business

What if they don’t want to play?

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Engage Luc Picard 1024x682 1 What if they don 8217 t want to play

One of the questions I get asked all the time is,

“What if people just don’t want to play your game? How do you engage them?”.

The answer comes in two parts, both as important as each other. One you may not like, but you have to accept it!

The first is, make sure you have designed the system properly.  If you have just added some badges and a leaderboard, then you are going to engage a very small number of people for any length of time. Consider looking at the User Types and design more to support them. People often say that people don’t engage with gamification because gamification is bad. The truth is that many gamification designers are bad – and so they create bad gamification. This is true of any industry and especially new technology, just think how wrong most companies got social media at the beginning!
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Employer Values

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Employer promise Employer Values

First things first, thanks to everyone who has completed the User Types 2.0 survey. If you have not done so, please take a few minutes to fill it in. I am trying to make this one a little more scientific so that the results can be used to help us all build better systems!. Check out the results so far. If you have done it, but want to play with the charts a bit, you can use the User Type Analysis Tool. This lets you manually put the values in and suggests what kind of mechanics and ideas may work for the dominant user type(s). Read More ...

More on Gamification and Careers

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Flow User Jounrney Motivation More on Gamification and Careers

Extrinsic Rewards and the User Journey

A couple of small bits this week whilst I pull together more substantial work (I’m not a machine!!) First a small revisit of my Flow and User Journey work. In various conversations I have had about the use of rewards in a gamified systems the general question is always “do you need rewards at all”. My answer is that it can’t hurt if it is done properly.  One thing that occurred is that during the on-boarding phase and into the habit forming phase of a user journey, rewards can play a key part.Charles Duhigg presents the idea that habits are formed when three key things are put together. Cue, Routine and Reward. Read More ...

Using Gamification to create meaningful feedback through Accessibility and Immediacy

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Questions box Using Gamification to create meaningful feedback through Accessibility and Immediacy

Whilst I process the amazing presentations, talks and general chats that happened at SocialNow, I wanted to put together a quick post around the ideas of accessibility and immediacy.

Imagine the situation.  You are an airport and have thousands of people moving through your building every day. Most have a very predictable path. Land, get of plane, walk to baggage claim, go to the exit.  On the way, they have to go through various checks. Customs, passport control, security etc.

All of these people are in a hurry, they have a goal and want to get to it as fast as possible.  Your problem is, you want to find out how they have found the experience of going through the processes in place at your airport.  How was the flight, how was the security, how was baggage claim etc. Read More ...

The gamification of a career

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Career game board The gamification of a career

A fair few of my recent posts have revolved around how we can use ideas from games / gamification to improve certain aspects of an employee’s “journey” through their career. I thought it may be time to pull it all together in a single coherent (I hope) post!

It makes sense to start with an employee’s first days, usually an induction process of some type. Rather than the standard two or three days of death by PowerPoint, how about this;

They start with a simple half day induction, preferably done face to face with a group of other newbies. Here they are told the basic essentials for them to actually get into an office, cover any legal requirements and meet people they may be working with in the future. After this, they are given the essential kit to get them going, probably a Smartphone and laptop. Read More ...