Friction, joy, and other lessons from designing games

4 comments

A few weeks ago, David Gillis interviewed me for UX Magazine. It was one of the first times I've had a solid reason to pull together some of my thoughts about designing the user interface for a game. What's particularly interesting to me are the parallels and contrasts of designing a game's UI vs developing a web application UI.

Anyhow, I actually don't plan to go into great depth into the issue here today, but considering this space has remained long dormant, this is a nudge for myself to perhaps start writing down my thoughts on some of these issues in a more formal way. I'm really looking forward to speaking at In Control Orlando early next year and hopefully I can gather enough ideas to build a new talk.

Comments

designbyarm -

http://www.designbyarm.com

Nice design on Game Glitch Do you have another work of game? Let me see.

Agatha -

I'm looking forward to reading more from you on this topic as it becomes available - no pressure Daniel lol...

Lowe Down -

I know what a pain it can be to keep up with adding new content when you're blogging and sometimes you just hit a creative wall. Best of luck pushing through it as your blog is interesting and engaging, I'm a regular reader - I suppose you could even call me a fan :)

Agatha -

http://imaginaryagony.com

Heya, If your going to remove links that's cool, its your blog and your prerogative. But could you at least be consistent? You left the link in the first comment above and its obvious that guy can't even speak/type proper Eng-ah-rish... Just a suggestion if you don't want people to add links perhaps consider removing the "Website" field in the "Post a Comment" form? Be well ^_^

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Bio via LinkedIn

Daniel Burka

My name is Daniel Burka. I'm a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, I'm one of the founders of Milk Inc.. For several years I was the creative director at Digg and previous to Milk, I was the director of design at Tiny Speck. I grew up in PEI, Canada, where I was one of the founders of silverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and css selectors, I'm a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

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Summary

I'm a web designer living in San Francisco, California. I sometimes get the chance to present lectures and workshops at conferences around the world, where I speak about iterative design strategies, designing for large online communities, and more broadly about interface design for web applications. I've posted many of the slides from past presentations I've done on Slideshare.

Currently, I'm the director of design at a small gaming startup called Tiny Speck. Until October 2009, I was the creative director at Digg. I was also one of the co-founders of the social content-sharing site Pownce, which is now a part (heh heh) of Six Apart. Back in 1999, I helped found silverorange, a stellar web development and design firm based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I continue to work with silverorange, but as an inactive partner.

Contact

I'm not currently looking for any kind of work and sometimes I take a long time to respond to email, but if you'd like to contact me please send an email to daniel [at] deltatangobravo [dot] com

Elsewhere

I tweet when the mood strikes at Twitter

I sometimes review products on Silverorange Stuff

I sell my amateur photography on Clustershot

I post some of my personal photos on Flickr

I used to contribute on the Digg Weblog

I connect with people I actually know in the real world on Facebook

This Blog

The technology that powers this blog was built by silverorange on their Swat open-source web application toolkit. I'm no longer working on day-to-day projects at silverorange, but they're available for hire if you're looking for top-notch interface design or web application development.

Speaking

Spoke