My Company (MeYou Health)
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I know you have probably seen me pimping this site with my twitter account, but I just wanted to post something here because my brother Andy and his wife Lindsay are doing awesome stuff. Neither of them knew anything about starting a web business, but here they are a few months later with a working site and signing up all sorts of charities to sell there hand made gifts in an ever growing market.
They created an awesome video to explain the idea. Check it out. Support them. They need all the help they can get to do more good in the world.
Shop. Support. Love. from CharityGiftMarket on Vimeo.
I have already purchased many great gifts from there. A water bottle to help support Thirst Relief, a t-shirt to buy meals for Urban Promise, bracelets for my daughters. I would link to the things I purchased, but everything is limited in stock because almost all of it is hand made with a rich story.
So jump over there. Check it out. There is an ever growing list of charities that are supported.
I had the honor of participating in a Co Health Tweet Chat the other day where we also announced a small collaboration with them to get some feedback on our product, Daily Challenge.
The tweet chat as a ton of fun. It was pretty hectic trying to watch all the tweets coming in, respond to them as fast as you can while constantly trying to edit your responses into 140 character tweets! It was fast and furious!
Here is a collection of my primary answers to the questions that were put out by CoHealth. I wanted to get them all here as a record. The topic was about Health Games.
Question 1: What's the promise of health games? (link)
To create a context in which participants gain access to an emergent experience around health. (link). They become immersed. They achieve, socialize, cooperate, compete, and gain mastery over their health challenges. (link) This mastery, often in the form of knowledge and mindfulness, beats back the powerlessness that many people face. (link) Through game experiences we are empowered to succeed. (link)
Question 2: What can we achieve with health games that's different from other change efforts? (link)
A game is a context. In that context we can set constraints. These constraints can be powerful. (link) They create a sense of control for the participant. There is comfort in this control. (link)
Question 3: What evidence do we have about their effectiveness? (link)
Games are a framework to bring people together to create the scaffolding for the social affects to take over. (link) The science on the affects of social is well documented. People recovering from disease together, recover faster. (link) Games are great frameworks to generate social interaction in an accessible way. That is where the truew power lies. (link)
Question 4: What makes a "good" health game, considering design, implementation, measurement? (link)
Any good game I have ever played is optimized for emergent outcome. (link) If I know there's a goal, that there is an expected end state, it isn't as fun as a game that emerges as you go. (link) In health games it is most important the participants be allowed to find their own win state. (link) The goal someone has when they start pursuing health (lose weight) might be different by the end (change jobs). (link)
Question 5: Where do games go wrong in these same areas? (link)
I think health games go wrong when they have a goal. (link) If the game is to lose 10 pounds, it becomes much more important to lose 10 pounds than to play the game. (link) If we leave the game we stop interacting with the content and other participants that really matter. (link)
Question 6: Are there any considerations specific to building games for the employer space? (link)
The main consideration is that all this is new to employers. :) (link) I think "games" and "players" when selling into workplace wellness is not helpful. "Participants" and "products" [is better]. (link)
So that's my story. :)
I find there is an over fixation (in my mind) on what a game is and not enough attempt to understand how gamification is there to create better product experiences. The product experience is the sum of the game rules and mechanics, plus the dynamics that arise out of interaction inside the product. If you want people to interact and not make them feel weird about it, try adding game mechanics! If you want people to feel comfortable and empowered within a set of constraints, use game mechanics! People tend to accept those constraints and flourish within them.
There continues to be a lot of pontification on what gamification is... and how to use it etc. That is all great. I am just trying to create a good experience in our products, using game mechanics to generate social dynamics that have shown to increase engagement, which extends the delivery window of the intervention, leading to more "doses" which leads to real health outcomes. For me that is really what this is all about.
I was asked the other day for a list of resources that I particularly like on the topic of product development and company culture. I thought I would share the list here in case any one finds them valuable.
