I am excited to host another “UX Game Night”: playing games that embody UX concepts while also socializing with your UX peers.
- November 8, 6-9pm, in the Cleveland area. RSVP at UX Akron’s meetup entry. This is a warm-up for Cleveland’s World Usability Day conference the next day.
I am going to bring two kinds of games: traditional games and specially-made games.
Useful UX Concepts Taught by Traditional Games
- Explain concepts by sketching: Pictionary. Visual communication requires some artistic skills but visual literacy and cultural understanding are also important.
- Translate written requirements into screen designs (and vice versa): Scribblish. Designing user interfaces and interacting with stakeholders can feel like the game of “telephone”.
- Create UI patterns based on reusable elements: Doodle Dice. A large part of user interface design is selecting the right combination of elements from a design system.
- Find visual patterns and categorize content by attributes: Set. Digital experiences are often determined by the clarity of the information architecture.
- Find relationships between words and concepts: Codenames. Unique experiences can be created by combining things in various (surprising) ways.
- Different roles collaborate to accomplish intermediate goals on the way to larger goals: Forbidden Island. Matt Leacock was a UX practitioner before he became a game designer. Pandemic is his more famous game.
- Set up a series of plays to satisfy the ever-changing goals: Fluxx. Requirements, goals and even “the rules” change often in large & complex organizations. To be successful at UX, sometimes you have to change the rules yourself.
Specific UX Games
- Find the best way to deal with design situations: Surviving Design Projects. Being successful in UX work is just as much about how you collaborate and deal with organizational conflict as what you create.
- There are highs and lows to designing, engineering, and producing software: Ship It! User Experience work often happens in the context of product management.
- Social products are the right combination of design patterns and features under the pressure of product delivery: Social Mania. Explains different social patterns, principles, antipatterns and other situations common to product design.
- As the UX Design team, help your company earn a profit by releasing games in various markets: UX Jungle. This game has it all: design specs, unhappy stakeholders, buggy code, product sales, and a lot more!
Should be fun!
