Doctor's Note – Issue 20 – Janky Services
In this issue: Understanding services as games with janky controls / New Power of Ten episodes / Coaching spot available / Antirom reunited apart / The Linkhole / Book Corner
Welcome to Issue 20 of Doctor’s Note. If you were forwarded this by a friend, you can sign up here. It’s still free, but if you love it, you can buy me a coffee and I’ll love you back even more.
Understanding services as games with janky controls
I recently tweeted a Games Studies article by M. D. Schmalzer called Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit, because it struck me as an excellent way to understand the design and delivery of services. It also helps understand why there is such a close relationship to interaction design and service design, with UX overlapping those two depending on your design religion. The key to this understanding is the concept of janky controls.
Schmalzer starts with a humorous example of intent versus experience:
A text file buried in Kentucky Route Zero’s (2013) game files gives instructions for playing the title on a gamepad: “Push buttons and analog sticks and watch for patterns in response until you have a sense of the relationship between the two.” These humorous directions highlight the unstated ways players are assumed to learn how to play and game designers create videogames. Players tend to assume a one-to-one, predictable correspondence between their inputs and in-game outputs. If they press a button, they can be reasonably sure what will happen as there are constant results based on consistent inputs. So, if they play around with the buttons, they should be able to discern a pattern of responses and make the connection between input and output.
This is something I explored in depth in my PhD about the relationship between playfulness and interactivity. Early videogames had very simple instructions, such as “avoid flashing ghosts.” As more complex games emerged, so did long instruction manuals and tutorial levels. The first Playstation Tomb Raider (1997) game had an entire pre-game training level set in her mansion’s gym. Lara talked you through how to control her movements and interact with the world.
Later, games designers realised many people completely ignore the instructions. Working out what you have to do and how to do it are enjoyable parts of exploring a new game, hence the deadpan Kentucky Route Zero instructions.
For this to work at all, the relationship between expectations and outcomes have to be consistent within the game world’s rules. The relationship between the physical controls, the rendering of them and the feedback through movement, sound, vision, and haptics is critical. This feedback loop is sometimes referred to as the cybernetic circuit.
Schmalzer quotes Ryan Cooper’s definition of jank as “a mixture of bugginess, minor glitches, strange animations, bizarre control schemes and any other number of possible occurrences or abnormalities.” But it’s not just a technical issue – it’s also to do with intent.
The suite of weirdness that jank describes are actually disconnects between player expectations about how elements of videogames (software, hardware, interface, rules, mechanics, visuals, etc.) “should” behave and how they actually do. That does not mean that unpredictable events, random occurrences, or abnormalities are by default janky. After all, unpredictability is a central feature of many videogames so players anticipate certain kinds of unpredictable events ex. enemies mixing up their attacks, random loot dropping, attacks causing critical hits, etc. These phenomena may be somewhat unexpected, but they are still within a player’s range of expectations. Players have literacy in, or familiarity with, those kinds of unpredictable phenomena so they are not interpreted as abnormalities, and thus are not janky. Jank is also often used to mean poor craftsmanship. This is a conflation of one of jank’s causes with the experience of jank. Something interpreted as janky may be because of shoddy construction, but the construction itself is not janky. Stated concisely, jank is a player’s perception that a videogame does not behave in the ways that it should.
Once you view the touchpoints of services as interfaces to intent and action you quickly see that many services are very janky indeed and in some cases “unplayable.”
The design of services often becomes a confusing mélange of disciplines, frequently set in opposition to each other. This is exemplified by the oft-asked question, “what’s the ROI of customer experience?” as if the business of an organisation is unrelated to the experiences of people who use that organisation’s services. Services connect to every part of the business and their ubiquity and complexity can obscure clarity of purpose.
Lou Downe’s excellent 15 principles for good services is a formula for the experiential side of non-janky services. Here are a numbers 2-5:
Good services explain their purpose
Good services set expectations
Good services enable users to complete the outcome they set out to do
Good services work in a way that is familiar
You can see where I’m going with this. While games do sometimes make the purpose deliberately unclear as part of the unfolding narrative of the gameplay they do so intentionally. This is the same difference as mystery versus confusion in storytelling. Mystery is when you don’t know what is going on, but you know you’re not meant to. Confusion is when you don’t know what is going on, but know you should. For most games the purpose is absolutely clear – capture the flag, get through the maze, highest score wins, etc.
Either way, the interface of games need to behave in the ways the players believes it should. Janky gaming interfaces are a cocktail of mismatched expectations and technical and design glitches, just like services.
It may feel strange—not “businesslike,” even—to think of customers or citizens “playing” the game of your service, especially with services like arranging a prison visit, making an insurance claim or paying taxes, but it is exactly what they’re doing and thinking of them in this way provides a lot of clarity (there are similarities to Jobs To Be Done here, too).
People have an end goal in mind and they have to work out what the correct sequence of interface interactions are to get there — go to this website, fill in this form correctly, have this document to hand, go through the payment process. It’s no different from learning how to control Lara Croft, finding the way through the labyrinth, ensuring you have all the parts to the magic amulet and enough health points to beat the boss, except the stakes are usually higher, real and you don’t get to respawn when you die.
