be incorporated into your successful design strategy? If so, please feel free to post a comment.

The following infographic provides a quick and easy way to understand the various elements of typography.

Game Dynamics are constructs of rules and feedback loops intended to produce enjoyable game-play. They are the building blocks that can be applied and combined to gamify any non-game context.

Early examples of gamification are based on rewarding points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook’s “Place” feature, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Gamification is used by marketers and website product managers as a tool for customer engagement and encouraging desirable website usage behaviour. Gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. One site, DevHub, increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements.

Below are listed 47 game dynamics. The challenge comes from taking these mechanics and employing them in a website setting. If you have some good examples, please feel free to post a comment.

1. Achievement – A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. Achievements can be easy, difficult, surprising and funny and can be accomplished alone or as a group. Achievements are often viewed as rewards in and of themselves.
   Example: A badge (Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah), a level (Tiny Wings and Angry Birds), a reward (Fruit Ninja), points (Doodle Jump and Pac-Man), really anything defined as a reward can be a reward.
2. Appointment Dynamic – A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dynamics.
   Example: Cafe World and Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.
3. Avoidance – The act of inducing player behaviour not by giving a reward, but by not instituting a punishment. Produces consistent level of activity, timed around the schedule.
   Example: Press a lever every 30 seconds to not get shocked.
4. Behavioural Contrast – The theory defining how behaviour can shift greatly based on changed expectations.
   Example: A monkey presses a lever and is given lettuce. The monkey is happy and continues to press the lever. Then it gets a grape one time. The monkey is delighted. The next time it presses the lever it gets lettuce again. Rather than being happy, as it was before, it goes ballistic throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. (In some experiments, a second monkey is placed in the cage, but tied to a rope so it can’t access the lettuce or lever. After the grape reward is removed, the first monkey beats up the second monkey even though it obviously had nothing to do with the removal. The anger is truly irrational.)
5. Behavioural Momentum – The tendency of players to keep doing what they have been doing.
   Example: From Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 talk: “I have spent ten hours playing Farmville. I am a smart person and wouldn’t spend 10 hours on something unless it was useful. Therefore this must be useful, so I can keep doing it.”
6. Blissful Productivity – The idea that playing in a game makes you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimised as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.
   Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk wherein she discusses how World of Warcraft players play on average 22 hours per week (a part time job), often after a full days work. They’re willing to work hard, perhaps harder than in real life, because of their blissful productivity in the game world.
7. Cascading Information Theory (also known as Progressive Disclosure on the Web) – The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.
   Example: Showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Making building on SCVNGR a simple but staged process to avoid information overload.
8. Chain Schedules – the practice of linking a reward to a series of contingencies. Players tend to treat these as simply the individual contingencies. Unlocking one step in the contingency is often viewed as an individual reward by the player.
   Example: Kill 10 orcs to get into the dragons cave, every 30 minutes the dragon appears.
9. Communal Discovery – The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.
   Example: DARPA Network Challenge; a competition that explores the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilisation. The cottage industries that appear around McDonald’s monopoly to find “Boardwalk”.
10. Companion Gaming – Games that can be played across multiple platforms
    Example: Games that be played on iPhone, Facebook, XBox with completely seamless cross platform game-play.
11. Contingency – The problem that the player must overcome in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: 10 orcs block your path
12. Countdown – The dynamic in which players are only given a certain amount of time to do something. This will create an activity graph that causes increased initial activity increasing frenetically until time runs out, which is a forced extinction.
    Example: Bejewelled Blitz with 30 seconds to get as many points as you can. Bonus rounds. Timed levels
13. Cross Situational Leader-boards – This occurs when one ranking mechanism is applied across multiple (unequal and isolated) gaming scenarios. Players often perceive that these ranking scenarios are unfair as not all players were presented with an “equal” opportunity to win.
