According to the foreword in the report, the author ( Heather LeFevre ) found herself in a pretty normal predicament; she felt she was underpaid, but couldn’t prove it. So instead of sitting on her hands, she put together an anonymous survey and sent it out to her network inquiring about their skill level and pay scale. She promised to share out the results and she’s been conducting this experiment for a few years. So, with a cheap web survey and a decent address book, she completely turned an age old process on it’s head.

This is pretty inspiring for me for a few reasons. First, instead of wringing her hands that she didn’t have the information to figure out her problem, she just went after the data. Instead of reinventing the wheel, she used simple tools she had at her disposal- an anonymous survey and an email. The data we don’t have often seems to be the first roadblock to progress; we don’t start because we’re not sure. This is such a great example of how to keep it simple and get it going.

Second, she solved for her problem, not all the world’s problems. If she would have stepped back and thought to herself “this is a big idea, how can create a salary report for the entire industry” she probably would have failed. Even limiting to the industry, she probably wouldn’t have gotten enough responses to complete the first report. By keeping the effort small, she could actually engage her audience. There are salary comparison websites all over the web (Glassdoor.com, Salary.com). These sites promise to share salary data, but they never seem to get enough scale to be useful. The idea behind the concept is so big people don’t know where they fit in the process. I love how she used technology to amplify her effort and didn’t make building the tool the object of her project.

There’s a big idea here for me. It’s the same thing that drove the success of Facebook (and social media in general). How can you use technology to amplify the network, connect people and then get the hell out of the way. The Internet isn’t much different than a good house party- if you can set the stage for people to interact, the party will usually take care of itself.

Beyond the volume of people tweeting around MJ’s death, there is this graph that compares the Iran controversy to MJ, which is far more interesting to me. Roughly the same number of tweet over a 10 day period, distributed over a different area. You can see the difference between breaking news and a complex conversation, which os pretty cool. All this from 140 characters across millions of people…that just blows my mind.

I usually find lots of inspiration from video games. I’m not a big gamer, but I’m fascinated with the space. Usually it’s less about the graphics or the game content, and more about the interactions that have been designed into the game. As games go, there seems to be a lot of really interesting things going on in massive-multiplayer games and web and phone-based games lately. Console games are sort of pushing each other deeper into this better graphics/extra gore niche. That’s mostly games for hardcore gamers. I’m more interested in what happens when there’s a wider cross-section of people just screwing around entertaining themselves.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting design/stratgey things lately, here’s my take on a few things I’ve seen. Hopefully you find some inspiration along the way.

Always Farming
I was reading this article that talked about a pretty interesting concept embedding in a game called Happy Farm. (The article is about a Chinese game but there’s also a Facebook app called Farmville and a few other knockoffs….farming seems to be the new shooting.) The gist of these games, which are massively popular at the moment, is that you have a virtual farm that you grow crops. It’s pretty simple and there’s a heavy fiddle factor around maintaining things. It sort of occupies your mind like Tetris or Minesweeper.

One of the things that makes this interaction interesting to me is that users can steal one another’s crops. The grounding concept behind the game is that it’s always on. When you’re away form your crops they grow, and you need to tend them. Sort of like a networked tamagotchi. The interesting interaction here is that if you’re not around tending your virtual farm, someone could nab your spinach.

This interaction is that makes MMPORGS like World of Warcraft pretty fascinating. Since you’re pitting real people against each other, anything can happen – you can’t design all of the foolish deviousness human opponents can create. If you were playing against the computer, that’s a rational device…playing against another player brings the fuzzy interactions that make the game interesting. I love how the simple act of making the experience open for multiple players takes something that would be very static and makes it quite dynamic. It’s a new flavor of immersion; if you’re into the game enough and you’re “AFK”, you might actually worry about someone stealing your crops and getting credit for it. That type of interaction adds this extra level of chance and richness to the experience, there’s the chance anything could happen.

Alternative Currencies

Continuing on the farming theme, many of these apps have a few ways to earn the crops you have. You can pay with time, waiting patiently for these cyber-sprouts to grow and slowly cultivating your empire. You can intervene and pay dollars and that allow you to grow crops faster. Or you can pay in effort – by taking quizzes or signing up for credit cards the game gives you some sort of currency or in-game tools in return.

Michael Arrington has sort of made a huge stink around this idea. He argues that paying through effort is a scam and it’s unfairly baiting users into all types of shady activity. Judging from his examples, he’s p right about the scam part, but the fact that you can pay through different means other than dollars is interesting. (In other gaming circles this buying in game currency rather than earning it is called ‘gold farming‘ – shocking amount of ‘farming’ going on here.)

I’m pretty interested in games that run internal economies. Lots of multiplayer games have this interaction and much like real life, money is one of the scarce good people compete for and use from trade with other goods. Most hard core gamers hate gold farming because it breaks their economy, goods aren’t scarce anymore when you can buy them in real life. This path to alternate currency is interesting because it doesn’t necessary throw an entire economy off, but it gives people an option in how they want to pay – time, money or effort. This is an interesting way to level the playing field and let the player chose which path is least scarce for them. For example, Tweens have more time than money, adults often more money than time (broad generalization, I know).

Pay For What You Get
OK, the final inspiration continues the thread around online currencies and economies. online multiplayer games usually have a two-stroke revenue engine. You pay for the software to play the game, and then you pay a subscription to play the game. It’s easy math to figure out these immersive models are big. money. Not only do you sell a $50 game, but each player drops $15 as long as they care to continue playing. To drive subscriptions, the games usually release minor patches to improve the game and major content releases (in another $50 shrink-wrapped boxes) to continue the experience.

Mike Masnik posted an article a few weeks ago talking about a pricing change to play an online DUngeons and Dragons game (yes, the exact one your thinking about). This change did away with the initial software fee and subsequent subscription in favor of allowing people to play for free and charging for certain features in the game.

The inspiring thing about this is that it orients the model around what the users really want. They want to play a game where tons of people are playing and wreaking havoc (that’s why they opted to play a massive multiplayer game in the first place….if it’s not massive, it’s not quite hat they’re looking for). ANyway, the other bit was how by removing the subscription fee, they actually “took the ceiling off of what people were willing to pay for the game”. There’s an interesting dynamic going on here, if you pay $15 you have an expectation of getting something. If you aren’t forced to pay, you’ll pay for what you want (and value what you receive). Additionally, if you take a break from playing the game for a few months, you don’t have a bagging feeling of getting charged for something you aren’t using. This segment is pretty hardcore games that switch between a few games, to keep things fresh. (The original article linked by Techdirt here.)

This balance is a pretty hard thing to pull off, and you sort of need an existing market. (Techdirt’s comments mention that the D&D brand equity really helps here.) Still, transparently pricing around exactly how consumers use your product seems so amazingly liberating. You’re now free to concentrate on how you can make them happier, and you just price against it, lots of the original complexity seems to fall away.

It’s potential over features.
It’s experience over function.

Inspiration: The World is Just Awesome (campaign by 72andSunny)

The Discovery Channel just extended it’s “the World is Awesome” campaign. The original spot was so popular, it’s even got a wikipedia entry. They could have made feature level claims around their content – we’re all in HD, most adventurous programming ever, 20% more shark week, etc. They used to have a whole campaign around ‘explore your world,’ putting the viewer more in the aggressor or adventurer postion. I love how they’ve taken a step back and decided to celebrate the world they cover with their viewer instead selling their viewer on the ‘value’ of their content.