I guess them that passes the laws first will get the kudos. So here’s some credit, and honestly if you google around you won’t find this law anywhere else. This is so simple yet it’s the basis of everything we do (and many things we overlook) every day online… Jerry Michalski’s “Law of Convenience.”

Every additional step that stands between people’s desires and the fulfillment of those desires greatly decreases the likelihood that they will undertake the activity.

Jerry reminds us that even one little impediment – one additional click; an additional password; a confirmation – can stand in the way of a product’s being used or not. Ya, everybody already knows this, but a reminder every once in a while is welcome because we sometimes get overly-impressed with the features of the products we’re designing and think that people will love them so much they won’t mind all of the extra steps and clicks.

So here are some examples from my life.

Web Design: The classic rule for web site design is that you lose some (half or more, I say) of your site visitors every time they have to click to move onward. This is also true, to some extent, if your web pages are long and people have to scroll down in order to finish reading the page — your site visitors will generally not read something that’s “below the fold” (it’s a newspaper term meaning the lower half of the front page, but in our case it means “below the bottom of the window”).

Hmmm: This means that over half of the people who read the top of this article will not click to see the more… portion of the article. So over half of you aren’t even readin gthis.

Games: I’ve had mixed-reality games running (on and off) for about five years now. These are games in which you send a TXT from your phone to an address then you get back instructions assigning you a task, then you accomplish that and move to the next task. We always thought that people would have fun doing these things and would go through a whole series of such tasks to complete a “game.” However we found the same attrition rate I cited above – over 50% of players dropped off every time there was an additional step. Maybe one in 10 players even finishes a 4-step game. So what have I done about this? I’ve made most of our new games one-step games, so people can choose whether to follow the entire trail or just get a quick hit. See Faces of Happiness and the Essence Project for example. In the Essence Project we incorporate videos into the community-created matrix, and that helps some, since people like watching video.

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Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

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Then came the iPhone. And rich (HTML) email entered the picture for mobile devices. And richer and longer in-game responses from players. (SMS is only 160 characters, while email doesn’t have this limit, and thus is so much more fun.)

Well, over time that changed. Sometimes text messages are delayed for a substantial time (can tale hours), and our games are real-time so any delay beyond say one minute is a catastrophe. And then more and more phones became capable of sending text messages to email addresses – it had only been T-Mobile at first, and now it’s most phones. Today, at least 50% of phones in the US are capable of sending/receiving email, even thru the SMS mechanisms (there is an SMS-to-email interface on all systems).

So we’ve made a number of improvements in our games that permit play from regular email as well as mobile email-capable devices like phones, PDAs and smartphones.

And it looks like 2008 may be the year that we’ll develop more of these new, rich street games based on HTML email, and still played from mobile devices like the iPhone.

Yesterday (July 31st) we sat down and planned the trajectory for the next few such experience for YBCA – this is going to be fun. Watch for more on this as we announce the next YBCA game (October).

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