Design Process

All great designs are built on a solid foundation. The design process is a blueprint to help guide creative development of interactive experiences and integrates approaches I have learned and applied on many successful projects. The process also integrates learnings from some of the great designers and design thinkers including Shigeru Miyamoto, Tracy Fullerton, and Sid Meier.

The process is geared towards games and entertaining interactive experiences, but it can also be applied to more functional apps as a lot of the principles for engagement and design are similar. While there is no "right" way to design interactive experiences, I have found this approach useful in helping guide an iterative, exploratory, comprehensive, and rigorous design process while remaining open to new ideas and approaches.

The Foundation consists of The Concept, The Core, and The Components. Each section involves a different approach to thinking and performing functions. The sections are described below.

The Concept

Concept Breakdown - Framing an idea

Interactive experiences start with a concept that outlines what the intended experience is for an audience and serves as the blueprint and inspiration for the more intensive design and development phase. Understanding who you are designing for helps focus on a design style or genre, but most interactive experiences share universal concepts when it comes to creating an engaging experience.

Ideas for compelling and interesting concepts can come from many sources, but are usually forged from immersion in a specific problem to solve, recognized opportunity to seize, or sometimes from a flash of inspiration.

This blue sky process is very fluid where ideas spark from brainstorming sessions, focused research, envisioning, and critical analysis of ideas. Rapidly prototyping ideas helps shape concepts so you can give them a test run to see how they feel. As ideas form and gel, the goal is to provide enough information so a solid premise, theme and mechanics emerge.

Interactive experiences typically form around three elements - Premise (what is the experience), theme (a call to action and the emotion, mood, or aesthetic it is meant to evoke), and mechanics (how you do things). A concept can begin and evolve from either three, but the idea is forged from the intended experience for an audience and the interplay of understanding the problem or opportunity, researching information or related ideas, formulating an overall vision and goals, and assessing each idea to evaluate its merit.

For example, I may have an idea for a fun jumping mechanic I try out in a prototype. Playing with this mechanic may trigger ideas for a premise and theme. Or if I want to explore ideas centered around conservation, I may try out some play mechanics and a premise that fits the theme.

A critical part of this process is to identify the primary emotion you want to evoke. Will this experience trigger adrenaline driven excitement, or will it trigger more thoughtful, introspective feelings? The type of mechanics, premise, and theme will have a direct impact on the emotions you create.

Premise or Story

What is the game or experience about? Who, or what, is the main character and what challenges do they need to overcome? What is their hero's journey? Explore what situations force the character to struggle outside their comfort zone and how they can overcome their challenges. For a transactional product, what problem is the customer wanting to solve and how can they overcome these challenges? This forms the basic structure for the story you want to tell. The main character can be more abstract like a community, or entire civilization.

Character drives premise

Great premises are centered around interesting characters. Interesting characters can be developed by exploring three filters that drive their behaviors - (1) their controlling idea which is their predominant point of view like solve the mystery, find love, kill the monsters; (2) their primary orientation which is their strongest self-identity like parent, artist, cop, soldier and serves as the controlling idea's context; and (3) fundamental question which is the primary question, doubt or fear that drives them like am I respected? am I full-filled? how will I survive?

Great premises are the foundation for great stories and great stories challenge the characters pre existing condition and transform them through a series of pressure and response events.

Theme and Setting

Theme is what the story or premise is about. The is the story's call to action and serves as the unifying idea that binds the game together and helps direct creative choices. A theme is the deeper meaning of the premise and story centered around basic human emotions and tenets like joy, loneliness, redemption, family, hope, injustice, good vs evil, parenthood, the power of nature, or technology. Great themes inspire and prompt people to do something meaningful like seize the day, or love your family, or find happiness in the day to day little things.

Settings impact themes helping inform time and place - like Victorian England, or futuristic space station - that help set context for the story and overall aesthetics of the experience. Theme influences and defines the world the experience lives in and drives aesthetics like world and level design, audio and visual elements to create an immersive, interconnected experience. Here is a great list of themes to explore.

Mechanics

Mechanics are the actions a user or player performs. In a game it defines actions such as running, jumping, shooting, hunting, crafting, exploring etc. as well as the play mode like single player or multiplayer. It also includes social features beyond gameplay such as shared lobby and social space interactions. Mechanics define the elements that bring the experience to life and include the functions, features and supporting content. Mechanics also include the player or user inputs and controls such as swiping, tapping, clicking, button pressing etc.

Mechanics are influenced by engagement principles that help drive the design decisions. Engagement principles help designers understand intrinsic motivations that push players to stay engaged and keep playing.

As a concept takes shape, I like to turn to an artist to see if a visual concept in the form of a Movie Poster, Product Cover, or animated GIF can be created. If the entire concept can be communicated in its most basic form using one of these formats, it's a good sign of a concise, clear and compelling concept.

