I wouldn't be in Lahore today if it wasn't for a friend's wedding tonight.
I was at his mehndi yesterday
and it reminded me of someone
Oh, yes.
Right about the time when the floodgates to the dinner table open up
There is one particular character
who is fluttering from one group to another.
It's your lovely sociable aunty
eyeing the young from a distance.
Before you know it
she would pop up in front of you and ask
Assalam o alaikum son, how are you doing?
Where are you nowadays? What's happening?
Your tie, your shirt, your pallu, even your shoelaces
and yeah, fake smile, she would judge you from head to toe in an instant.
And right next, she'll link up how you are related
and then, trrrrrr, she will match you up with countless potentials.
And all this happens faster than you've ever cancelled a missed call.
Love her or hate her
You are out in the market now ready to be traded with a very credible reference.
I envy her
I envy that fearless mind
I envy the fearless mind who is willing to take a half prepared product
and put it in front of people just to test how they respond.
There's a lot talked about it, but as a young designer
this is a skill that is barely taught in school
Different industries have different names for it
like we in gaming call it play testing
Software guys call it UAT (User Acceptance Testing)
Product designers have focus groups
Marketeers, they draw their insights from Consumer Behavior Research.
But today I would like to talk about my experience
being your lovely aunty.
Well, I would give you three examples
of how my team avoided death by arrogance building 'Howzatt'
an online game that is being played by almost half a million players every month.
which amounts to about 500 years of productivity lost in a day.
The CEO's over here or office managers would vouch for that.
The thing is, it was hard to digest
when we started out
But thinking like your aunt, we figured
that if you have more features in your product
it won't necessarily make it any better
To explain this further, I would need a volunteer
Anyone over here who would like to come up?
I can't see you over here. Can someone help me pick a volunteer?
Your name? - Mujtuba
Mujtuba, nice to meet you
Okay so imagine I'm a character on the screen
I'm not going to hit you, don't worry.
So, I'm holding a bat in my hand
And you have a keyboard in your hand
You want me to hit a six down the ground
What will you press?
Space key
Next ball
you see a gap in the cover
And you want me to drive it right through that
What will you press now?
The right arrow on the space key, fine
Okay, next ball, you tried but did not hit the boundary
You have to make me run, what will you press?
Escape and shutdown
It's fine, thank you, excellent. Thank you for your answers.
So,
I mean, like, one or two keys, that's all he mentioned.
Thank you for coming here.
A round of applause for Mujtuba.
Well, listen to how it happened in the very first version of the game we made.
You press space bar then you have adjust your feet to place the batsman.
Then you press space again and hit the direction key.
to play a shot.
Wait, nothing happens because you forgot
whether to press the 'x' key or 'z' key
to either drive the ball or loft the ball.
And yes, to make me run
you have to whack your keyboard with the space bar again and again
so that the player moves.
Not surprisingly, 70% of the people who played the game for the first time
couldn't figure out how it worked.
But today all these five steps are possible
with a press of a single key.
When we started out we didn't think that things could be so simple.
But as it turns out, when you talk to people, interact with people
you learn
that the more features, the more options you bombard in a product
in a feature, less likely it is to be used by a human.
This brings me to the second ability of an aunt.
Her ability to judge a lot of people very quickly.
It is very likely that when you are building a product
The thing that you think is the most exciting about your product
might not be what everyone else enjoys as much as you do.
I'm a terrible batsman
but I'm an even worse bowler.
But in 'Howzatt' I love bowling
because by using pace and spin
I could make players behave like the English batsmen.
And it used to give me a kick.
The thing is, most of the people like you, who have taken time out of school
or work, to just whack the ball out of the ground.
And if I make them fumble for the ball
they would quit.
And if they gave me a chance to bat
and I go boom boom on them, they would quit again.
But this quitting business was killing the gaming experience
We had to do something, so what we did was, whenever someone quits
an automatic bowler takes over
and in the second version of the game
the bowling department has totally been handed over to the robots.
This was something we couldn't have figured out until we analyzed a lot of people
So your ability, your experience of interacting with a lot of people
and then analyzing them very quickly
empowers you, just like your aunt to link things up.
Let me give you an example over here,
like when we started out, I wouldn't have thought if our game resembled real cricket too much
It's probably not suitable for someone crouched over a computer screen.
When we started out, the experience that we wanted to create
was basically me playing cricket with my friends
used to on PC or console.
The thing was, that I was now in Singapore
my friends were in Pakistan
and all over the world.
We went ahead, taking the same experience in mind and made the game.
It was a hit in offices and hostels
but it was still a painful struggle to get friends who lived halfway across the world
to want to play the game at the same time as you do.
So as a player,
and someone who is sick of stalking people on Facebook
I want a cricketing challenge,
but I don't want to bowl or be humiliated by a stranger.
What do I do?
The thing is, you play multi-player "Howzatt" cricket
where I play against three other people
batting at the same time.
What happens is
I'm the batsman in the middle and I can see what other people do
ball by ball.
We have 5 overs and whoever makes the most runs in 5 overs, wins.
This isn't real cricket, I know.
The thing is, that rules of cricket in every neighborhood are different
Ludo too has different rules in every home.
Your product, if you want to go out for the mass market
you have to make sure it has evolved for the context it's going to be used in.
I have to rush off to a wedding soon
so, if you forget everything
just remember, when heading out
How many times you have pushed through a door that reads pull?
Why would an educated person do that?
It's your failure as a designer
to not have anticipated how people are going to use your product.
So when you are building a product
venture out, interact with people, out do your aunt
Because once that door has been designed to be pushed
putting a pull sign over it won't fix it. Thank you.