Adding Game Features to Your Design
In an earlier post I talked about reverse engineering things that make our minds race as a technique for doing cognitive design. I highlighted an article from Wired that talked about how the game model is being applied to the design of many different things. Now Businessweek has picked up on the issue with an article titled:
One example: “PhotoAttack, you must quickly describe images as they fly at you. “Funny,” “cute,” “sexy,”—and so on. The more your tags match those of other users, the higher your score. You can invite friends to play the game with your images, though you can also choose who views what—and tags can later be exported to other photo-sharing sites. As the game is played again and again by users, the quality of each tag improves.”
Note the clever use of both game features and collaborative tagging (folksonomy style) to help solve the problem of organizing large online stores of photos. Not clear if it will work yet but it seems like a very clever cognitive design. If you are struggling with the cognition of organizing your photos give it a try at rmbr (when they are done with beta testing).
