Could it be true that we’ve finally mastered the art of controlling users’ emotions? This talk by a widely respected design consultant claims that this is what their research has made possible

Watch the video and see if you found this as intriguing as it sounds

There’s a part in the middle of the video where I confess that I almost lost faith in her for a short while, as she seemed to me to be struggling to maintain momentum, but I quickly decided that this was probably nothing more than ‘just a presentation struggle moment’ which occasionally happens to just about all of us who do presentations: you’ll find there’s far too much good material in here to let those few moments discourage you from watching the whole talk.

From a review of the UX Week 2010 event in Core77 Magazine

“…the highlight of the day was Nicole Lazzaro. She proposed a transformative design concept: applying gaming principals to things we don’t typically consider games: work, school, preparing dinner, or reading the newspaper. Of course, that’s not a particularly ground-breaking proposal. Game principals have always been a part of non-game systems. We all grew up getting gold-stars in elementary school. What is Employee-of-the-Month if not a grown-up’s Big Gold Star? New social applications like Four Square offer badges (a.k.a. gold stars) for using their service. At heart, using gaming principles to encourage behavior isn’t a unique proposal. What is unique about Nicole’s proposal is her particular model of fun.”

The session was called:

The Future of UX is Play: The 4 Keys to Fun, Emotion and User Engagement

The speaker was Nicole Lazzaro of XEODesign

Here are her four different types of fun:

    • Hard Fun – players who like the opportunities for challenge, strategy, and problem solving. Their comments focus on the game’s challenge and strategic thinking and problem solving.
    • Easy Fun – players who enjoy intrigue and curiosity. Players become immersed in games when it absorbs their complete attention, or when it takes them on an exciting adventure.
    • Serious Fun – players who get enjoyment from their internal experiences in reaction to the visceral, behavior, cognitive, and social properties.
    • People Fun – players who enjoy using games as mechanisms for social experiences and enjoy the social experiences of competition, teamwork, as well as opportunity for social bonding and personal recognition that comes from playing with others

The event was called:

UX Week 2010

It was hosted by Adaptive Path on Tuesday, August 24 2010 at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF