Archive for quote
21 January, 2018 at 12:59 am · Filed under quote, storytelling
“I learned about “iconography” from working with Rob Schrab for several years. In cartooning, you have to draw a certain combination of lines before the audience is going to universally recognize what you’ve drawn.
“If I draw a cylinder, I can tell you it’s a banana, but I can’t make you think “banana” on your own unless I make it yellow, taper the ends and give it some curvature. To further extend this metaphor: Sometimes bananas are green in real life. If I make a green, tapered, curved cylinder, does it look like a banana? It looks like a pepper. You can jump up and down and scream about how you just drew a perfectly good banana, because it looks just as much like a real banana as a yellow one (student filmmaker), but I’m telling you, dude, it’s a fucking pepper, UNTIL you put more time and energy into giving it OTHER recognizable banana qualities- for instance, drawing it half peeled. Okay, now it’s a green banana. You blew my mind.
Dan Harmon
http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_106:_Five_Minute_Pilots
When creating we like to be different, unique or ‘creative’, unless it can be recognized as a banana it can fall flat. We suffer from the curse of knowledge, we know if it is a banana but the player/audience doesn’t unless it looks like one.
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20 February, 2016 at 5:58 am · Filed under design, publishing, quote, research
- You Didn’t Understand The Problem You Were Solving
- You Asked Your Friends What They Thought
- You Listened To Users Instead Of Watching Them
- You Didn’t Test Your Riskiest Assumption
- You Had A “Bob The Builder” Mentality
“…Sharon says it’s as simple as validating, or invalidating, three core pieces of the plan: The problem (Is the app solving a problem people care about?), the market (Are there enough people who have this problem?), and the product (Is our product solving this problem for this market?).
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3033092/googles-6-reasons-why-nobody-uses-your-app
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9 August, 2015 at 10:18 pm · Filed under design, publishing, quote
Rule one has two parts:
a. the customer is always right
b. if that’s not true, it’s unlikely that this person will remain your customer.
If you need to explain to a customer that he’s wrong, that everyone else has no problem, that you have tons of happy customers who were able to successfully read the instructions, that he’s not smart enough or persistent enough or handsome enough to be your customer, you might be right. But if you are, part b kicks in and you’ve lost him.
If you find yourself litigating, debating, arguing and most of all, proving your point, you’ve forgotten something vital: people have a choice, and they rarely choose to do business with someone who insists that they are wrong.
By all means, fire the customers who aren’t worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you’ve just started the firing process.
PS here’s a great way around this problem: Make sure that the instruction manual, the website and the tech support are so clear, so patient and so generous that customers don’t find themselves being wrong.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/07/when-in-doubt-re-read-rule-one.html
Not everyone who talks about projects are customers (as defined by them having spend money on the product), however they have an impact on brand, community and customers. Understanding how you deal with the customers & community around a brand is a big deal to live service products.
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24 March, 2015 at 3:39 pm · Filed under game design, quote ·Tagged choices
Every choice takes some mental energy. Make the choices you offer the player ones that matter and that they should care about. Don’t make them burn energy on thinks that don’t matter or aren’t meaningful.
The only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose
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20 March, 2015 at 3:59 pm · Filed under game design, quote
“Because there’s so much awesome stuff that’s happening on YouTube, the videos that people are posting, the amazing creations that people are making on Minecraft, all the League of Legends stuff – this didn’t exist before. I think the innovation is just happening in a place where it might be a little bit outside of the control of the developer.”
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19 March, 2015 at 4:45 pm · Filed under game design, quote
“That’s been really the challenge that I’ve been suffering: how can we look at the business differently rather than thinking about ARPU’s, what the numbers are, what knobs to turn etc? Instead, we should be thinking about what experiences can we deliver that are going to delight users. The crazy thought that I was giving with the talk today was I believe that there are going to be companies out there that really practice and really understand the value of user experience over time.
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2 March, 2015 at 10:49 pm · Filed under game design, project management, quote
Game developers should think twice before including ingrained game conventions such as combat, death, and trial-and-error gameplay. Trial and error in games undermines emotional experiences and “keeps the machinery opaque.” It is un-immersive because it “chips away at the make-believe,” forcing the player to examine the game machinery to figure out how to beat the system.
and a really interesting blog post about Indie games as inspiration
http://www.theastronauts.com/2012/10/reboot-your-aaa-brain/
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2 March, 2015 at 10:48 pm · Filed under game design, publishing, quote
Interesting article on tablet trends – http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/4/25/ipad-growth
- iPad sales are slowing and pretty flat.
- Apple still winning, and Android tablets not cause of slow down
- Is it because iPads can’t be used for the same stuff as PCs yet?
…moving to new devices and form factors involves new software experiences, and new software also often both creates and requires new business processes. It’s hard to spend a day creating a 20-slide sales report on an iPad, even now that MS Office is available for iPad. But actually, that sales report should be a SAAS dashboard that takes 10 minutes to annotate. It will take time for those business processes to shift to enable more corporate tablet use.
Maybe suggesting that software will need to keep moving forward to meet the changing needs. In games, tablet games have been very much thrown in with phones most of the time. Unique tablet games will likely have more in common with PC than smartphone.
