Stephen Anderson
Designer, speaker & CXO at BloomBoard
Learning UX from Game Design
If you’re serious about UX, then it’s time to bust out some games. Seriously. Nearly everything we should know about crafting an experience can be learned (and learned better) by studying game design.
In this workshop, speaker Stephen P. Anderson will expose you to the process of designing a board game, with a special focus on lessons and tools we, as UX designers, can bring back to our daily processes. Some of the ideas may be familiar: Iterative testing and prototypes. Starting with a desired experience. Designing for emotions. Other ideas may be less familiar: Modelling complex systems. Designing for emergent behaviours. Whatever the case, you’ll see your perspective changed as you experience these concepts through a game design lens.
This fast-paced workshop will challenge you to design a game, experiencing first-hand the mindset needed to level up your UX work. Through a series of hands-on activities, attendees will learn practical ways to:
- Define a core experience that drives every product decision
- Design emotionally engaging experiences based on core needs and motivations
- Work quickly and iteratively to ship a complete-enough system (that can then be iterated upon)
- Separate bad friction (usability issues) from good friction (inherent learning challenges)
- Spot and articulate gaps in our processes that handicap great experiences
About Stephen Anderson
Stephen P. Anderson is the Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard, where he is transforming how teachers grow as professionals. Once a high school teacher, Stephen continues to challenge and inspire people as an international speaker and trainer; he’s presented at some of the world’s largest organisations, teaching teams about games, play, learning, interactive visualisations, and other fun topics.
Stephen is most recognised as the man behind the Mental Notes card deck—a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He also authored Seductive Interaction Design, which answers the question: "How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?”