These are listed because they were the first to come off the top of my head. I am sure there are other great ones I am leaving off. What did I miss? Leave it in the comments.
We were having a discussion internally at MeYou Health about a new product we are working on. In the conversation, Bill Sabram, our lead game designer, said this:
"Games are particularly good at asking us to put seemingly irrelevant limitations on our performance (Draw only one card, Roll only two dice to move, Wait for your turn before going again, etc.) and yet they are so fun that we gladly give up control to live within the 'rules' of this new group experience."
I think that is a great statement about one of the main powers of gamification. It isn't just about adding points, levels, or badges to your product. Gamification provides an operating context that makes your participants open to experiencing a product in a very different manner than they otherwise might. It makes them open to direction, to ritual, to limitations. And not only are they open to it, they generally accept it at face value, and rarely even question it.
"Why should I do this? Because the game says so. That is how you play. That is the rule."
Very powerful stuff.
I don't typically ask for much from the internets, but here it is:
Can you please vote for my SXSW 2012 panel? Pretty please?
The title of the panel is "Health Games for all: employer, employee & public". As the title suggests, all of us panelists are interested in exploring health games at work. This includes their design, their effectiveness, their viability, their future, etc. The participants include:
Here is a snip from the submission:
This panel focuses on the implementation and outcomes of health games in the workplace environment. We’ll zero in on measurement, motivation and scalability. And we won’t skip over practicality. Gamification may be hot, but it means squat if your business model isn’t proven.
I think our panel is specifically interesting because we are bringing together a combination of solution providers who are using gamification techniques, and the people that purchase and implement these solutions at scale. This will hopefully result in a frank discussion about how health gamification works when get down into the tactical execution of these programs to drive outcomes.
How can you help?
Between now and Friday, Sept 2, please vote for my panel and leave a comment about why you think our panel will add an interesting perspective, or about your interest in the specific speakers. Even if you are not attending, all of the panels are video taped and typically made available online, so you can catch it if the topic is something you are interested in.
To vote, do these two things:
You don't have to just vote for mine. There are a ton of cool panels in the Health space. Check them all out!
Thank you friends and family and everyone else who happens to come here for your support! If the panel gets chosen, this will be my first visit to SXSW!
As many of you (friends and family) know, at MeYou Health we are working on a social health product called Daily Challenge. We are taking some of the latest thinking in game design, social network science, and behavior change and blending it all together in pursuit of measurable improvements in people's well-being.
What is well-being? It is all the aspects that make up who we are. It is a mix of our choices in the past, the choices we can make now, and how both of these affect the choices we could make or might have to make in the future. I have come to learn that improving well-being is a partnership between what we can design in the product and what the human being who uses Daily Challenge brings to the table. Our mission at Daily Challenge is to engage. The mission of our participants is to improve. From these two things together, product and person, emerges an individual outcome for each unique individual.
Designing for this to happen turns out to be incredibly hard. But that is why I love my job.
The biggest challenge recently has been balancing the use of social features in the product that allow people to create support networks and the temptation to expand these into features that comprise an entire social network product.
The goal of Daily Challenge has always been to build a network that can support you in the improvement of your well-being. From the research that we did which informs the product, this circle of influence is rather small. Anywhere from 3-12 people. Daily Challenge was never conceived nor optimized to connect you to hundreds of people like Facebook does. It has always been about taking these larger networks like Facebook, and using that as a starting point, asking you to identify the true influencers and supporters in your life.
But, the moment you put friending in your product. The moment you put messaging, and commenting and interacting, some amount of "social networking" is assumed. The participants of your product are going to do what they do. They are going to take your expectations in directions outside your control. And that is ok. The problem is, if the actions they do, like friending hundreds of people, is not going to move the needle on the health outcomes you are looking for, it becomes impossible to justify supporting that, no matter how vocal they become. To pivot the product to a true social network to satisfy the needs of a few who arrived for that reason would mean abandoning those that are actually using it to find a framework for support and encouragement at a more intimate scale.
