What farmville can teach us about cooperative workflows and architectures

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of digital social games such as Zynga´s FarmVille is that they are designed in such a way that any user, regardless of their skills and experience, can familiarise themselves in a matter of moments with the object of the game, the interface, and the tools and options involved in playing them. In contrast, developers of collaborative platforms for teaching and research have been struggling for the last 15 to 20 years to gain a wide acceptance among users, and with very limited success. Although simple and intuitive usability has long been recognised as a key design goal, no-one has, apparently, yet succeeded in integrating all the tools and functions required for academic work into a platform with an intuitive interface that target groups make enthusiastic use of. This paper investigates which principles and features may be adopted to make the use of these platforms easier and more intuitive.This electronic document is a “live” template. The various components of your paper [title, text, heads, etc.] are already defined on the style sheet, as illustrated by the portions given in this document.