Serendipity and Learning

I am somewhere in the last stages of designing a game. I have been in the last stages for 3 months now. But each time I see it with a fresh pair of eyes (of my users or my collaborators), it is excruciatingly tough to change what I knew or thought I always knew. Over 20 playtests with approx 80-100 folks and about a 100 odd hours of testing and iteration led us to keep seeing thing that were blind to us. For instance, a design which I thought was working well is now being comprehended in a different way. In order to make that right, I have had to change my thought/approach and come at it from a new lens.  We made many changes as we engaged with users and bit by bit the change has happened. And yes, we could see the improvement of the way the users engaged in the next test. Colours had to be changed. Text. Visuals. Rules. We had to simplify things. We had to explain things we thought were obvious. And things which we thought were difficult - users wanted a degree of complexity as we...

I was attending a session on design and the speaker referred to this book, "Creative Selection". Instantly I ordered it. And promptly finished it over the weekend. This is a fantastic book. If you are in the creative space or in the space of design or product or just want to get a deep inside view of design or creation, this is a must read book. And the single biggest takeaway? Great product or design is no accident. It is a combination of perseverance, diligence, risk, choices and decisions, among other things... Thats all I will say. Read it!

Creating a tool or a game or an aid for presentation skills has been on my mind for a long time now. As someone who has developed, designed and delivered many versions of presentation skills and slide making skills, this has been a question in my mind. And I thought of something fairly obvious - a deck of cards (Yes, I am a huge fan of card and board games) to help people as they work on their presentation. But when I looked this up, there seemed to be a few products that serve this need. And so it went. There did not seem to be any new value addition that I could bring. And a few weeks ago, I attended a session where we had to evaluate a speaker and there was no feedback for the speaker. The insight for me was that many a time giving feedback is 'difficult' I suppose. The issue with feedback is - that most often the only way to do it at the 'Point of Presentation' is with paper - And many a time, people just cursorily fill out the sheets with any random number...