2. STICKINESS
Perfect world:
Universally applicable
Obvious, simple, fast, stable, reliable, robust
Instant ROI
Real world:
Not everyone just gets it
Constant tension between easy and powerful
We need to encourage customer
growth/evolution
4. TWO PARTS OF GAMIFICATION
Stickiness = Loyalty + Reputation
Loyalty
• User + system
• Progress tracking
• Tangible Rewards
• Isolated recognition
Reputation
• Player + community
• Results surfacing
• Status Rewards
• Social recognition
6. LOYALTY & REPUTATION
Gamification Type Motivations People
Player + system Extrinsic Laborers
LOYALTY
Progress tracking (monetary rewards) Customers
Tangible rewards Works well for directed ‘Soldiers’
Isolated recognition tasks
REPUTATION
Player + community Intrinsic Thinkers
Results surfacing (social standing) Fans
Status rewards Works well with freeform ‘Artists’
Social recognition problem solving
7. Motivations People
LOYALTY: Extrinsic
v
(monetary rewards)
Laborers
Customers
Works well for directed ‘Soldiers’
tasks
Internal - employees External - customers
• ‘On the floor’ workers • Frequent buyer/user programs
• Sales team • Fitness training regimens
• Customer service • Events / Conferences
• Training Programs
8. ADOPTION OF LOYALTY
How to design for gamified Loyalty?
1. Identify the value proposition
• Benefits of services rendered
• Sources of pride
2. Highlight fulfillment of the value proposition:
• Money saved, Time saved, Locations visited
3. Build progress toward rewards:
• Discounts, Privileges, Access
Bottom Line: Highlight relevant metrics and build towards rewards
9. WHY IS LOYALTY IMPORTANT?
Build a dependency- a symbiotic relationship
Loss Aversion
All of your progress will be lost if you go to a competitor
Condition Dependency
Develop an expectation for reward that can’t be found elsewhere.
Competitor experiences will feel empty, less compelling.
Develop a Routine
Rewards help make behaviors habits. Habits are hard to break.
10. THE COMPETITION GAMBLE
Competition increases the ‘pressure’ to succeed in a Loyalty environment.
More pressure in an individual context than on teams
Competition is:
• Ranks
• Leaderboards
• Score comparisons
Competition is a gamble because it can backfire:
• If your users like it, it will vastly improve engagement
• If your users are intimidated by it, it will hurt overall engagement
• Competition kills collaboration (but improves it within competing teams)
Works well in environments that already ‘feel’ like a game:
• Gaming
• Sports
• Predictions
• Sales
Bottom Line: Know your audience before you introduce competition
11. Motivations People
REPUTATION: Intrinsic
v
(social standing)
Thinkers
Fans
Works well for freeform ‘Artists’
problem solving
Internal – your users/employees External - customers
• Knowledge share • Fan communities
• Team collaboration • Q&A communities
• Identifying experts • Content Crowdsourcing
12. ADOPTION OF REPUTATION
How do you get gamified reputation?
Work with existing reputation structures
• Title
• Years experience
• Area of expertise
• Sense of Value provided
Worst case scenario: Redefine the above
Best case scenario: Accurately visualize them (particularly the last two)
Worst case example:
Define ‘Top collaborator status’ and award according to emails sent
Best case example:
Define ‘Top collaborator status’ and award according to peer
recognition (‘helpful’ votes)
Bottom Line: Objective is to highlight relevant metrics
13. WHY IS REPUTATION IMPORTANT?
Q: Why not just rely on existing rewards and status?
A: You can never over-emphasize the story of growth
Q: Why? What is meant by Growth?
A: Growth describes a sense of purpose.
Another way to think about it:
You are born You do some stuff … and then you die
What’s the point? Why are we here?
14. WHAT’S THE POINT?
No matter who you ask, the answer is almost always a form of growth.
Typically one or more of the following four:
Learning
The things I learned – the experiences I had – the knowledge I harnessed.
Overcoming Challenges
The challenges I overcame – my measurable accomplishments – my impact.
