DanC posted a great read (PDF) on how interaction designers might benefit from studying game design.

A brief sample, the Levels pattern:

Levels (aka contexts for mediated learning)

This is the very first screen of Super Mario Bros. It demonstrates the use of a simple constrained environment that lets users build skills around a new tool.

The player is handed a new tool called Mario the first time they see this screen. They don’t know how to use him. The screen gives them a playground where they can try different things.
- Blocks that reward jumping by giving out coins.
- Goomba that rewards successfully learning how to attack. It also teaches the players to avoid Goombas on pain of death.
- Blocks that teach the player how to collect powerups.

There are a couple of interesting points to note:
- The awarding of a new tool is almost always paired with a simple level that lets the player learn the tool in a somewhat safe environment.
- The player cannot pass this section without mastering at least one critical skill, in this case moving and jumping. This sort of gating ensures that the designer can rely upon the user having the jumping skill available at later points in the game.

This is different than most apps. In many apps, you sort through the options and turn on a new feature. There is nothing that is the equivalent of a ‘level’ or learning context to help you build skills associated with the tool.

— The Princess Rescuing Application, DanC, lostgarden.com, October 26, 2008

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Apple is starting a project they’re calling Apple University. Apple’s not saying much about it yet, but they’ve hired Joel Podolny, the dean of Yale University’s business school, to run things. The post Mr. Podolny leaves behind along with previous teaching engagements at Harvard and Stanford make him well-connected within business academia, which Apple is sure to leverage.

Hey, wasn’t there a recent article in Harvard Business Review by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull about the value of strong academic ties and cross-training employees? This could be evidence of cross-training of a different kind, where Apple learns from Pixar and Pixar learns from Apple. The obvious Apple references in Pixar’s Wall-E were hard to miss, as are the possibly Pixar-inspired animations Apple added to Leopard and iPhone.

One thing’s for sure: Mr. Podolny wouldn’t have left his prestigious post lightly, so the plans Apple shared with him must have been persuasive indeed.

If you haven’t yet discovered PCalc for iPhone, you’re missing out on a wonderfully designed and full-featured calculator. Version 1.1 was released yesterday and looks great. So does the Mac version, now at version 3.3.1.

Preview in Leopard has limited read-only support for animated gifs. Open an animated gif in Preview and you’ll see what looks like a normal image:

You’ll see a little numbered icon up in the top-left corner of the thumbnail representing the number of frames in the animated gif.

Click this little icon to animate the single image out into a collection of images.

The animated gif support still needs refinement, though. Viewing that image in Slideshow mode shows the same first frame every time, rather than each successive frame, as you’d expect.

Still, a handy and quick way to grab a particular frame from a complicated animated gif. Nice!

After reading yesterday’s post about good iPhone app design, reader “michael” said that a “much better example of a nicely done game on the app store” is Subway Shuffle. So let’s take a look, but understand that both games are a lot of fun to play, regardless of how appropriately they’re designed for the iPhone.

Subway Shuffle, like the Blocked game discussed in yesterday’s post, is a puzzle game in which you shuffle pieces around on a board until you’re able to get one particular piece to its destination. That’s how the games work, but we’re not concerned here with how the games work or whether they’re fun to play. Here, we’re looking at how well they’re designed to be iPhone apps, and why.

Design guideline: Use screen area effectively.

Here are their game pages on which you play the game, Blocked on the left, Subway Shuffle on the right:

If we compare their respective gameboard areas, it appears that Blocked devotes more screen area to the gameplay. We can determine this by measuring the number of pixels for each. In these screenshots taken from the actual games on my iPhone then reduced in size by an equal amount, Blocked devotes roughly 36290 (190×191) pixels to the game, while Subway Shuffle devotes 30210 pixels (265×114). So Blocked’s game area is roughly 20% larger than Subway Shuffle’s.

There’s no reason Subway Shuffle couldn’t be using more of the screen for that level than it does. You don’t see them in this screenshot because Subway Shuffle hides them after a brief pause, but panels appear at the screen’s top and bottom when you tap anywhere but on the dots and connecting lines. It’s puzzling why these panels are hidden at all if the real estate they occupy isn’t going to be reclaimed. As it is, the area not used is as large as the area used.

Design guideline: Use easily legible text.

The text shown in Blocked appears in a large font size, easily readable even in this reduced screenshot. Subway Shuffle’s text is by comparison considerably smaller and hard to read, even at full-size. There’s no clear reason why Subway Shuffle displays text at that small size, especially if the available space isn’t going to be prioritized for something more important like gameplay.

Design guideline: Be lean.

Subway Shuffle includes a Settings page with controls for disabling the sound effects and for changing the app’s appearance. It’s easy to understand what “Sound Effects: on/off” does, but what exactly is meant by “appearance”?

Here’s what those three Appearance settings look like:

Paper Map

Classic Flat

Better for Colorblind

There’s not much difference between them, really. Paper Map includes a folded-paper background image with 3D highlights on the little round buttons; Classic Flat includes a solid colored background without the 3D highlights; and Better for Colorblind differs from Classic Flat in one color only.

