Turning users into developers

Lately, I have been thinking of a problem. That many successful products have large user base. We had try to get designers to create great products. We said they made them beautiful, but not necessary usable. We got usability professionals to make them usable. We interview them once every few months to update usability guidelines. Lastly, we put users into the same room as we work. We work, they tell us how to do it. Now what?

As always, the gaming industry has pushed the knowledge envelope. For the past 15 years, they have been learning how to turn players into developers. They develop free development kit for paid users. Some were merely map editors for creating new zones for play, others were full development environment that allowed users to create a new game altogether. The resulted outcome are mods, and users who created them modders.

Modders contributed to games immersely. Most modders were passengers, who were there, and done that. A few, however, made their mark, and changed the landscape of gaming forever. Counter-Strike is a first person shooter that is played in every professional gaming tournament and developed by two modders. Counter-strike is a total conversion mod, meaning that the game is different from its parent. Other mods, such as those in World of Warcraft (WoW), the most popular online game played by 10 million worldwide, are partial conversions.

Since developers do not think like players, as we had long acknowledge, putting toolkits in the hands of users allow them to customize the product as they need it. It gets as close as what they need, only to be limited by the power of the toolkit and their knowledge of how to use it. Most modders in WoW know programming before they started modding, making the entry level for modding fairly high. Yet, we may lower this barrier by providing more usable, less powerful toolkits. For example, by making cellphones cover easier to remove and replace, we allowed the possibility of 3rd party developers creating alternative designs. By examing users who use them, we can learn about differing user tastes and cultural factors!

I felt that we have a lot to learn from modding in games. How do we decide which part of a product to open for modding? How do we attract a community of modders? How do we work with modders? What is the optimum size of modders? How do we substain modding activities? These are questions I have in mind.