Making Social Connections
The connections I made – the people I knew – the relationships I fostered.
Building Order
My moral code – making the world ‘right’ – the things I taught others.
These are the things that give our life meaning. We seek them, often unconsciously.
Gamification offers the ability to measure tiny victories in the realm of growth.
15. HOW TO GAMIFY
VALUE GROWTH
Payouts Learning
– Discounts – Exploration
– Extended Free Trials – Discovery
– Privileges – Access – Record of Acquired Skills
Pride Challenges Overcome
– Celebrate success – Talent Recognition
– Visualize progress – Tests of Skill
– Contextualize – Record of Victory
accomplishments (rank) Connections Made
Preferences – Social Updates
– ‘Personality’ Profile – Social Discovery
– Solicit Opinions – Record of Helpfulness
– Influence the Experience Creating Order
– Success Scheduling
– Completionism
– Record of Progress
.
16. HOW TO REWARD
Value Growth
• Make it for your workers - loyalty • Make it for your thinkers - reputation
• Make it personal • Make it social
REPUTATION
LOYALTY
17. DESIGN TENETS
Make it relevant
• Know your audience
• Define the value proposition
• Market it appropriately – don’t distract
Promote specific growth
• Specializations
• Features
Remove the chaff aka optimize
• If it’s not compelling, cut it
18. REMOVE THE CHAFF
Value: conformist? Potential: low
Value: prolific? Potential: medium
More specific?
Value: involved? Potential: medium
More specific?
Value: prolific? Potential: medium
Redundant?
Value: peer Potential: high
validation? More specific?
How could these be more specific? More informative of individualism?
25. GAMIFICATION IS A PROGRAM
845 Million 2 Billion Minutes 60 Hours of Video
Active Users of Play Per Day Uploaded Per Minute
Editor's Notes
In the perfect world, you have a product that is a perfect fit and is universally applicable.It’s completely intuitive and obvious. It’s simple, fast. It’s incredibly robust.It requires no effort and delivers massive and instant ROI.CLICKMaybe it’s the iphone of your space. CLICKNot one of us is Steve Jobs though. And we live in the real world .Not every customer automatically gets our product or fully commits to it.We have to balance ease of use with power.We need to nudge our customers to grow and evolve To move up our value chain.Don’t feel bad thoughCLICK Apple does this too. Here’s a picture of an ipad training class for example. So, let’s define stickiness.
Stickiness is aided by delightful user experiences – sexy, intuitive features, a great look-and-feel.Innovative ways of addressing a problem are also related.But innovation doesn’t necessarily create stickiness. How many times have you heard someone say their product was “ahead of its time” - sometimes that means really innovative but not well-understood, well-adopted. CLICK -Stickiness is really a way of describing the relationship between your product and the folks who use it (and for clarity, I’m really thinking about business-side of B2B or B2C solutions). -Stickiness is about making your product indispensible, essential. -In the SaaS world in particular, your business is based on retaining customers who you work hard to win in the first place. -You know about the SaaS revenue hockey stick – you don’t want it to be a revenue pool cue. -You have to turn users into champions in order to retain them, in order to move them up your value chain, deliver more ROI, and in order to set up cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. -Stickiness of course goes beyond software design – it’s really about the total product experience.-In many ways, it’s about loyalty – turning users into champions, developing a commitment to you. And that’s where gamification comes in.
There are two sides of Gamification that apply in product design. Not only is there loyalty, but there’s also reputation. You need to consider both of them to increase stickiness. When you think about the concept of loyalty, think of a rewards system like Frequent Flier program – Loyalty is about the payout Loyalty is paid for with tangible rewardsTangible rewards can be difficult in a product environment – may involve things like - discounts (more usage, lower CPMM, bundled pricing) - discounts on events, free events for star users - Extended free trials (Tibr) - gaining access – customer advisory boards can turn into this.Reputation – establishing status and credibility which is done in the context of a community. Reputation is about the message – getting expert status based on activity – differentiating people and making them special – welcome, enjoyableThe important concept here is that Reputation only exists in the context of a community.It’s quite literally powered by social recognition.
