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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Amy Jo Kim
Because game designers don’t design badges and points systems. That’s not the heart of what we do. We build systems that teach you themselves.
Setup the Conditions for Flow.
Successful games all have something in common: the intrinsic joy of skill-building. It feels good to engage our brains, improve our skills, and make progress along a path toward mastery.
Flow is not about making things easy, or “gamified.” Flow takes effort. Without learning, practice, and challenge, there is no flow. At their core, games are pleasurable learning engines that deliver an experience that’s deeply, intrinsically motivating. Over time, you absorb the rules, build your skills, tackle ever-greater challenges—and in the process, you’re transformed in some way that’s meaningful to YOU.
Forget Points, Think Character Transformation.
Just as character transformation is the backbone of great drama, personal transformation is the backbone of great gameplay. In games, we are the protagonist—the person with agency, facing a series of ch...
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The Trinity of Intrinsic Motivation
To create a truly compelling experience, tap into the trinity of Intrinsic Motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Autonomy, Competence & Relatedness
Mastery: Skill-Building, Feedback and Challenge
In a great game, mastering the rule-set is deeply pleasurable. The lack of anything to master is often why simple gamification fails. Points, badges, and leaderboards aren’t compelling unless you’re improving along some personally meaningful dimension.
Purpose is about connectedness and relatedness—with other people, with a shared cause, with something bigger than yourself.
Game Design ≠ Loyalty Marketing
People who come from a marketing background look at games and see a set of extrinsic motivators and reward schedules that can be lifted out and plunked down elsewhere.
Trying to drive long-term engagement with extrinsic rewards is a fool’s errand. If metrics and rewards are your main event, you’ve got a shallow and/or manipulative product that won’t hold people’s interest over time.
Extrinsic Rewards Can Devalue Pleasurable Activities
Extrinsic rewards are effective at getting people to complete simple, short-term tasks, but decrease effectiveness for creative tasks that require out-of-the-box thinking.
Some use the Business Model Canvas (or something similar) to get started (a “canvas” is a one-page worksheet you complete to capture at-a-glance insights and goals). While this helps you think through your whole business, it doesn’t help you focus on the most pressing issues involved in testing and validating an idea and building your MVP (minimum viable product).
Meet the MVP Canvas To help you develop strong, testable hypotheses and run smarter experiments, I’ve created a stripped-down tool called the MVP Canvas that helps you frame your current ideas as hypotheses, and generate prioritized assumptions to test. If you’ve ever wanted a reliable way to validate ideas quickly, this tool is for you.
Finding these high-need, high-value early customers is an iterative process that you can accelerate by writing down clear, testable hypotheses. Ask yourself: What group of people will need and want our offering first? What characteristics and behaviors will they have in common?
Value proposition
What relevant needs do they have right now that we could potentially address? How are they currently getting those needs met? Why is that unsatisfying?
Developing a New Product Let’s bring this to life by looking at how Happify, a successful mental health app, created and tested their early customer hypotheses. At the start, we had three hypotheses about who would most need a game that promotes science-based happiness—and what their unmet need might be. We put those into the MVP Canvas.
People don’t care about your solution, they care about finding the easiest, most convenient, most effective way to meet their needs.
Customer Value Connects to Unmet Need You might have trouble differentiating between customer value proposition and unmet need. That’s because they’re closely related. Customer needs exist in problem space—whether or not your project is in the mix. Your value proposition exists in solution space—it’s the connective tissue between your solution and your customer’s needs.
Define Your Unfair Advantage and Early Metrics Next, you’re going to write down your unfair advantage—the special skills, resources, connections and knowledge that makes you and your team the right people to bring this idea to life.
To identify your unfair advantage, get inspired by the “hedgehog concept” from Good to Great by Jim Collins. Ask yourself: What am I passionate about? What are we the best in the world at? Why should someone believe in this team and project?