So I find myself wondering, if you add social features to your product, will you always end up building a social network? When I started Daily Challenge, it was never the plan to build a separate social network from Facebook. But it seems that you are naturally pulled in that direction the moment you start asking people to connect.
We use Get Satisfaction for our support, and that product has social features. Do some hard core users of that product consider it their social network?
If you put friending in your product, is the creation of a social network inevitable? Is this some law of the universe?
I tend to be known as one of those people who uncovers all the cool new articles and internet tools. Even if the tool or service is not related to my specific job, I still might see it and think of you!
How do I find out about all of these things? Simple... I spend a great deal of time consuming the web. I am a huge user of Google Reader... and unlike many people, I practice an "Inbox Zero" approach on my RSS feeds as well. I view every single one... every single day... If I am on my mobile device (which syncs with Google Reader), I star anything that is interesting, and then read it later (typically on Monday nights or Friday afternoons).
My Starred list (feed favorites) is just like my email inbox. I try and practice Google Star Zero on that as well. :)
Now, I know there are a lot of RSS Ninjas out there... who probably read way more than I do, but I like to think that I have a pretty good system. I don't keep a lot of junk in my feeds. If I don't get value or it is too noisy, I trim it out.
Here are some of my stats:
And a pretty chart of the last 30 days of activity.
You can see on 7/16 that I had gone on vacation for two days, so I had some serious catching up to do! And here is the top 10 most consumed feeds:
Being that I am in the web product space, it isn't surprising that something like TechCrunch is up there... they also tend to publish on average 30 stories a day, so those build up fast.
So if you too want to know about all the latest cool stuff having across every industry on the web, you now know the secret. Google Reader action.
I was thinking the other day about the things I am good at (career wise) and staying on top of the latest trends, products, and ideas definitely ranks up there. It is definitely not work. I enjoy sitting in front of the information firehose.
I think they got it pretty right actually... get yours today!
I had the honor of attending TEDxBoston 2011. While I was lucky enough to speak at TEDxChange Nashville, and I watch many TED Talks on-line, this is the first time I was able to settle in for an entire TED program and devote my full attention to all of the talks.
As you would expect, the ideas are big, and the solutions inspiring. My favorite talks were:
Joe Coughlin - Aging as an Extreme Sport
As the number of seniors continues to grow, a new understanding is needed about how environments will need to be reconfigured for their needs. He demoed a suit that a person can wear that makes it feel like you are 80 years old. It turns everyday movements like walking stairs, bending down, picking up objects into a struggle and brings perspective. The take away is that unless you manufacture empathy, it can be hard to design real solutions.
Lisa Gross - Civic Fruit
Lisa gave a very articulate and fun talk about a movement in Boston around planting pairs of apple trees throughout public spaces. It is part public art project, part green movement, part political expression, part food bank. You have to struggle to find reasons why planting fruit trees throughout the city is a bad idea. What I like about this idea is that it starts small, but it scales by inspiring local communities to take up the cause. You no longer just need Lisa going around planting, but you have schools, and churches, and towns all over the region doing their own planting.
Erez Lieberman AIden & Jean-Baptiste Michel - A Picture is Worth 500 Billion Words
Google has digitized 15 million books. By analyzing the usage of text throughout the ages, it provides an interesting and humorous look at the evolution of our culture. It is amazing the types of patterns you can detect through this type of big-data analysis. You can see things like censorship, proliferation of diseases, and the adoption rate of technology... and that is just text. Imagine when everything is digitized? What patterns will we see then?
Dr. Bo Pomahac - Face the Future
This was the first talk of the day, and it was a crazy one about actual facial transplants. When significantly destroyed, the face is far to complex to reconstruct through plastic surgery. The new alternative is a complete facial transplant. The fact that this is even possible is a scientific wonder. I really like the statement that, while this procedure is risky and it isn't life saving, it is life giving.