This diagram illustrates the benefit of making your product social – think about if you were to provide a monetary payout to increase loyalty. The value/effectiveness of a hard payout doesn’t change – you get what you pay for. Virtual rewards (reputation, status) have more impact the more social your environment is. As you’re thinking about your products, think about ways to make the environment social – do you link to a community? Do you surface activities? Can I learn from others by following their activities. These are all product features you can leverage to make rewards involving reputation effective.This is really the great opportunity for collaboration and communication systems like Salesforce Chatter. [Common confusion by naysayers - virtual rewards don’t work! Only b/c they aren’t in a social environment[]
Another way of thinking about these concepts is to think about the nature of the reward. Extrinsic rewards come from the outside – this is the hard payout. Intrinsic value comes from the inside – a SENSE of accomplishment, a SENSE of expertiseWhich type of motivator to use depends on who you are trying to motivate. There have been studies that show that extrinsic rewards work for rote, repetitive, laborers – you can bribe them.In free form environments, a knowledge worker will be less motivated by extrinsic rewards. They can be motivated by things that establish positive feelings – progress, accomplishment, recognition, credibility!
Let me talk a little more about “soldiers” – I don’t use this term to mean dumb users. I mean people who’s jobs are more repetitive, who are following a prescribed course, who are operating in a structured environment.That structure can come from the task – follows a relatively standard progression. It can come from the calendar too.When I think about soldiers, I think about some of my favorite folks: qbsr’s. Those are highly gamified people heavily motivated by extrinsic payouts. Spiffs, cars, watches, President’s Club.
Professional solidersaren’t logging into one of my products to play a silly game or to earn some superficial points, they’re coming to do a job. - An important design guideline is: Don’t distract them from their job. Keep their purpose in mind.This is really about knowing the value proposition.- To do this, Identify the metrics relevant to your user (and to you) and build toward rewards. From a product design perspective, if you don’t know you’re user, and can’t measure what people are and aren’t doing, it’s going to be hard to build a reward system. Absent gamification, you might be using analytics to identify opportunities for reward or usage data might come from reports created by your ops guy.With a gamified reward system, it’s almost like you get these kinds of stats for free b/c they underlie the reward system.CLICKSo, Once you have the objective, show and reinforce WHY it’s valuable. This one is obvious – this is almost marketing. Finally, build in ways to make progress toward the reward. Progression is key as we’ll see in a few minutes.
To reiterate, loyalty is a key characteristic of gamification and is essential to stickiness. It helps build the dependency we talked about earlier. CLICKUnderlying that dependency is loss aversion – the feeling that progress will be lost if you go to a competitor.CLICKThere’s also what’s called Condition Dependency – the expectation of the reward can’t be found elsewhere. Competitive offerings will be less attractive because they don’t have the reward system.CLICKFinally, rewards help turn behaviors into habits. Habits are good for your business. The most loyal customers of Test&Target developed the habit of testing literally every customer interaction. This also raises an important point – loyalty isn’t manipulative. Testing everything helped those customers on the bottom line of their businesses. Loyalty is win-win.
Speaking of winning, introducing competition into the loyalty mix should be considered very carefully. It can backfire – it can be intimidating, can hurt collaboration and interaction, and can be superficial. CLICKWhere the environment already feels like a game, however, it can be very very effective.
The other side of gamification from loyalty is reputation. Recall that reputation can only exist in a social environment.Reputation is about unique identity.CLICK It usually involves knowledge sharing, collaborating, creating and identifying expertsIn terms of product design, developing a reputation system can be done without developing they type reward system for loyalty that we just discussed.
