Juha Henrik Arrasvuori

PLEX Cards : a source of inspiration when designing for playfulness

Playfulness can be observed in all areas of human activity. It is an attitude of making activities more enjoyable. Designing for playfulness involves creating objects that elicit a playful approach and provide enjoyable experiences. In this paper we introduce the design and evaluation of the PLEX Cards and its two related idea generation techniques. The cards were created to communicate the 22 categories of a Playful Experiences framework to designers and other stakeholders who wish to design for playfulness. We have evaluated the practical use of the cards by applying them in three design cases. The results show that the PLEX Cards are a valuable source of inspiration when designing for playfulness and the techniques help create a large amount of ideas in a short time.

Applying the PLEX framework in designing for playfulness

In addition to functionality and usability, interactive products are increasingly expected to provide pleasurable experiences to their users. Playfulness is a part of these experiences. However, playfulness can manifest in many different ways as humans are inherently playful by nature. This poses challenges for designing for playfulness. To tackle this broad field, we have developed the Playful Experiences (PLEX) framework. The two-fold purpose of the PLEX framework is to be a conceptual tool for understanding the playful aspects of user experience (UX), and be a practical tool for designing for such experiences through established user-centered design (UCD) methods. In this paper we present an overview of our work during 2008--2010 on designing for playful experiences. After introducing and summarizing previous studies, we motivate the reasons for designing for playfulness by framing PLEX within the domains of user experience and emotional experience. Then, we briefly discuss the creation and evaluation of the PLEX Cards and its associated techniques as practical design tools based on the PLEX framework, followed by a concrete design case where these tools have been used. We also present the development of the PLEX Design Patterns for actual design solutions for playfulness. Based on this work, we propose the PLEX framework as a powerful tool for understanding playful experiences, and for providing inspiration to design interactive products that elicit playfulness.

Analysing user experience of personal mobile products through contextual factors

Context plays a critical role in the user experience (UX) of mobile products. In UX studies, context is often seen as a single entity such as mobile context or car context. More fine-grained categorization of contextual factors is needed when we want to understand how context affects user experience. The purpose of our study was to adapt existing context and experience categorizations, and try out in practice how well these are suited for analyzing the user experience of mobile products. We conducted a ten-day field study where 21 participants reported their experiences of personal mobile products by writing experience reports. The reports were analyzed by using eight context categories to identify the contextual factors. Among these factors we determined the triggering context, which has the major influence on the most meaningful user experience described in a report. Our results show that having a detailed categorization for analyzing contextual factors is valuable for understanding how context affects user experience. This becomes practical in identifying the most meaningful user experiences among the reported ones. We propose that triggering context analysis should become a part of user experience studies of mobile products.

The PLEX Cards and its techniques as sources of inspiration when designing for playfulness

Playfulness can be observed in all areas of human activity. It is an attitude of making activities more enjoyable. Designing for playfulness involves creating objects that elicit a playful approach and provide enjoyable experiences. In this paper, we introduce the design and evaluation of the PLEX Cards and its two related idea generation techniques. The cards were created to communicate the 22 categories of a playful experiences framework to designers and other stakeholders who wish to design for playfulness. We have evaluated the helpfulness of both the cards and their associated techniques in two studies. The results show that the PLEX Cards and its associated techniques are valuable sources of inspiration when designing for playfulness.

Reflections on experience-driven design: a case study on designing for playful experiences

User experience (UX) has been recognized as an important quality factor of interactive products and services. Current design practices aim at ensuring a generally pleasurable or satisfying UX. However, approaches and methods for designing for specific experiences are still scarce. This paper addresses experience-driven design (EDD) by reflecting upon a study where playful experiences (PLEX) were utilized as design targets in a practical design assignment of a post-graduate seminar. The outcomes and learning experiences imply that utilizing PLEX as target experiences in the EDD approach is a sound way to provide design inspiration and guidance, and help refining early design ideas. The pre-defined playful experiences were considered as fruitful starting points for brainstorming as well as constant reminders of the rationale of the design. The paper concludes with reflections on applying EDD and four roles in which it was found beneficial: guiding & framing, inspiring, evaluating and communicating.

Personalizing game content using audio-visual media

This paper introduces the concept of media-controlled games, where game content is personalized using audio-visual media as an input to the game. Each piece of background music or picture selected by the player makes the game look different and behave variedly.

Designing interactive music mixing applications for mobile devices

Mobile devices are a potential platform for interactive music mixing applications for a large target audience. In this paper, the authors discuss the development of four such application concepts. The concepts were implemented as software prototypes for PDAs and mobile phones. The authors reflect on the design decisions and the technical obstacles they encountered. Solutions related to the user interfaces and creating content for interactive music mixing applications are also discussed.

Background music reactive games

In this paper, we discuss the concept of games that react to their background music. Instead of limiting the player to a fixed set of songs, the background music can be any song chosen from the players own music collection. Due to the relative simplicity of such existing game titles, we wanted to explore the potential of the concept more broadly in both digital audio and MIDI domains. Mappings between several musical and game parameters were studied by modifying two open-source games to react to their background music. The feedback collected with the game prototypes suggests that players appreciate the concept and find it entertaining. Based on the feedback and our experiments with different mappings, we present a set of design considerations for background music reactive games. The concept can be used to bring new life to existing games, and even a trivial game can be made interesting if the player can affect the game by changing the background music to his or her favorite song.

Introducing game and playful experiences to other application domains through personality and motivation models

We discuss the use of the PLEX playful experience model a system to introduce games design aspects into alternative application and product domains. We report an exploratory study to relate the relationships between playful experiences and real world values and personalities. The method led to a prototype model of playful experiences associated with values and personality based motivations, emotions and behavior, and could be a useful tool for playful concept creation. As consumer offerings are increasingly differentiated by the quality of the experience, our approach promises to enhance the fun, and widen the engagement, of many products and applications.