I first learned about Glitch through my friend, Shelly Bowman, after sign up I immediately fell in love with this cute little browser based massive multi-player game. You can get a feel for the game from the trailer above  but some of the stuff the trailer doesn’t show is the intricate details such as the count down to the end of a skill training:

I enjoy it is it’s “sense of humor” and quirkiness. You can pet trees (which I swear must be a take from the fact this company is based near Berkeley, California), talk to yoga frogs, nibble on pigs, massage butterflies, and they may even want to discuss things of this world with you (see below). In order to increase skill training time you can get “Rock” to speed read. They say the devil is in the details. In this case, the joy of the game is in the details and all those details help tell the story. Tiny Speck has gone so far to make their site a joy to use on mobile. I believe Glitch has a lot of potential to be a run away success when it goes public.

Update:
Tiny Speck Closes $10.7 Million Second Round on Social MMO Glitch, Entering Closed Beta Also of note, in the article, it’s mentioned that Tiny Speck will release an API for the Glitch animation to be utilized in other projects.

Tiny Speck Expects Glitch but No Glitches in Launch: User will be able to grow the game in their own way by using the API to add streets and other sections of the game. A truly customizable experience.

Tiny Speck Founder, Stewart Butterfield, Talks Glitch

Mark Baskinger on Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction from Johnny Holland on Vimeo.

Here Mark Baskinger (associate professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design) talks to Johnny about drawing ideas, the differences between industrial designers and interaction designers, and how interaction designers can use sketching to communicate their designs better.

Sketch
Sketching is nothing more than showing what’s in your head. Everyone can communicate through drawing. Industrial Designers are very skilled at communicating their ideas within space and real time. It’s part of their vernacular. Interaction Designers are only expected to do that at certain stages and rarely go beyond the basics (ie stick figures). Since Industrial Designers can draw and illustrate in 3D, Interaction Designers should strive to sketch like Industrial Designers.

Construct a Visual Conversation
Use something accessible to the client to get them sketching (ie – a crayon at a cheap Italian restaurant) and talking about their ideas. Clients need to learn about the process. They will feel like they are directing but really they are learning through sketching. As a designer we are interpreting their direction as boundaries, wishes, and desires.

The physicality of the old (like a sliding phone) is what’s locked away in our brains but the new (like an iPad) is still foreign. There’s a disconnect to communicating the new verses what we know as the old. Form needs to embody the desired behaviour. Touch screen is becoming ubiquitous. Thus we need to put the old and new together in a meaningful way or users will break the old. Over time there has to be a record that shows the expected movement. Then connect it back to the person. Through the sketches, tell the story of the product.

Figure out what the value is that you are giving to business. Until everyday people can choose a product based on the interaction not on the cost, then interaction design will still be trying to persuade business they are a needed asset.

I have to ask all UX professionals everywhere, “Why the divide?” Aren’t we as professionals in User Experience supposed to be about the design of that experience no matter the medium?

You could argue, much like Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message!” After all a content rich site is going to need a good IA to wrangle all that content but then that IA needs to also create the interface for the user to interact with all that content. Isn’t the interaction design?

On the flip side, you may have an interaction designer working on a content rich site such as CBS News is going to need to know how to wrangle all that content in order to increase find-ability. Isn’t that Information Architecture?

How much are we really different from each other? And does it really matter? In the end isn’t it all about the user and their experience anyway?