Richard Resnick - The Next Hot Commoditiy of Genone Sequences
This was my favorite talk of the day because it was so mind blowing. The cost of sequencing someones entire genome is falling dramatically. This allows for unprecedented clarity assessing mutations that cause disease and building custom medicine to repair it in our individual bodies. It was a big deal when the human genome project was complete, but now that amount of work can be done in less than a week, and soon it will happen in less than a day. Get ready for a revolution in bio-tech that very few people see coming.
My main take away was this: You just have to start doing something. Most of the TED Talks were about people who just started doing something small... and that small thing served as inspiration to the larger thing... or served as inspiration to a larger number of people. Given my work in on-line software, I spend a lot of time thinking about how you get systems to scale... but the beauty of many of the ideas and solutions presented at TED is that no one ever cared about scale when they started... they just started doing it... and it grew from there.
I guess what I am saying is that you could start two types of business. The first type is a consulting business where you build websites for others. This does not scale... because there is only one you... so you can only build as many sites as you have hours in the day. No more no less unless you hire more people... but then you can only keep them assuming you continue to get business at the same pace. The business does not auto-scale up and down.
The second type of business would be an on-line service. You spend the time upfront building the service, then people pay $20 a month to use it. Sure if you get a million people suddenly, you would need to scale that, but then you would have 20 million dollars to do it. The business would auto scale and you just have to provide operational support.
So given those two examples, most TED ideas seem to be the former... a single person just out there doing something. They rarely seem to get to the scale level... but does that matter? Probably not if inspiration is your goal. Can we go beyond inspiration? How many scalable ways are there to save the world?
I have become a fan of disintermediation recently. Don't worry, I had to look it up too:
In economics, disintermediation is the free market removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: often explained with the phrase, "cutting out the middleman". - Wikipedia
It all started when I bumped into Alex Faire of FairCareMD.com, where he is hooking up patients directly with doctors and cutting the insurance companies out of the loop to drive up efficiencies, and drive down costs. He was one of the first people I have heard describe himself being in the business of disintermediation. The concept stuck with me, and I have started to see it in more and more places... it even sparked a small business idea around non-anonymous direct instant mobile ad buying, but I digress. :)
As network technology gets more ubiquitous, as social technologies tie us together easier, the flow of goods and services, preferences and behaviors across these networks becomes much more liquid. We no longer need a "middleman" to connect us to the things we want. We can be connected to these things, these creators, these people... ourselves.
I think this has ramifications for the work I am doing at MeYou Health. As we have been out in the market, working behind the scenes to unleash our business model into the wild with a set of pilot customers, we have come up against the status quo of wellness programs. This status quo generally consists of the company inserting something in your way. If you want to lose weight? You *have* to do it at a certain time, for a certain duration, and *only* with other employees. They try to not make the restrictions feel like limitations, but they are. They have inserted themselves between you and your well-being.
So I would say the biggest market challenge we have been facing is trying to convince companies very comfortable with buying these types of programs to entertain getting out of the way.
Why not let your employees sign up in a context that you do not own and do not brand? How about letting them sign up with the people that *really* support them like their friends and family? How about enabling them to learn about things beyond weight and fitness that might be impacting them in ways they cannot yet comprehend? Empower your employees to begin, but after that, please step aside and let people take the journey in a way that will work for them, and their own unique and complicated circumstances.
That right there is the disintermediation of corporate well-being programs! Scary. Fun. Stay tuned!
Of course, if we are inserting ourselves into the process, are we the new middleman? Oh god. Where does it end?
I use to take the effort to write more about the games I was playing. Maybe it was because I was working at gamerDNA where it was such a large part of my life! Due to the lack of general publication about my gaming, it could appear like I have lost my gamer cred, but that is not the case! I still DO actually play games. The challenge lately has been finding any good games to keep me engaged.
