Yesterday I organized a uxSEARS extracurricular-activity, after work for some of our user experience architects, we played “Social Mania: Designing Social Interfaces.” It is basically a pattern library of social rules for building great social experiences.
Players form teams & compete with to develop the best experiences before time runs out. The team that ship products delivering the best experience win.
The Objectives are to:
• Build a social digital product around an object for a specific audience delivered in a specific way.
• Deliver a well rounded product (with features across Identity, Activities, and Relationships) in a defined time frame.
• Work as a team to collaborate and build the best products
We had Pete Wendel, Pete Simon, Mark Geotz, Ariel Rudolph, Victor Pinto, Emil Gentolizo and myself.
We produced 4 products in 1 hour and had a lot of fun. People afterwards told me:
•It breeds innovating thinking & gets your creative juices flowing
• It helps one realize how many different components there can really be and could be considered for any social system
• It was fun and collaborative
Based on the results I think it would an excellent thing to do with any designers working in this space and even with your product management teams.
If you are here in Chicago and are interesting in trying it out, drop me a line. I am always up for teaching others about this very cool game. Don’t worry if you don’t have a Ph.D. or anything in social media or user interface engineering, it is easy to get the hang of it, you just have to be interested in and open to stretching your mind into the social media and social business space.