The Core

Game Structure

All games are structured around three core elements - The balance between the players challenges and limited resources to tackle those challenges; the structure of the world they play in ranging from a highly structures world that unfolds in a linear way to an open world where users can roam and explore; and how the user progresses which usually aligns with the world structure where a linear world will feature level objectives that open up the next level to progression driven by completing quests and missions to unlock resources needed to tackle bigger challenges in an open world.

The Player Motivation Model describes how all the game elements work together to drive the player to keep exploring and discovering how the rules and mechanics work to master them and continue to impact the players progression.

Loops

The Core of the experience combine the mechanics, premise and theme into repeated interactive loops built on engagement loop theory that form the heart of the experience and keep users engaged and coming back each time. The choice of mechanics and pacing of the loops depend on the type of game and emotional responses desired influenced by the premise and theme. This diagram breaks out how to think about designing the core experience comprised of the mechanics (or actions), short and long term engagement loops, and how the features will support overall use and engagement.

Simple Loop

This is a typical loop in a Role Playing Game (RPG) as an example. The core loop consists of players understanding of the game and how to play - their main activity is exploring an environment, finding enemies to kill and trying to kill them while avoiding damage, and earning loot for each kill, or suffering damage. This loop feeds back to their understanding of the game and impacts the actions and decisions they make. A longer enhancing support loop includes unlocking new weapons when all the enemies have been killed, or re-spawn if killed.

Detailed Loops Breakdown

This detailed model illustrates elements that make up effective core and support loops.

Players or users start with some interest or curiosity about the experience and seek to understand what they are supposed to do and how it works. They are introduced to the core mechanics and loops gradually to let them master and understand how they work.

The core loop is the primary repeatable activities they will do throughout the experience. The core loop is the moment to moment micro decisions and actions that lead to an impactful outcome. These decisions need to be interesting by offering multiple options with a best solution that are non obvious. These decisions need to have trade offs that will impact the outcome.

Decisions usually involve handling challenges and obstacles to achieving the goals. Positive consequences keep the player moving ahead while negative consequences slows, stops, limits, or in some way impedes the player from advancing and creates the tension that, when balanced, creates a flow state. Core loops can have smaller sub-loops, for example, in Zelda Breath of the Wild the core loop is to explore and discover critical resources. A smaller loop that supports this core is crafting the resources to create better resources.

The core loop(s) are reinforced by medium term and long term enhancing support loops. Medium term loops reinforce the core loop by unlocking additional content or tools that make the core loop more interesting and challenging. Long term loops reinforce the core loop by adding reflective elements that let users feel like they are deeply connected and invested in the world giving their actions more meaning.

The core loop seeks to engage them in a cycle of repeated discoveries that feed a series of goals and reveal more discoveries adding to an ongoing sense of mastery and feelings of impact over time. These reinforcing loops seek to engage players and users in repeatable actions as they discover new ways to play and experience the activities.

Use Cases are scenarios that help envision how people will use and flow through the experience.

The Components

The Components include all elements that build on the concept and core and bring the concept to life. This design phase builds on the concept and core and delves deep into the details of the experience through ongoing iteration of the core elements of the design consisting of the main character, roles and goals, challenges, core loops and construction of the world, user flows and progression.

Through each iteration of the design, user testing helps validate or provide valuable insights into what is connecting with users. The foundational elements are broken down below.

Pillars

The Design Pillars help guide what features and mechanics should be included and helps limit what should not be included in order to create a concise, balanced, and coherent design. They should focus on concrete actions players can do in the experience.

Examples of game design pillars are genre (platformer, rpg, puzzler), mechanics (collection and crafting, jumping, shooting, hitting/punching), progression ( linear/ non linear, multi branching), modes ( online/local, single player/multiplayer).

Design Pillars help keep the focus and priorities on the elements and features that are most important to the experience. Here is an excellent outline of design pillars.

Roadmap - MVP

The MVP is the minimal viable product features at launch. While the core features of the game or experience needed to engage and excite customers need to be available at launch, content and features will be added and tweaked as feedback and analysis is received post launch. The MVP helps outline what features and content need to be present at launch to provide the most fundamental requirements needed to attract and retain customers from the beginning.

The Design Pillars and customer engagement map assessment help guide the MVP outline. The MVP outline helps detail who the idea is targeting, what their unmet needs are, what value proposition is meeting the unmet need, a teams competitive advantage in developing the idea, and key measurable metrics for success and main assumptions. The MVP forms the basis for the project plan and how to structure the Agile Scrum Sprints.

Prototyping

Prototyping continues in the design process building on the concept to discover interesting and promising design elements to support he core.