I started Assasin's Creed 2 (Xbox), but just couldn't get into all the time-wasting mechanics they threw into the sequel. Then I started playing Enslaved (Xbox), which had a great demo, but the actual game itself became a tedious door/key puzzle solver. Then there was Battlestar Glactica Online (PC), but there just wasn't enough visceral payoff in the combat, and walking around the motherships was seriously boring. I will say that I finally found my way into a small Angry Birds addiction. What can I say? Pop culture is sometimes right about these things.
Amidst all this gaming exploration, I stumbled into a simple, yet compelling (for me) Facebook game recently called Army Attack. It was recommended by TheInternetSamHouston(tm).
Like many Facebook games, it is pretty casual. If you have played Advanced Wars (DS), you will know how this works. Each of your units has a certain movement allowance, attack range, damage level, and health level. Every time you take a turn to move a unit, the enemy moves their units. You have to manage your energy level (which allows you to take turns), your money (to buy things) and your supplies (to keep things repaired).
I've been playing for about a week now, and it is simple and satisfying. The audio with headphones on is well done. The satisfying "thud thud thud" of an APC auto cannon and the resulting shrapnel explosions, add to the straight forward action.
Currently, the game is pretty sparse when it comes to unit selection and customization. This isn't city building. It is about repelling wave after wave of enemy attackers while you try and expand your territory, often times working on multiple fronts.
So if you are looking for a new Facebook game, you could do worse than Army Attack. It is straight up, simple combat fun. If you do give it a try, send me an ally request!
As the title states, Game On is about nothing less than transforming how you think about your business through the application of ideas and patterns born out of social media gaming. The hot term for this is "gamification". And while that term is helpful, gamification is a technique, but it isn't a process. What Jon gives you is a way of thinking about how you apply this nebulous term to your business right now.
Ultimately, that is why I like this book. It doesn't spend a ton of time trying to convince you that gaming is a trend you should pay attention to. Zynga (one of the hottest social game companies on the planet) has a multi-billion dollar market cap. We shouldn't need much convincing.
But what I think we do need is a clear understanding on how any of this social game craziness matters to us. Jon attacks this head on in Chapter 2 - "Games have changed the business playfield" - by laying out very clearly how the media and online landscape has changed and how these changes have altered how we interact, and how social games have capitalized on these changes to become so popular. It turns out that social media games focus on doing many of the things your business should be doing!
All of our businesses should strive for these things in this connected, digital, participatory, entertainment-driven era. If you aren't striving now, maybe after reading Game On, you will be!
For me, since I am not specifically building a social game, the meat of the book was Chapters 4 - 6 where you learn to think of your customers as "players", the process around "Fungineering" and some case studies of turning work into fun (which features MeYou Health on pages 150,151).
With my work on behavior change in the health space, I continue to rely on the fulfillment mechanics that games are so good at leveraging. For the longest time I have used Dr. Richard Bartle's model as a way of describing motivation, but going forward I plan to reference Jon's refactoring of that model into a slightly richer version that accounts for a few different nuances that I find valuable. See below:
In summary, I think Game On is a book written at the right moment. It takes a term like "gamification" that people can't decide if they like or not, and cuts straight through to what really matters: the patterns that drive greater loylaty, engagement, and passion for your product and business. I plan to recommend it to anyone I know looking for a good primer on this latest trend.
Bill Sabram's Prezi about Monumental
MeYou Health had a good presence at Games For Health this year. Our game designer Bill Sabram presented the effort and process designing our iPhone game Monumental. We also had posters of the application hanging in the expo space. And I participated on a panel about what we can learn from MMOs about using big data to solve big problems.
All in all, it was a fun and educational few days. My two big takeaways are:
The sensor wave is coming!
I was in the building for maybe 30 minutes and I had already heard the word "sensor" referenced a few dozen times. Everyone was talking about sensors and the solutions and experiences that they would eventually enable. It wasn't just accelerometers, but gyroscopes, gps, camera/light, temperature, NFC, cadence, galvanic skin response, blood pressure, pulse oximeter, compasses, etc. If you can think of it, someone is building a sensor to measure it.