So if moving through a service experience is the gameplay, what is the role of the enterprise responsible for the service? It is all the things that make the game work at all – the manifestation of the game world, the technical platform, the rendering engine, the physical and virtual controls, the design of the affordances, rules, boundaries, and mechanics.
It’s not uncommon in games to stumble upon a glitch that either allows you to cheat or leaves you so stuck that the only way to get out is to restart the console. The same frustration you experience dying at the last moment at the end of a game level is exactly the same as spending ages filling in an online form only to have an error that means you have to start again. Sometimes cheats are the only way through poorly designed services.
Game design is a much more evolved discipline than service design with plenty of lessons learned and conundrums resolved that we can draw upon. It helps, of course, that it’s an enormously profitable industry with a very clear ROI, but the ubiquity of services masks the fact that it services is an even larger sector (and games have themselves evolved into services).
Thinking of the technology stack as the platform, the physical touchpoints as physical games controls, and the rest of the movement through the service as the game provides a clear picture for why they must all align to provide at least a “playable,” if not engaging, service experience. Anything else is janky.
And the business? Well the business is all of the above. Without it, nobody buys and plays the game and there’s no return on investment. In the worst cases of government and enterprise software and services, players are forced to play a janky game it because it’s the only one available.
Janky services don’t just fail to be engaging ludic experiences. They’re torture.
Power of Ten new episodes
Speaking of drawing upon one discipline to understand another, in the latest episode of my Power of Ten podcast, Molly Wright Steenson explains how we can trace the emergence of the fields of interaction design, UX, Agile, and AI through the colliding histories of architecture and computational intelligence.
Don’t miss the previous episode with Tanarra Schneider talking about her experience of leadership. It resonated with a lot of people.
And a quick reminder that Power of Ten is no longer on This is HCD, so if you’ve wondered why the episodes haven’t updated, you’re on the wrong feed. All the subscription links to most podcast platforms and apps are available over on Power of Ten’s Audioboom page.
Coaching spot available
I’ve got a coaching spot that has opened up, as one coachee has finished their current package. Ideally this is a time slot in the European afternoon, which would also suit someone’s USA morning or Asia evening. I mainly coach for design leadership, but for many it is very much personal development in the context of creative work, so don’t feel like it’s not for you if you’re not in or aspiring to a leadership role. I’d also be very happy to coach leaders of designers, by which I mean folks who are in charge of a department of creative teams, but don’t have that background themselves.
Get in touch if you’d like to know more details and package pricing.
Antirom Reunited Apart
Much of my thinking about the relationship between playfulness and interactivity was formed during my time as a member of Antirom. Nikola Tosic managed to corral almost all of us together for one of his Raw Interviews (I did another one with him solo).
It was surprisingly emotional and great fun for all of us to see each other again. I still think of those years as a defining time of my career and, as it turns out, Antirom’s influence rippled far beyond what we imagined at the time.
The Linkhole
John Curran’s Decoding Culture podcast also has a new home. Make sure you update your subscription in your podcast app. He also has a new Decoding Culture newsletter.
One of the last things I did at Fjord was co-write the 2020 Trends report. One of them was Life-Centred Design. Johnathyn Owens wrote a set of 10 Principles of Life Centered Design over on Medium that’s worth a read.
Gutted to read of the passing of Sir Ken Robinson. His thinking about education was an inspiration and one education ministers have shamefully not acted upon.
Andrea Mignolo wrote a fine piece about management versus leadership.
Here are two rare clips of Jimi Hendrix playing acoustic guitar. Easy to forget how young he was.
If, like me, you like reading film scripts you can now use a browser plug-in called ScreenplaySubs to read the script side-by-side to the film on Netflix.
Stoked to be having Maurice Cherry as a guest on my podcast soon. You should go and listen to the enormous archive of his interviews with BIPOC designers on Revision Path.
Sam McAfee and I share a similar interest in C.G. Jung in our coaching work. Here’s a piece by him about leadership, personality traits and Jung’s concept of the shadow.
Tantacrul’s short Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul is marvellous and has a very astute point to make as he explains how he came to think about the topic.
Talking of which, I had a little rant about the crazy notion that work should not be miserable. It got such a reaction I clearly need to write more on this soon. It requires a bit more nuance to explain the difference between miserable and other forms of unpleasantness.
Ever wondered what it would be like to unplug and go and live in the wild? Mark Boyle did exactly that and reports back in Not So Simple – Notes from a Tech-Free Life.
Teela Reid’s 2020: The year of reckoning, not reconciliation is powerful reading and an indigenous Australian perspective on what’s going on in the world right now.
Book Corner
As you can see above, I’ve been reading more online than off recently. Nevertheless:
Just bought Pip Pip: A sideways look at time by Jay Griffiths thanks to the Mark Boyle article. I’ve often had similar thoughts about time and its relationship to modernity.
In my coaching work the inner critic is alive and well. I interviewed the wonderful Denise Jacobs this week for Power of Ten, author of Banish Your Inner Critic.
Not yet read, but highly recommended by people’s whose opinions I value is Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown.
One of my favourite books about change is Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities by Nabeel Hamdi. Lots to learn about change movements in general, not just cities.
That’s it for this issue. If you liked it, please consider forwarding it to a friend or colleague to sign-up. I really do appreciate all the shares and feedback. If you have a reading tip, reply to this and let me know or tweet me.
Take care,
Andy