CaptainUp is back on the blog

January 15, 2015January 15, 2015 by Andrzej Marczewski

I was recently contacted by the guys from CaptainUp (www.captainup.com). For those that don’t know, this is a free / affordable platform for gamifying websites and until recently I had been using it for about 2 years. Then I stopped and they were interested to know why. The main reason was how intrusive it was to my readers, with popups and flashes and the like distracting from the content.

So they asked if I was willing to try something – a package they wanted to test that was less invasive and focused more on just gently thanking my readers for their loyalty. So it is, CaptainUp is back on the blog – just slightly more low key. You get one popup asking you to join my little club. After that there is always a small bar at the bottom of the page that will let you join should you wish. There is a leaderboard as well. Badges can be earned for simple things such as liking and tweeting. There are a couple of missions as well (more to come). The first you should try is the Onboarding one. See the progress bar on the left of the page? Click it and it will show links I feel all my readers should have looked at to understand my content better Read More ...

Page Views for 2014 posts

1) Defining gamification – what do people really think?

Posted on April 16, 2014As many of you know, I recently took exception to a particular definition of gamification that was doing the rounds. However, the positive effect was to make me think about what it really means and also started to make me wonder what other people think of it. So, I asked them – I did a… More… Read More ...

My 3 main focuses for rewards and feedback

January 23, 2023September 29, 2014 by Andrzej Marczewski

One of the key things that I consider when looking at anything in gamification is how feedback is going to be handled. For me, feedback is anything that gives a user some understanding of progress and achievement. This can be something as simple as a message that says “You have completed the survey”, to a full virtual economy working with points, badges, levels, leaderboards, trading, prizes etc! They are all just there to keep the user informed.

I feel there are three important aspects that need to be considered when designing feedback and rewards for any system though. It should be – cue another mnemonic – RIM…..! Read More ...

Forget loyalty, how about liking?

September 24, 2014 by Andrzej Marczewski

Over the last few months I have seen more and more people in gamification changing their messaging. Rather than speaking about gamification, they have started to speak about loyalty.

It makes sense, with gamification you are trying to guide people and engage them with your products, services or whatever – it does seem to follow that you would be aiming for their loyalty as well. However, I see an issue here and it may just be a definition thing, but it still got me thinking.

I have spoken about loyalty a few times and it always comes across to me that it can be looked at as: Read More ...

2 major lessons Apple has just taught us about loyalty

September 16, 2014 by Andrzej Marczewski

Another 6 months – another set of Apple tech announcements and pending products. Bigger phones, better software and a Watch (which I will probably speak about soon enough around what this could mean to personal gamification!).

They also gave every iTunes user a gift.

How awesome is that! Well, as it turns out not very. Apple pushed the new U2 album into everyone’s iTunes account forgetting a couple of really important things about people.

They like to have a choice.
They like to have things that are relevant to them.

As nice as they thought they were being, they were actually breaking the trust of their customers – pushing content on them without asking if it was ok first. Read More ...