At the middle tier level I talked to two people during the day who were working only on the middle tier that pipes data from devices wirelessly using standards and links them up with HIPAA storage and medical records, or exposes them in a usable API. So even the middle teir (called aggregation management) is evolving.
A conversation about Simulations vs Games
This was the best session of the conference for me because it made me think the most about different types of product philosophies and how that impacts engagement. The topic of the panel was a discussion about the interchangeable nature of building games or simulations.
More profound was this single idea:
Once you know the learning objective, the game is no longer fun.
In my mind, that could be a huge reason why health games fail. The objective is far too known too early to be interesting. A big piece of this is that games are optimized to create emergent experiences, not outcomes. The best games do not dictate the goal. The goal is "fuzzy" and the purpose is to play the game to discover the goal yourself. When I look at what we are doing with Daily Challenge, that is the best part. We do not dictate an outcome, but we do convince you to play... and in participating, you have your own emergent experiences that are social and rewarding.
In games one can rarely point to the moment when a really good game became such. The entire experience has to be judged as a whole. The danger is over-engineering this. The moment we say "the goal of this product/game is to do <this>" it takes the fun out of it because the objective is known. So how do we design products that are required to have outcomes, but we don't lead with them?
Conclusion
The Games for Health conference gets bigger and better every year. I still feel like they offer a few too many tracks which leaves some presentations full while others barely have any people in them. Less choice and more guidance would be welcome, but I appreciate the diversity of the concepts and speakers, and I look forward to seeing how far sensors and design comes in the next 12 months. If the G4H conference points to anything, it is that this is a really vibrant and exciting time in the industry.
Racing armadillos with Dan Buettner (Blue Zones) and Ross Scott (Healthways)
Last week I was honored to be asked to speak at the Healthways Well-Being Summit. It was an amazing few days of talks about many different angles on well-being.
Some of my favorites included Deepok Chopra's talk about well-being at the cellular level, and his exploration around how language is capable of causing physiological responses. Then there was Daniel Pink telling it like it is on how to build high performance, motivated teams so we can all tackle these challenging health issues. There was of course Dan Buettner talking about his work finding Blue Zones around the world where people live longer than the average and unlocking the secrets. I had never seen him talk before which was fun.
My talk was on the last day of the conference, following a host of smart people from Gallup and Healthways who are working on the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and what it can teach us about Well-Being. Right after me was Nicholas Cristakis on who's work many of our ideas at MeYou Health are based. So I have to say that I found myself quite star struck most of the time.
Here is my talk if you want to give it a view. The title is "Designing for the first step". It is similar to the talk I gave at the Healthcare Experience Design conference recently with a new twist around intelligent inviting which we have rolled out recently. The talk is about 30 minutes long.
Oh and funny enough, they had an artist make caricatures of all the speakers. Here is mine!
For the record, the power glove idea I think came from my TEDxNashville talk I did last year where I showed a picture of me wearing the glove. Who knows where the carrot came from. I guess I have to embrace the idea that, for Healthways, I am the token gamer!
Photo by by swgn
At MeYou Health we are trying to design products for people who need to take the first step. This means resisting the urge to design for people who are already aware and achieving in health, and instead trying to think up how we can build something for people who find today's widely available products unrealistic, inconvenient, misaligned with their personal goals, and assume, since they are prescribed by their health plan or employer, disingenuous by nature.
We are on a path to do this using the Daily Challenge. We send you a quick email once a day (7am) with some small "challenge" for you to do some time during the day. If you do it, click DONE in the email. If you don't do it, you will get a reminder (4pm). Rolled up in that are opportunities in a social layer (for support and motivation), and a game layer (for progress). Eventually there will be a few more layers to deepen the experience once you are ready.
Most of the time, people say "that's it? You send me an email?" Yep. That is it. Although lots of different types of people can take advantage of such a light weight intervention, the simplicity is actually part of adhering to four design principals that I have come to believe not enough health products respect.
