Help Me and Entertain Me
No commentsLife is about fun… no one can deny that, even when people seem to work hard, it’s for the purpose of having fun at a later date.
Alex Iskold wrote an interesting post on ReadWriteWeb where he discussed that the success of future applications depends on them either being helpful or being fun for the sake of entertainment.
Apps don’t have to be polarized like Alex suggests, on the contrary, I think one of the most inviting opportunities is finding the sweet spot between offering something really useful and making it fun to work on at the same time.
We took that philosophy to heart when we designed “Next” our App1, as we planned and evaluated everything, starting from the name of the application down to the finest details to create a helpful, productive, quick, short, cool, casual and fun to use application.
We made sure to add subtle pieces here and there to make it entertaining, and remind users not to take everything seriously, even when getting things done.
Those subtle additions were quite a challenge on their own, especially when combined with the obvious minimalism and limitation behind the concept, but it was a great exercise.
We believe that everything should be fun, and your task list is definitely one of the most important things.
Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under App1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.