Opinion

Critisism – well a rant really.

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RANT Critisism 8211 well a rant really

This is a rant – you will find no insight here.. Move along…

I’ve written about criticism in the past, but wanted to bring it up again just for fun.

A couple of days ago, I received some criticism. Nothing to major, but for some reason it really set me off!

I Am pretty good with criticism, I grew up with it. From being labelled as stupid by a school that could not be bothered to offer help for dyslexics, to being called lazy by a medical practice that did not wish to diagnose M.E. as it did not exist, I deal with it pretty well. Read More ...

Gamification: Novelty is not enough

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Recently the following video has been doing the rounds.

It shows a great idea to get people to stop at crossings when the red light shows. The idea is that rather than a boring red man stood there you get a real time animation of someone dancing in a booth a little further away.

They claim that the number of people stopping rose to 81%, which is awesome.

It also hooks into loads of motivations. You have free spirits are engaged as they get to dance their hearts out. Philanthropist types will like that by dancing they are helping reduce accidents. Achievers will want to do the best dance possible, whilst players will want to beat all the other dancers. Socialisers get to watch the show and chat to the people around them also watching. Even disruptors have a chance to be subversive in their actions in the booth! Read More ...

Forget loyalty, how about liking?

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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 ...

Dynamic teams: Learning from the kids

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The other day, I had the joy of taking my eldest daughter to a theme park (Chessington World of Adventures). We had an amazing time, finished off with a visit to what I thought was a sort of soft play area.

It turns out it was way more awesome than that. It was a steam punk themed ball shooting arena called Temple of Mayhem.

The arena was 2 floors high, with walkways laid out in a horseshoe around the edges. Each of the walkways had a bank of guns, whilst the ground floor had 2 large cannons.

The guns and the cannons fired tennis ball sized foam balls (as many as you could get in them). Also dotted around were various mechanisms to get the foam balls from the ground floor up to the first and second levels. Read More ...

Gamification is sh1t. Let’s make it better.

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I thought that might get your attention. Excuse the contrived use of the 1 in shit there as well, firewalls can be so jumpy about certain words.

Now back to my point.

Gamification, in far too many cases right now,  is indeed shit. I am not saying gamification itself is bad, just a lot of the uses and applications of gamification that we are seeing out there falls into that particularly odorous category.

It’s as if gamification has become the duct tape of user design. “The user experience is a bit off, what should we do? Add gamification”. “The system is not great, people get stuck and don’t like using it, what should we do? Add gamification – points and badges will fix it!”. “We need to improve efficiency in the department. How can we do that? A leaderboard you say? Let’s do it!” Read More ...

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