Jot down one or two relevant factors you can measure in upcoming experiments, such as: Preference: old vs new (for a redesign) Uptake: willingness to use the product Value: willingness to pay for the product NPS score: willingness to recommend it to other people
For Happify, our unfair advantage was the team’s experience with running and selling a successful casual games company, and a personal passion for bringing the science of happiness to a wider audience. Our early metrics were built around getting positive reactions to our prototype.
Your goal is to write down a prioritized list of your high-risk assumptions—the ones central to your project that you’re unsure about. Pay special attention to the left side of your Canvas. Who are your assumptions’ early customers and what are their unmet needs? What about your solution and value prop?
Speed bump #1: The mass market visionary Teams that stumble often do so because they go broad first, skipping the crucial stage of finding and delighting their early customers.
Speed bump #2: The passionate believer It takes superhuman self-control to listen dispassionately while early customers rip your ideas apart.
Speed bump #3: The data snob Some people worship at the altar of analytics and believe that actionable research always involves A/B testing and thousands of data points. That’s great if you’re optimizing an existing product, but not useful if you’re bringing something innovative to life.
Use subjective tests to validate your early ideas. Innovation comes from early prototyping. Analytics come later. Know when to use both.
Speed bump #4: The high-gloss champion High-gloss champions have a hard time with imagining how sketches and wireframes might evolve into something wonderful. Polished visuals can fool them into thinking something is further along than it is.
Use the Elevator Pitch Template below to tell the world what you’re delivering, who it’s for, and what customer problem or need you’re addressing.
Planning Your Research: Who, What, When, Where Look over your early market hypotheses from your MVP Canvas and ask yourself: Who will we bring in first for testing? How will we find them? Which assumptions will we be testing first? Why? Can we start right away, or is there a “gating event” for getting started? Will we talk to people online, by phone, or in person? Or a mix?
Speed bump #1: Lack of internal support If your organization is unfamiliar with hypothesis-driven testing, you’ll get pushback. This happens when your colleagues don’t have the skill set and experience to run these tests, so they dismiss what they don’t understand.
Speed bump #2: Lack of focus on a small early market The surest way to derail early product development is to go broad and build for everyone—which usually delights nobody.
Speed bump #3: Overdeveloping software too early Although you and your team might have the best intentions, it’s emotionally difficult in practice to let potential customers interact with a buggy, ugly version of your grand vision. Many startups set out to build their alpha, but end up developing and polishing something that’s much closer to a beta.
When you set out to create something new, you need to seek out feedback from a specific type of customer with four key characteristics:
Research from the Nielsen/Norman group suggests that you only need five testers to know if you’re on the right track. But here’s the catch: they need to be the right five people for your product and development stage.
Innovation diffusion theory gives us a road map for which customers to focus on first: our pre-chasm early market. When you’re bringing a new idea to life, pay attention to feedback from your early market and ignore the rest.
Day in the Life “Walk us through your typical experience of [relevant activity]. How does [relevant activity] fit into your day?”
What’s Working Now “As you do [relevant activity], what [websites, apps, games, services] do you use? Which parts of that experience are working for you? What do you enjoy about that?”
A job story is a special kind of customer story—told from the customer’s POV—that follows the format shown here.
Surface Patterns in the Data To transform your customer data into actionable insights, start by scanning the data for patterns that are relevant to your product. In particular, look for: Existing habits Unmet needs Pain points Ideas or suggestions
During our Pley research, we discovered that parents with Lego-obsessed kids were desperate for a guilt-free break and frustrated with the wide-open nature of YouTube.
Pay Attention to Emotions All these job stories have something in common: an emotional arc that moves the protagonist from one state to another. There’s an implicit emotion embedded in the trigger, and the desired outcome has an emotional component that tells you the state they’re seeking to change.
Story–quote pairs are a great way to synthesize what you learned. To create one, select a job story that captures a key finding, and illustrate it with a quote (or paraphrase) from a subject. The Happify mom gets home in the morning after drop-off and faces dirty dishes.
