Ribbon Hero: levelling up in Microsoft Office proficiency

And so the floodgates open, if you ask me. Ribbon Hero is an addon for Microsoft Office, a game addon, that teaches you how to use Office.

Says Danc of Lost Garden, the designer:

Ribbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. I made the following bet:

• If an activity can be learned…
• If the player’s performance can be measured…
• If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
• Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.

Not only can you make a game out of the activity, but you can turn tasks traditionally seen as a rote or frustrating into compelling experiences that users find delightful.

Fantastic.

Here's the full post: it's a must-read, especially for UX designers.

Comments

[Sylvie]

Considering the popularity of Foursquare and its ilk, this Office Ribbon Hero was inevitable. People love getting rewards :)

I can see this as an interesting way of helping people learn a complex piece of software. Pity I don't have MS Word so I can't try it. I'm wondering how different it is from an active tutorial.

[Sarah]

And it can be set up to post your results on Facebook too. That's a major hook for my parental units :)