So, looking at tablets and smartphones as mobile devices in a new category that competes with PCs may be the wrong comparison – in fact, it may be better to think of tablets, laptops and desktops as one ‘big screen’ segment, all of which compete with smartphones, and for which the opportunity is just smaller than that for smartphones. And so tablets will over time eat away at laptop and desktop sales just as laptops ate away at desktop sales, but the truly transformative new category is the smartphone. Maybe.
We need to think about the tablet as part of the ‘PC’ and think about what it does to gamers expectations, and what we have to do to innovate in this space.
An alternate selection of data from Reality Mine on tablet use throughout the day, where and what people are doing with their tablets in 2014.
Tablets used most between 8 & 9pm primarily for content consumption, with games and entertainment apps leading the pack.
- Apps, TV and Video content consumption are top activities for tablet owners.
- Gaming is the most popular activity on tablets, compared to social networking for mobile phone users.
- 85% of all tablet use occurs at home, this is significantly more than in home use of tablets and computers.
- The majority of people are ‘relaxing’ while using their tablet or iPad.
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5 December, 2014 at 6:41 am · Filed under life, project management, quote ·Tagged google, management, mastery
According to ‘How Google Works’, Google’s 1-1 model is summarized as follows;
- Performance on job requirements = Work & delivery focused
- Relationships with peer groups = People and effectiveness
- Management/Leadership = Coaching, guiding and feedback, are you working hard enough at recruitment
- Innovation/Best Practice = Are you constantly moving forward, learning new things
As an alternative way to structure 1-1 meetings, focus on the 4 key topics of Work, Team, Management and Mastery WTMM.
* Work: performance delivering work requirements
* Team: relationships with peers and team
* Management: feedback, coaching & motivation
* Mastery: new learnings & opportunities, training goals
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1 October, 2014 at 8:00 pm · Filed under quote ·Tagged design
And here’s the next irony that defines Ive’s career: In the clutter of contemporary culture, where hits and likes threaten to overtake content in value, the purity of an idea takes on increasing currency. “I think now more than ever it’s important to be clear, to be singular,” he says, “and to have a perspective, one you didn’t generate as the result of doing a lot of focus groups.” Developing concepts and creating prototypes leads to “fascinating conversations” with his team, says Ive. “It’s a process I’ve been practicing for decades, but I still have the same wonder.”
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8 September, 2014 at 8:27 pm · Filed under life, quote ·Tagged rewards
In October 2013, a café in the South of France implemented a pricing policy based on patron’s politeness. Patrons who greeted the barista at La Petite Syrah and used ‘please’ were charged EUR 1.40 for a cup of coffee; those who failed to use any pleasantries were ‘penalized’ with a EUR 7 price. The prices (with greeting) were clearly displayed on a board inside the café.
Trendwatching
Interesting idea, especially in an era of trolls and endless complaints.
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16 July, 2014 at 3:41 pm · Filed under design, publishing, quote
* You Didn’t Understand The Problem You Were Solving
* You Asked Your Friends What They Thought
* You Listened To Users Instead Of Watching Them
* You Didn’t Test Your Riskiest Assumption
* You Had A “Bob The Builder” Mentality
“…Sharon says it’s as simple as validating, or invalidating, three core pieces of the plan: The problem (Is the app solving a problem people care about?), the market (Are there enough people who have this problem?), and the product (Is our product solving this problem for this market?).
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9 February, 2014 at 5:05 am · Filed under design, game design, quote
“The evidence that people are drawn to shiny things is all around us: from the pages of lifestyle magazines to the page stock of lifestyle magazines. One logical explanation for this cultural affection is that we’ve come to associate gloss with wealth and luxury.”
“… that our preference for glossy might be deep-rooted and very human,” says Patrick. “It is humbling to acknowledge that despite our sophistication and progress as a species, we are still drawn to things that serve our innate needs–in this case, the need for water.”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3024766/evidence/an-evolutionary-theory-for-why-you-love-glossy-things
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9 February, 2014 at 4:25 am · Filed under publishing, quote
Super fans take their hobby or passions very seriously. It doesn’t matter what the hobby, super fans spend heavily to feed their hobby. Doesn’t that make them whales?
Free to play whales spend heavily on their favorite game(s), and they spend a huge amount of time playing these games. Doesn’t that make them super fans?
“There’s a terrible habit of talking about F2P “whales” – a term which the industry itself doesn’t use so much any more, incidentally, having realised that borrowing its parlance from the morally bankrupt world of Las Vegas casinos probably wasn’t doing it any favours – in terms of condescension and pity. We act like these people have been hoodwinked somehow. They’ve downloaded a game for free and ended up spending loads of money on it, and for some reason we assume that they didn’t know it was happening – that they’ll reach some day, down the line, where they realise how much they’ve spent and have a terrible Road to Damascus moment that lays bare how empty and pointless the whole thing has been. Not like us and our expensive merchandise or huge collections of games half of which we’ve never actually played; nothing like that at all.”
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-01-30-core-gamers-can-be-whales-too?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=us-daily
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snippets of cloud 