    Example: Players are arbitrarily sent into one of three paths. The winner is determined by the top scorer overall (i.e. across the paths). Since the players can only do one path (and can’t pick), they will perceive inequity in the game scenario and get upset.
14. Disincentives – a game element that uses a penalty (or altered situation) to induce behavioural shift.
    Example: losing health points, amazon’s checkout line removing all links to tunnel the buyer to purchase, speeding traps.
15. Endless Games – Games that do not have an explicit end. Most applicable to casual games that can refresh their content or games where a static (but positive) state is a reward of its own.
    Example: Farmville (static state is its own victory), SCVNGR (challenges constantly are being built by the community to refresh content).
16. Envy – The desire to have what others have. In order for this to be effective seeing what other people have (voyeurism) must be employed.
    Example: My friend has this item and I want it!
17. Epic Meaning – players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk where she discusses World of Warcraft’s ongoing story line and “epic meaning” that involves each individual has motivated players to participate outside the game and create the second largest wiki in the world to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.
18. Extinction – Extinction is the term used to refer to the action of stopping providing a reward. This tends to create anger in players as they feel betrayed by no longer receiving the reward they have come to expect. It generally induces negative behavioural momentum.
    Example: Killing 10 orcs no longer gets you a level up.
19. Fixed Interval Reward Schedules – Fixed interval schedules provide a reward after a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. This tends to create a low engagement after a reward, and then gradually increasing activity until a reward is given, followed by another lull in engagement.
    Example: Farmville, wait 30 minutes, crops have appeared.
20. Fixed Ratio Reward Schedules – A fixed ratio schedule provides rewards after a fixed number of actions. This creates cyclical nadirs of engagement (because the first action will not create any reward so incentive is low) and then bursts of activity as the reward gets closer and closer.
    Example: Kill 20 ships, get a level up, visit five locations, get a badge.
21. Free Lunch – A dynamic in which a player feels that they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. It’s critical that work is perceived to have been done (just not by the player in question) to avoid breaching trust in the scenario. The player must feel that they’ve “lucked” into something.
    Example: Groupon. By virtue of 100 other people having bought the deal, you get it cheaply. There is no sketchiness because you recognise work has been done (100 people are spending money) but you yourself didn’t have to do it.
22. Fun Once, Fun Always – The concept that an action in enjoyable to repeat all the time. Generally this has to do with simple actions. There is often also a limitation to the total level of enjoyment of the action.
    Example: the theory behind the check-in everywhere and the check-in and the default challenges on SCVNGR.
23. Interval Reward Schedules – Interval based reward schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time. There are two flavours: variable and fixed.
    Example: Wait n minutes, collect rent.
24. Lottery – A game dynamic in which the winner is determined solely by chance. This creates a high level of anticipation. The fairness is often suspect, however winners will generally continue to play indefinitely while losers will quickly abandon the game, despite the random nature of the distinction between the two.
    Example: Many forms of gambling, scratch tickets.
25. Loyalty – The concept of feeling a positive sustained connection to an entity leading to a feeling of partial ownership. Often reinforced with a visual representation.
    Example: Fealty in World of Warcraft, achieving status at physical places (mayorship, being on the wall of favourite customers).
26. Meta Game – a game which exists layered within another game. These generally are discovered rather than explained (lest they cause confusion) and tend to appeal to ~2% of the total game-playing audience. They are dangerous as they can induce confusion (if made too overt) but are powerful as they’re greatly satisfying to those who find them.
    Example: hidden questions / achievements within World of Warcraft that require you to do special (and hard to discover) activities as you go through other quests.
27. Micro Leader-boards – The rankings of all individuals in a micro-set. Often great for distributed game dynamics where you want many micro-competitions or desire to induce loyalty.
    Example: Be the top scorers at Joe’s bar this week and get a free appetiser.
28. Modifiers – An item that when used affects other actions. Generally modifiers are earned after having completed a series of challenges or core functions.
    Example: A x2 modifier that doubles the points on the next action you take.
29. Moral Hazard of Game Play – The risk that by rewarding people manipulatively in a game you remove the actual moral value of the action and replace it with an ersatz game-based reward. The risk that by providing too many incentives to take an action, the incentive of actually enjoying the action taken is lost. The corollary to this is that if the points or rewards are taken away, then the person loses all motivation to take the (initially fun on its own) action.