User testing

User testing and feedback are critical to helping guide the design. With prototyping and concept art, users can try out and imagine what the experience will be like and provide invaluable insights into what works and what doesn't.

Design

The Design outlines elements for creating a detailed design building on the core foundation of the premise, theme, mechanics and core loops. The goal is to produce a design document that serves as the blueprint for the production process enabling teams to plan and execute building the experience. Using the process of continued iterative prototyping to build on the core concept, on going user testing helps refine and expand the detailed design using the Pillars as a creative guide. A roadmap helps ensure coordination of art and engineering as the detailed design is honed and refined.

The elements outlined below represent key components that are needed for the detailed design.

Main Character(s)

The main character is the "player" or user of the experience. In a game the main character may be a fictitious character, or an avatar that represents the player. In a transactional product it will be the user.

Goal, Role, and Controls

The Main Character's - and by extension - players (or customers) goal and role . Think of the character as an extension of the player. The player is assuming the role of the character controlling their actions and making all the interesting choices for them. Build out what the character can do as it relates to the core mechanics.

Gameplay

Briefly define the overall experience and how all of the elements work together. The Gameplay loop is the central element in gameplay and serves as the overall framework for how users will experience the game.

Mechanics

Define the main mechanics like run, jump, fly, fight, swim, smash, craft etc. For example, if the character can run and jump, how many ways can the character run and what types of jumps can it do?

Obstacles

What are the challenges the player needs to overcome? Are they environmental challenges or enemies or both? Or maybe they are internal struggles - psychological or emotional challenges they character needs to overcome. How will combat work if the player needs to take on enemies?

Resources

What resources does the player have or can earn or unlock to help overcome the challenges? The resources can be power-ups, which will improve the way your character relates with the core mechanics, or elements of the environments. Resources should also be related to the core mechanic; think of them as tools: hammers, magic swords, blocks to move around, bombs are great objects to populate your game with.

To add depth, think of more than one way players can use the resources. If a character has a hammer to smash objects and get loot, maybe the hammer can also be used to open doors, or unlock items frozen in ice.

World

World building is designing the environments and levels where you play or functional transactions occur. Whether a platformer or open world, world building not only provides the spaces and elements for the mechanics, but also helps tell the story of the world.

How do we incorporate the mechanics, obstacles and resources into a playing area? Are the levels carefully crafted by hand, or generated procedurally - or a combination of the two?

Some tips when designing the world to think about are:

Give the player some freedom to explore and decide how to navigate the world. The amount of freedom depends on the game type - a high linear rpg or platformer might have less exploration, but even these should have some to evoke a sense of discovery.
Restrict access to some areas naturally. Don't just block it off, give it a logical reason why the player can't go or make it too hard to go or survive until they have worked for it. For example, the player might be able to go under water for a few seconds to get a glimpse of its wonder, but will need to unlock scuba equipment, or learn to swim to fully explore it.
Make it fun to get around with multiple ways that have to be learned or unlocked.
Provide deep backstories that can be revealed when explored. These backstories can add more depth to the world and unlock new discoveries that can help in game play.
Give the world life with elements that change over time and as the player experiences it. Add small details that promote the sense that it is a living, breathing world that exists without the player, like characters and objects that have a backstory that may not be related to the overall objectives, but help tell the story of the world.

Progress and Pacing

How does the player and character progress - what does it mean to progress? Is it better skills, new levels, new resources, new insights? Ultimately for the player, progression is about getting better, learning new skills, and mastering the mechanics while feeling a sense of overall accomplishment and impact. Rewards and unlocks should focus on giving players the tools needed to learn and improve their skills while expanding the world for new discoveries. Progression and pacing defines the overall rhythm of rising tension and release to keep player in the Flow - coordinating the balance of skill and difficulty while giving them a reason and incentive to keep moving forward.

What systems do you want to create to help pull the player along? Quests are story driven experiences that serve as both practical goals the player can achieve as well as serve as story telling devices. Currency and experience points that can be used to buy or unlock new resources, challenges, or places and levels in the world also provide a tool for progression. Awards and achievements can also entice and motivate players to press on and keep engaging in the experience.

What pace and frequency should players level up or earn currency? Unlocking many rewards early on can hook players then slower paced and unpredictable unlocks can build anticipation and keep players over extended periods.

The primary mechanisms for progression in a game are goals and quests. Goals are set by the designers to provide the primary motivation and objective to pull the player along. Quests are story driven tasks that provide smaller goals while enabling story telling moments. In an open world, quests and goals provide the player context and direction to progress, but its important to also include side quests to help the player discover elements of the world they may have not experiences while traveling the primary progression path.

Toolkit

Use this toolkit to help guide the deign process and its components.

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