I really like this because it is something that gaming does very well. Through the use of progressive difficulty, you are never asked to do something that feels like too much of a stretch. The difficulty and complexity of a game increases overtime, moving from novice to expert to master, so that everything seems achievable.
Our idea of small actions goes right at this concept. Small actions build momentum and cut through the lack of confidence that most people face. If you can do a small thing, maybe you can do the next small thing.
The science behind the population affects of small actions is also well documented, so there is a bit of validity around just getting large numbers of people to do small things:
As we build a system at scale that helps people complete small actions, we hope that MeYou Health can ultimately contribute to this ongoing research.
A classic on-boarding experience of many health products is something like this:
To be convenient, we have to keep in mind the attention economy. All that means is you acknowledge that the attention of a human being is a scarce commodity. You have to assume at all times you are going to get nothing from people. Almost everyone we talked to in our market research was severely time-impoverished. Whether they actually are or just think they are doesn't matter.
As a health application designer, you are playing a zero-sum game. To get 10 minutes of their time, you are probably pulling it from 10 minutes somewhere else in their life where they really enjoy spending it. One women we talked to in our interviews told us that in order to spend 90 minutes with us that morning, she was giving up 90 minutes of her six hours per night sleep. (she worked the night shift and slept in the mornings).
If we are going to ask anyone to do anything, we have to treat the time they give us with the utmost respect, almost to a completely radical degree if we expect them to keep giving it to us.
The new neologism for this is "gamification". I personally belive that using that term presumes that you carry forward some of the other aspects of games, like fun, narrative, characters, etc.. I think of points and levels as a way to create a tangible sense of progress. Putting a progress bar to fill out your profile on LinkedIN, doesn't make it a "game" in a strict sense. So I argue that adding points to an app that a user accurues for engagement doesn't make it a game either. Points are just another type of progress bar. If I do something, and then come back and do something else, and then come back a third time and do something else, how do I know on the third time that I have made any progress? If I get 100 points each time and at the end I have 300 points it is pretty clear to me (and others in a social context) where I am at.
Progress is really important to create immediate feedback. We are committing to real well-being products that create behaviors and perspective that last a life time. You can’t really lead with that (see principal #1)!
If we can give people something to do today. And they can do it today. And they can get that quick win today. And it can make them more mindful today. And they can maybe have a fulfilling discussion with someone today. They will be much more likely to come back tomorrow.
Making things “fun” has to be the hottest catch phrase in health these days. I am a gamer. I know what fun games are to me... But fun is a really overloaded word. If we overly focus on fun experiences we potentially miss the decidedly non-fun experiences that can be equally rewarding and engaging.
Keely Rued said it best in some commentary about the topic in an article called “Having Fun Isn’t always the point”:
People can be deeply engaged, motivated and, ultimately, entertained by experiences and media that are downright disturbing, sad, and leave us with more questions than answers, more tension than resolution. Moreover, people can be entertained by games, media, and experiences that are patently dull, repetitive, and frustrating as hell (for example, the grind to get experience points (XP) in your favorite massively multiplayer online (MMO) title – sure, it has a payoff at the end, but it isn’t always fun while you’re doing it).
If you are someone with low well-being, you are facing some pretty serious challenges. Many of the things you will be asked to do will be dull and repetitive... and frustrating... and maybe sad... and that is ok. It isn’t always going to be fun.
If the products we build trivialize your challenges. We’ve lost you. More importantly, we’ve failed you. After all, that is why we all got into this industry right? To genuinely help people improve their lives?
That said, I am the first to admit that building something genuine is really, really hard. It is surprisingly easy to fall off the wagon and just do something fun and light-hearted, and in the process alienate the audience we need to help the most.
So in the coming years as we unleash an entirely new generation of well-being products on the millions of people that can really benefit from them I am promising myself that I will always push my solutions to be realistic, convenient, immediate, and genuine.
That is how I plan to change the world. Shhhh don't tell.