- With a reputation system, you build a way to get more specialized by establishing what makes someone unique – their super powers. -These are the types of things that Title and Years of Experience don’t really express. - You DO NOT want to try to redefine those (you want to be aware of them and respect them)- You DO want respect them and to expose them along with that which makes people unique - You create visualizations that offer recognition within the community.Let’s think about the behavior that we should reward – using a simple example.CLICK In the worst case, you reward top status based on how many emails are sent. This is about quantity and is meaningless – this will backfire b/c the guy who is spamming everyone is being rewarded. CLICK Better would be to have the community determine quality and reward on that.CLICKAs with loyalty, you have to tie the reputation system to relevant metrics or behaviors. What makes a behavior relevant?
Relevant behaviors are the ones tied to growthYou can think about status and reputation as really about the story of growth. In life, CLICK you’re born, CLICK you do some stuffCLICK and then you die.Part of reputation is “what you’ve accomplished.” The purpose.
If you ask someone about what they’ve accomplished in life or in their career, they’ll tell you a story of growth. People have a sense of accomplishment when the know they’re making progress – need to know how you’re doing relative to others.When designing your products, you want people to be able to tell the same story. You don’t want them telling a story of drudgery and toil.People generally think about growth in four ways: Learning – developing skill or a faculty Overcoming challenges – being stretched, providing more and getting more valueMaking social connection – a functioning, contributing member of your product society if you will Really though, some people are just motivated by making connectionsFor others, it’s being connected to people with certain roles or identities helps give them a sense of their role and identity; Building structure is about organizing the experience. Especially if you have a powerful product (aka complex). To connect this to games more literally – Pokemon. You have to catch them all, you have to build sets, you have to build order.CLICKIt’s worth pointing out that video games are really really good at developing the story of growth.They always giving you the sense of progression both in small and large increments.
Now that we’ve described loyalty and reputation, some more quick ideas. Payouts – direct monetary value Pride is an emotion you can experience alone and is about setting goals – a lot of gamification is about setting goals and tracking progress and celebrating success. If I’m trying to motivate you through pride, you have to care about what you’re doing and you don’t need a community. Think about a health&fitness site – they’re be a lot of this. Days without an accident or defect. Speed, time if being efficient is what it’s about. Preferences – think personality tests or even astrology – the “system” validates my identity – there’s a novelty pleasure in the data telling you something about yourself – I’m good at this type of task (closing tickets, finding bugs) - exerting your identity – this could also be about idenity - influence the experience – once you know your identity, it could be about changing habits for fun or to become who I think I am – I’m not good at something so I’m going to change that. I’m effective but slowSuccess Scheduling is an idea from games – “I’m not going to let you go more than a few minutes from having a small victor or a few more minutes without a big victory”. It’s like the emotional rollercoaster devised in a movie script. Completionism – this is like people who build lists and put stuff they’ve already done – they want credit and get a positive feeling from itThese are what we’re talking about when you hear about missions and tracks, etc…How do you organize around this?
I worked at a company where if you were issued a patent, you got money - a fair amount, but it wasn’t always the huge motivator. The bigger motivator (remember, we are talking about knowledge workers) was the inventor status on your business cards and the public acknowledgement when new patent holders were announced. Note the two types of communities here where status was being established: the company and the industry. They’re showing both intrinsic and extrinsic approach – value and growth.
It’s always good to have some principles or pillars that you design around.I’ll suggest 3 for designing for gamification.We’ve already touched on all of them.First, make it relevant - to make it relevant, you have to know your audience, your user – know their motivators. - you have to have a clear definition of the value proposition - Also, think about location in how you present it – I might even suggest testing the presentation approach!Second, make growth specific - tie it to developing a specialty - or maybe it’s about using specific featuresFinally, optimize it- Put simply, if part of your approach isn’t really working, get rid of it b/c it’ll just distract the user or weigh down the experienceThis is about both the value proposition and the presentation Let me show you what I mean here with an example of chaff and a lack of relevance or specificty
This is an example from somebody we did some work. I’m showing 5 of 10 total statuses they were giving.Even with 10, they weren’t very specific.In fact a good way of evaluating your design is by asking what does the status mean to the recipient.You can also ask the question: “can it be more specific”.What does “Broadcaster” status deliver in terms of value?It was probably intended to mean you share your knowledge, it’s tied to quantity not quality, it’s about Facebook not this community. I won’t pour over this entire structure - but remember that reputation is about the individual not big buckets. To help design with all this information in mind, Badgeville has packaged up best practices and capabilities into a set of Game Frameworks-we have them for external/consumer facing businesses as well as for internal business user environmentsLet me talk about two of the internal-facing ones a little bit – they are called Company Challenge, Company Collaborator, and Gentle Guide.
