Gamification often uses points, deal with it. They can form a solid backbone to a system, after all, they are just a granular form of tracking and record keeping!
My issue today is with a misconception about using experience points in gamification. In games, we know that experience points are used in many titles. In a game, experience points (XP) are gained by doing tasks, completing missions, killing the bad guys and more. Often, the early stages of games see the user “grinding”, doing small, unskilled repetitive tasks over and over again, to gain XP.
As such, it seems obvious that we use them in gamification. The user does things that are “correct” and gains experience points. As I say, in games players are willing to spend hours doing things that are relatively boring – just for XP.
However, that isn’t quite right. They are doing these things because XP leads to new opportunities within the game. Players can upgrade their characters, purchase new items, gain new skills, unlock new levels in the game and much much more. This grinding leads to much more fulfilling experiences and opportunities within the game.
In gamification, XP often just leads to more XP or at times maybe a new in system rank. Very rarely does it offer new and more fulfilling experiences within the gamified system, very rarely does it answer the key question on the user’s mind – “So what?”
To make a long-term impact with something like experience points, you need to be able to answer that question. If you don’t give people a real reason to keep grinding – they won’t. The occasional badge won’t cut it. You need to offer new experiences, content only available to certain experience levels, virtual goods, real world goods. Something that makes the less interesting stuff more bearable in the long term.
It’s all well and good talking about flow and the like, but you can’t rely on what you feel is a perfectly balanced system working for everyone. If users want to reach for the stars – make sure there are some to reach for!
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…..!
Relevant, In-Time and Meaningful
RIM Framework
Relevant
The feedback needs to be relevant to and in context with the activity. If you are clicking a like button – is it relevant to suddenly be given a certificate by post? Would it not be more relevant to have a little “thank you” or a point added to an experience system?
In-Time
Does the feedback need to be instantaneous, or can it wait? For instance, in a game, you get several types of feedback. When you miss time your jump, you die. The feedback is immediate – it has to be! If you gain experience, you often get a little notification on the screen – however, if you are in the middle of a frantic battle, is that actually of use to you. A sudden light flashing up telling you you have levelled up, maybe just distracting enough to get you killed! It would surely be better to wait a moment until the fighting has died down a little and then give the feedback. That, or wait until the level has ended and then congratulate and give the feedback.
In gamification, this could be seen as using a monthly leaderboard rather than an hourly one. If people are not going to be checking hourly, why feedback hourly? Judge the best and most impactful time to give feedback and rewards.
Meaningful
This is the most important category for me. Many systems reward everything. Clicking, registering, logging in. Soon you have awards and badges for everything you have done. They become meaningless very fast as they took nothing to achieve! Use feedback and especially rewards to celebrate and record actual achievement. Then it will have some meaning to the user. If everyone can have the “I clicked like 10 times” sticker, it means nothing. However, the “I just scored 100% on my exam” sticker is harder to get. If you then make that reward transferable to real life – so maybe that sticker gets them priority somewhere else, for instance, it has true meaning to them.
Bonus round
The ever awesome Richard Wallace has suggested that personal/personalised should be a fourth key consideration. Taking a quote from his comment below (which I have included below I full, along with our twitter conversation).
personalization is more based on social (personal, peer or inspirational) relationships and/or personal preferences (information, trends, interests etc).
I agree this could really help any reward or feedback. As such and after much thought and conversation, I leave this here as a bonus for you. For me, this is all part of meaning, but I am definitely not always right, so here is the full comment and subsequent conversation. Thanks Rich.
Comment
Andrzej, I agree with the feedback you’ve suggested but I’d like to suggest one more.
Personalised – I think this differs from the above as I would define it in relation to things that relate the individual (or their role) either socially or preferentially. For example: That fellow team members (or friends) are participating the same activity, show their progress or actions etc in comparison with a desire an action to simulate similar behaviors.
I believe this differs from relevance as you’ve defined that as context with the activity, whereas I think personalization is more based on social (personal, peer or inspirational) relationships and/or personal preferences (information, trends, interests etc).
(PRIM perhaps?)
Twitter
Andrzej Marczewski (@daverage)
03/10/2014 14:47
@rich_wallace got me thinking now. Maybe personal could sit connecting relevant and meaning in the image. Mmmm.
rich_wallace (@rich_wallace)
03/10/2014 18:43
@daverage obviously in the latter trying to interpret the user experience but also for the business goals….
Andrzej Marczewski (@daverage)
03/10/2014 18:49
@rich_wallace yeah. Tough one. Still not sure of it is right to separate it from meaningful. Personal is not always practice ;-S
rich_wallace (@rich_wallace)
03/10/2014 20:05
@daverage but I think relational (social) is such a strong driver in most humans that it is almost a separate focus.
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.
The traditional way would be to ask them to fill in a survey. This could be done by randomly selecting people as they tried to leave the airport, as a survey they have to fill in and post back or even online after they have got to their destination. However, each of these has an issue.
No one likes their path to be blocked by someone holding a clipboard – especially fter a 6 hour flight, when all you want is to get to your hotel or see your family. You are not likely to get reasonably thought out responses with this. The other ways all rely on memory of the experience. They rely on people remembering how it felt to go from the plane to the exit. What they did and didn’t like.
There are two issues here. The first is that many people won’t bother to fill in the survey (unless there is an incentive of course and even then you can’t guarantee that they are telling you the truth or what they think you want to hear). The other is that if they do fill in the survey, they are doing it from memory and anyone who watches CSI knows that memory cannot be relied on!
So, knowing all of this, it seems that some clever people in certain airports have come up with a simple yet brilliant solution. At each major stage of your journey around the airport, they have placed one of these.
Each one has a question. In this case, “How was your baggage delivery experience today?”. All you have to do is press one of four buttons, from happy face to angry face. If you then feel you want to say more, you can fill in a short feedback card as well.
This is brilliant in a few different ways. The first is how simple, accessible and immediate it is. You don’t even have to slow down to tap the button you want. It also prompts you then and there to think about a certain stage of your experience – rather than having to remember all of the stages at once in sequence. As I walked from the plain to the exit I saw three or four of these, asking about how my experience was. I clicked the appropriate face on each one. The other brilliant part was the use of four buttons. It is easy to think that giving four options over three is making it harder, but it actually forces you to make a meaningful decision rather than just opting for sitting on the fence at each one.
All in all, I think we can learn a lot from this. Whilst they cannot ask all the questions that they could in a full survey, it does allow them to get meaningful feedback on key questions from a much larger number of people. It breaks down the goal, to make it much easier for people to achieve and in some minds is a bit of fun, especially compared to a survey!
Thanks to Morgan Tinline for the better title!! https://twitter.com/mtinline/status/488227078576566272
Whilst I normally blog about Gamification and finding the benefits in understanding the psychology of people, this post is of a deeply personal nature. It also shows how important user experience is. I hope though, you will retweet this far and wide. Oh – and it is a bit of a rant. This was to … Read more