So, with the understanding that being lean and focused are especially important in iPhone apps and that the addition of any feature makes an app less lean and less focused, the question you have to ask is: does Subway Shuffle’s Appearance feature add more than it detracts? The answer depends on the implementation and audience of course and is admittedly subjective, but in Subway Shuffle’s case I’d have to say no, it doesn’t:

Why Subway Shuttle’s Appearance feature should have dropped, or at least deferred:

• There aren’t many themes.
• The themes differ only slightly. Better for Colorblind barely differs at all from Classic Flat, and being colorblind myself, I can say that the colors in Better for Colorblind are harder to distinguish. There are many different kinds and degrees of color-blindness, so any slight shift in color to favor one person may end up being harder to see by another. Better would have been to accompany the different colors with matching symbols.
• The Appearance feature actually introduces a bug. Choose any theme other than Paper Map and you’ll still see the Paper Map folded paper background image when you launch the app. That’s because the iPhone loads the app’s Default.png image file at launch time, but because apps are read-only, Subway Shuttle can’t change which image is shown. The result is that you see the Paper Map background image for several seconds, after which it is replaced with your theme of choice.

Given those limitations to the feature itself and the importance of weighing the value of a feature against how that feature affects an app’s leanness and focus, the Appearance feature detracts more than it adds, and thus should have been left out.

There are more examples, but these alone already suggest that Blocked is the better designed iPhone app.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, you’ve probably already downloaded an app or two (or twenty) from Apple’s App Store. And if you have, you’ve probably also developed a sense of which apps feel appropriate to the iPhone, and which apps don’t.

(By the way, Apple may have a naming problem—what do you call these apps? “iPhone apps” is an awkward fit for all those iPod touch owners.)

An excellent example of a good iPhone app is Joel Rosenberg’s Blocked—and by “good” I mean well-suited, rather than high-quality (though Mr. Rosenberg’s app is both). Blocked is a fun little game where you push blocks around the screen to free up a channel though which you then push a special block off the board through a gate. There are 100 levels grouped into sections which you unlock by completing the previous section, each level progressively more difficult.

The essential simplicity of the game itself is part of what makes it a good fit for the iPhone, but the game’s design and execution are also exemplary for their leanness and clarity:

• There’s not a lot onscreen: the blocks, two arrow buttons to move between levels, and three menu buttons at the bottom of the screen.
• Text is minimal.
• Completed levels and sections are stamped with a circled checkmark whose meaning is immediately clear and whose economy keeps the pages uncluttered.
• Arrow buttons allow you to move between levels for relatively modeless play.
• When you complete a level, you’re automatically taken to the next level. No need to say “take me to the next level”. Note that this is made possible by those arrow buttons, since if for some reason you didn’t want to go the next level automatically, you can go back easily enough.
• There are only three pages: Game, Levels, and Help.

Simplicity like this looks easy, but it’s actually pretty hard. The Levels page is simple in part because using those checkmarks to show completed levels and using button enabling to show unlocked levels makes it simple. It’s not hard to imagine an alternate design where still-locked levels might have been marked with a little lock icon, or text like “completed” might have been displayed to show completed levels. Both of these would have added weight to the page. Mr. Rosenberg’s decision to use the checkmark and the dimmed buttons instead kept the page light and rendered those details almost invisible.

Similarly, if the Help page seems simple it’s because the self-running animation shows you how to play, keeping the text minimal and the page uncluttered.

This attention to economy and clarity delights the player by making the app disappear. You pick up the game and just start playing, unaware of the care that went into creating that experience.

So when you wish your favorite iPhone app had another option or two, or had that feature that you say you can’t live without, consider that though you think you’d like the app a little more, you might actually use it a little less.

All freshman students and faculty members at Abilene Christian University get an iPhone or iPod touch, reports Al Sacco at cio.com. And because everyone has a device, the school has invested in innovative solutions to leverage those devices.

One example that caught my eye was this screen for one of the English classes. Each student in the class is shown by photo and name. The teacher can choose to randomly mix names and photos to help name recognition, and can take roll in the class by tapping those little color-coded squares next to each student’s name, “P” for present, “T” for tardy, “E” for excused and “A” for absent.

A small thing, but boy I’ll bet it’s incredibly handy for teachers and students alike.

These kinds of seemingly insignificant improvements in commonplace chores and communication scenarios are what will continue to boost the iPhone as the next computing platform.

Except we won’t call them computers, or phones. We’ll call them our pods or some similar name that may not have emerged yet, but will.

For all the developer griping about Apple’s App Store—some of which is justified—the App Store is a dream-come-true for developers because Apple does a lot of the heavy lifting, including server storage, payment and billing, and currency conversion.

But Apple doesn’t do your promotion for you.

Yes, Apple promotes some apps, but that’s really Apple promoting the App Store, not you. Apple decides this app and that app highlight desirable aspects of the App Store, so those apps get a free ride on Apple’s promotion.

All your app gets is a page on the App Store and, if you’re lucky, a mention in the New Apps section, but that’s it as far as promotion goes. Yes, there are many thousands of apps already and more arrive every day, but though your page is becoming increasingly hard to find in the App Store, it’s not getting any harder to find on the App Store—because that link to your app’s page still works fine.

Promoting that link is your job, not Apple’s.

Apple’s decision to require users to buy an iPhone app before reviewing it has already improved the quality of comments on the App Store. If you’ve wondered why Apple let those no-pay riders on the train in the first place, it was probably to get the App Store rolling, to give it a good launch—Everyone’s welcome! Come right in!—but now that ridership is up, time to start punching tickets. See your ticket, Ma’am?

This only works of course because Apple knows when you’ve bought an app, and it only knows this because the App Store is the only place you can buy the app.

For all of its problems, this train does run on time.