EARLY WORK

Long before the rise of the smartphone, touchscreen video games served as a popular form of barroom entertainment in taverns around the globe. If unfamiliar, during the 90s and 00s, Megatouch was the world’s premiere touchscreen amusement system. With hundreds of games such as 11-Ball, Photo Hunt, Trivia Whiz and more, these coin-operated machines served up countless hours of nightly entertainment, 3 minutes at a time. Each game was purposefully designed to only last 3 minutes, at the conclusion of which players (with top scores) would be given a chance to enter a name onto a flashy leaderboard. The recipe of course was formulated to create an addiction, leveraging the innate competitive nature of humans to elicit “let me trying that again” responses. Did it work? You betcha ­– to the tune of billions of annual paid plays. Megatouch was an incredibly unique place to earn your stripes as a user experience designer, because every UX you created, regardless of complexity, had just 3 minutes to convert a first-time user into a repeat customer. It was an experience that forever shaped my design philosophy.