    Example: Paraphrased from Jesse Schell “If I give you points every time you brush your teeth, you’ll stop brushing your teeth because it’s good for you and then only do it for the points. If the points stop flowing, your teeth will decay.”
30. Ownership – The act of controlling something, having it be your property.
    Example: Ownership is interesting on a number of levels, from taking over places, to controlling a slot, to simply owning popularity by having a digital representation of many friends.
31. Pride – the feeling of ownership and joy at an accomplishment.
    Example: I have ten badges. I own them. They are mine. There are many like them, but these are mine. Hooray.
32. Privacy – The concept that certain information is private, not for public distribution. This can be a demotivator (I won’t take an action because I don’t want to share this) or a motivator (by sharing this I reinforce my own actions).
    Example: Scales the publish your daily weight onto Twitter (these are real and are proven positive motivator for staying on your diet). Or having your location publicly broadcast anytime you do anything (which is invasive and can should be avoided).
33. Progression – A dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemised tasks.
    Example: LinkedIn uses a progress bar to motivate you to complete your user profile, whilst Mendeley combines the progress bar with a statement suggesting what content needs to be completed: “Fill out your research profile to increase your impact in the Mendeley network and to enable your colleagues to find you.” Levelling up from Paladin level 1 to Paladin level 60.
34. Ratio Reward Schedules – Ratio schedules provide a reward after a number of actions. There are two flavours: variable and fixed.
    Example: Kill 10 orcs, get a power up.
35. Real-time vs. Delayed Mechanics – Realtime information flow is uninhibited by delay. Delayed information is only released after a certain interval.
    Example: Realtime scores cause instant reaction (gratification or demotivation). Delayed information causes ambiguity which can incentivise more action due to the lack of certainty of ranking.
36. Reinforcer – The reward given if the expected action is carried out in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: Receiving a level up after killing 10 orcs.
37. Response – The expected action from the player in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: the player takes the action to kill 10 orcs.
38. Reward Schedules – the time-frame and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.
    Example: Getting a level up for killing 10 orcs, clearing a row in Tetris, getting fresh crops in Farmville
39. Rolling Physical Goods – A physical good (one with real value) that can be won by anyone on an ongoing basis as long as they meet some characteristic. However, that characteristic rolls from player to player.
    Example: Top scorer deals, mayor deals.
40. Shell Game – a game in which the player is presented with the illusion of choice but is actually in a situation that guides them to the desired outcome of the operator.
    Example: 3 Card Monty, lotteries, gambling.
41. Social Fabric of Games – the idea that people like one another better after they’ve played games with them, have a higher level of trust and a great willingness to work together.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk where she suggests that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone because you need them to spend their time with you, play by the same rules, shoot for the same goals.
42. Status – The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status.
    Example: White Paladin level 20 in World of Warcraft.
43. Urgent Optimism – Extreme self motivation. The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk. The idea that in proper games an “epic win” or just “win” is possible and therefore always worth acting for.
44. Variable Interval Reward Schedules – Variable interval reward schedules provide a reward after a roughly consistent amount of time. This tends to create a reasonably high level of activity over time, as the player could receive a reward at any time but never the burst as created under a fixed schedule. This system is also more immune to the nadir right after the receiving of a reward, but also lacks the zenith of activity before a reward in unlocked due to high levels of ambiguity.
    Example: Wait roughly 30 minutes, a new weapon appears. Check back as often as you want but that won’t speed it up. Generally players are bad at realising that.
45. Variable Ratio Reward Schedules – A variable ratio reward schedule provides rewards after a roughly consistent but unknown amount of actions. This creates a relatively high consistent rate of activity (as there could always be a reward after the next action) with a slight increase as the expected reward threshold is reached, but never the huge burst of a fixed ratio schedule. It’s also more immune to nadirs in engagement after a reward is achieved.
    Example: Kill 20 ships, get a level up. Visit a couple locations (roughly five) get a badge
46. Viral Game Mechanics – A game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people).
    Example: Farmville making you more successful in the game if you invite your friends, the social check-in.
47. Virtual Items – Digital prizes, rewards, objects found or taken within the course of a game. Often these can be traded or given away.
    Example: Gowalla’s items, Facebook gifts, badges.

You can read more about “Gamification” on the Gamification Wiki or on the Wikipedia Gamification page.

Inclusive design is where innovation and imagination flourish. Meeting the needs of the widest variety of people does not inhibit creativity. It opens our minds and inspires excellence.

In her article in .net magazine, Sandi Wassmer of Copious explains the ten principles for inclusive web design an overview of which is listed below:

1. Equitable – Be welcoming, don’t discriminate and engage with people. Create different user experiences and make certain they have equally valuable outcomes. Aesthetics matter.
2. Flexible – Provide options. Think who, how, why, what, where and when people will be using your website. Make sure there is choice for diverse users and maintain device independence.
3. Straightforward – Be obvious and not ambiguous. Make sure your website’s features add value, not complexity. Remember, good design is as little design as possible.
4. Perceptible – Don’t assume anything. Make sure your website’s purpose is clear, its content, structure and sequence are meaningful and convey information to all of the senses.
5. Informative – Make sure people know where they are on your website and provide ways for them to find what they’re looking for. Be timely, predictable, uncomplicated and precise.
6. Preventative – Provide easy to follow instructions and gently guide users in interacting with your website. Help them to minimise errors when submitting data, through well considered form design.
7. Tolerant – Handle errors respectfully and indicate precisely what the error is, where it is and how to fix it. Remember to let people know the outcome.
8. Effortless – Don’t make demands or place restrictions on your users. People should not have to work or think hard to find what they want on your website. Ensure it can be used efficiently and effectively.
9. Accommodating – Be approachable, uncluttered and give people room to manoeuvre. Make sure that your website is unobtrusive and can be accessed by different devices of all shapes and sizes.
10. Consistent – Follow standards, guidelines, conventions and best practices. Provide a familiar environment with memorable functionality.

With different devices, configurations, browsers, personal settings and assistive technologies, and no agreement on how to achieve interoperability, web builders must do their best to accommodate the diverse ways people access the internet. Building with this in mind will ensure your visitors have a quality experience.

Inclusive design enables us to create great, meaningful, on-brand internet experiences for the widest audience possible. However, inclusive design is also a new way of thinking, and its overarching aims may not mirror those of your organisation or clients. Change takes time, so you may not be able to do everything at once. If you just start thinking about accessibility and plan your projects with users in mind, you’ll be on the right path. There will be trade-offs and tough decisions, but this is where inclusive design really comes to the fore. It challenges us to hone our craft and fosters real creativity and innovation.

Steve Jobs on product development, from “Steve Jobs: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff” in Forbes.

The essay contrasts two different free software development models: The Cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers; and, The Bazaar model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public.

The essay helped convince most existing open source and free software projects to adopt Bazaar-style open development models, fully or partially

Raymond posits that there are 19 guidelines for creating good open source software:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible – and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a predefined series of orderly steps. The spaces demarcate different sorts of related activities that together form the continuum of innovation. Design thinking can feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the first time. But over the life of a project participants come to see that the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its architecture differs from the linear, milestone-based processes typical of other kinds of business activities.

Design projects must ultimately pass through three spaces. These include “inspiration”, for the circumstances (be they a problem, an opportunity, or both) that motivate the search for solutions; “ideation”, for the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas that may lead to solutions; and “implementation”, for the charting of a path to market. Projects will loop back through these spaces – particularly the first two – more than once as ideas are refined and new directions taken.

In an article for the Harvard Business Review in June, 2008, Tim Brown of IDEO describes what is needed to make Design Thinking part of the innovation drill.

• Begin at the beginning. Involve design thinkers at the very start of the innovation process, before any direction has been set. Design thinking will help you explore more ideas more quickly than you could otherwise.
• Take a human-centered approach. Along with business and technology considerations, innovation should factor in human behavior, needs, and preferences. Human-centered design thinking – especially when it includes research based on direct observation – will capture unexpected insights and produce innovation that more precisely reflects what consumers want.
• Try early and often. Create an expectation of rapid experimentation and prototyping. Encourage teams to create a prototype in the first week of a project. Measure progress with a metric such as average time to first prototype or number of consumers exposed to prototypes during the life of a program.
• Seek outside help. Expand the innovation ecosystem by looking for opportunities to co-create with customers and consumers. Exploit social networks to enlarge the effective scale of your innovation team.
• Blend big and small projects. Manage a portfolio of innovation that stretches from shorter-term incremental ideas to longer-term revolutionary ones. Expect business units to drive and fund incremental innovation, but be willing to initiate revolutionary innovation from the top.
• Budget to the pace of innovation. Design thinking happens quickly, yet the route to market can be unpredictable. Don’t constrain the pace at which you can innovate by relying on cumbersome budgeting cycles. Be prepared to rethink your funding approach as projects proceed and teams learn more about opportunities.
• Find talent any way you can. Look to hire from interdisciplinary programs like the Institute of Design at Stanford, progressive business schools like Rotman in Toronto and the Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Anthropology courses at UCL in London. People with more conventional design backgrounds can push solutions far beyond your expectations. You may even be able to train non-designers with the right attributes to excel in design-thinking roles.
• Design for the cycle. In many businesses people move every 12 to 18 months. But design projects may take longer than that to get from day one through implementation. Plan assignments so that design thinkers go from inspiration to ideation to implementation. Experiencing the full cycle builds better judgment and creates great long-term benefits for the organisation.

Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes – and even strategy.

In an article for the Harvard Business Review in June, 2008, Tim Brown of IDEO outlined some characteristics to look for in design thinkers:

• Empathy. They can imagine the world from multiple perspectives – those of colleagues, clients, end users, and customers (current and prospective). By taking a “people first” approach, design thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. Great design thinkers observe the world in minute detail. They notice things that others do not and use their insights to inspire innovation.
• Integrative thinking. They not only rely on analytical processes (those that produce either/or choices) but also exhibit the ability to see all of the salient – and sometimes contradictory – aspects of a confounding problem and create novel solutions that go beyond and dramatically improve on existing alternatives. (See Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking.)
• Optimism. They assume that no matter how challenging the constraints of a given problem, at least one potential solution is better than the existing alternatives.
• Experimentalism. Significant innovations don’t come from incremental tweaks. Design thinkers pose questions and explore constraints in creative ways that proceed in entirely new directions.
• Collaboration. The increasing complexity of products, services, and experiences has replaced the myth of the lone creative genius with the reality of the enthusiastic interdisciplinary collaborator. The best design thinkers don’t simply work alongside other disciplines; many of them have significant experience in more than one. They can be engineers and marketers, anthropologists and industrial designers, architects and psychologists.

In her The Dimensions of a Good Experience presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle, 2011, Andrzejewski shared ten principles from urban design that provide unique lenses for evaluating and thinking about mobile and Web user experience designs.

Luke Wroblewski provides a handy overview from the talk; my take on his overview is summarised below:

1. Sense of Meaning — Does the design tell a story? How is the form a reflection of its values? Can people read and understand the environment? Visual cues in the environment can communicate meaning. For example, there’s a lot of meaning in the way that Japanese signs are structured. This enables you to read the environment. What story are we trying to tell in our information architecture (IA) through its structural design?
2. Sense of Place — Does the design leave a lasting impression on the user’s senses? Is it memorable [in a good way]? Focus on those key moments. What should they remember? What story do you want to tell the user and how can you use the language of design to reinforce that story? Show a user a home page that’s unfamiliar to them and ask if they understand the value of the product or service. How well are you communicating?
3. Sense of Structure — Does the design afford the user a sense of structure? Can they understand that structure? Can the user create an accurate mental model of what they’re looking at? When things fit together, a user will feel comfortable and in control.
4. Sense of Unfolding — Does the design get better the more a user explores? Are they ‘delighted’ by the what’s unfolding before them? Is the first time experience tempered so as not to be overwhelming? How can you get the user to leave wanting more?
5. Sense of Transparency — Does the design give a glimmer of what’s inside? This is not absolute as different groups demand different levels of transparency.
6. Sense of Fit — Does the design anticipate and facilitate the desired needs of the user so that it makes them feel positive? Observe the user throughout the site. Find the drop-off points and fix them. Ask the users questions.
7. Sense of Adaptability — Does the design afford the user the ability to adapt their surroundings to reach a more comfortable fit? Again, observe your users and learn from their adaptations.
8. Sense of Access — Does the design provide a range of choices to the user? How much and what range of choices are presented to a user at any given time? Is it too many or too few? Carry out some A/B tests to find out.
9. Sense of Responsibility — Does the design engender a sense of community, ownership and responsibility with/to your users? Holding people accountable will encourage good behaviour. How can you increase your users’ sense of responsibility to the community or website you’re trying to build?
10. Sense of Certainty — Does the design promote trust? What are the systems of control? Do these reinforce trust? Does your website behave in predictable ways? This is particularly important if your users aren’t actually in control. Examine what makes your users anxious and mitigate against those anxieties. Make your users feel confident.

You need to examine the user experience you’re creating through each of the lenses above. By doing so you will improve the experience for all your users.