This is an example from somebody we did some work. I’m showing 5 of 10 total statuses they were giving.Even with 10, they weren’t very specific.In fact a good way of evaluating your design is by asking what does the status mean to the recipient.You can also ask the question: “can it be more specific”.What does “Broadcaster” status deliver in terms of value?It was probably intended to mean you share your knowledge, it’s tied to quantity not quality, it’s about Facebook not this community. I won’t pour over this entire structure - but remember that reputation is about the individual not big buckets. To help design with all this information in mind, Badgeville has packaged up best practices and capabilities into a set of Game Frameworks-we have them for external/consumer facing businesses as well as for internal business user environmentsLet me talk about two of the internal-facing ones a little bit – they are called Company Challenge, Company Collaborator, and Gentle Guide.
Company Challenge – it’s about loyalty and growth –but it’s also about competition.Remember the competitive gamble.Follow the guidelines for effective competitionPromote collaboration and individual progress within a team and competition between teamsThink about the Biggest Loser – individual weight loss and progress and team competition.From a design perspective, this example within our soon to be available Salesforce app is good. It’s intended to motivated sales teams and reward accomplishmentIt provides clear progress in a reasonable locationIt’s tied to established goalsIt organizes activities/actions – creates order.There is Enough diversity of reward to create an identitiy.
Another framework is called Company Collaborator – it incentives people to share and interact as part of a broader community. It’s often closely tied to your community features.This example is tied to questions and answers.Status is prominent but not overwhelming.It’s tied to voting by the community.
Finally, I want to describe Gentle Guide.These game concepts are about driving behavior first through task management. You see here there are goals at different intervals – weekly, monthly – the task list here can reset, tasks can be linked. A good design here is that it shows progress as well as what you have to do. Your status, established through success, is visible – your uniqueness is reinforced by showing your progress relative to others. Gentle Guide can also be used for learning – when you hear about gamification in learning management systems, you’re hearing about guided learning through task management. My next example illustrates the use of guides for onboarding but doesn’t follow any best practices.
- The most important thing that is missing is the value proposition. - As the end user, what do I get out of this?- If I was already motivated to engage with learning about these capabilities, these metrics might be interesting to me (intrinsic – learning).- but the fact is, I probably don't care enough about it all to stay interested-there’s little or no community where my progress can be expressed - the results aren't public means the most significant introducible intrinsic motivation (status) is also absent.We definitely had some small wins here, but we didn’t realize the full potential. The fact that the goal is simply to consume all of the content, means that everyone will end up in the same state - there won't be any differentiation. This is a missed opportunity at creating an opportunity for self-expression. Even if the program were made public, the primary social motivation would be to 'keep up' with everyone else and look like a slacker. If a time element were introduced, it might become a 'race' which would at least improve engagement with the more competitive users. If the lessons ended with quizzes (that could be re-taken if failed), the pass/attempts ratio could be tracked to help differentiate user skill (at least amongst users with an equal number of passed courses)All in all – this is a pretty bad example.
What I learned was that it was insufficient to think game mechanics as a feature – its’ not a project, it’s a program. No one ever called it a LOYALTY PROJECT.We didn’t make the environment social for example. And it was hard to revisit the capabilities or develop a real expertise. We failed to optimize it. We also didn’t have partners to help. That’s one of the reasons that I came to Badgeville – Badgeville is really helping build programs, optimize them, and extend them. We’re part of making applications and SaaS businesses sticky. Stickiness doesn’t happen by chance – it’s part of the design.Facebook, Zynga, YouTube built it in.
