Making Gamification Work

Introduction:

In last few years, gamification has emerged as a trend within the marketing sectors. Not only has the concept of gamification been appreciated within the field, it has also gained interest from academics, educators and practitioners from a large variety of domains.

The idea behind Gamification is "to use game design elements in non-game contexts and drive game like engagement in order to promote desired behaviours". The game industry successfully motivates people to play games without any kind of force or demand to do so; the players simply play games on the basis of their own profit in being entertained. Say for instance, if a regular medication for some chronic disease is converted into a game and it motivates the patient to take medicines on time, won’t it help?

In lay man’s language we can say that Gamification is using some concepts of games to motivate and engage an audience.

Gamification and Technology:

 The digital transformation in this century has made us technology dependent and we use it to connect with each other and share experiences. Technology is now used in different domains, e.g. healthcare, retail, government, transportation, and education etc.

Technology wishes to motivate people and support processes which benefit users both individually and collectively. Gamification satisfies this issue by being a design that aims to support these things and it works because it leverages human behaviour and emotions by introducing factors like recognition, rewards, competition, team work etc.

Although there’s no formal definition for Gamification, it is safe to say that Gamification is a set of techniques implemented to engage and motivate individuals and groups, to perform specific actions with technology being the primary enabler.

Making Gamification work:

 There are many Gamification Design Frameworks readily available over the web those help in establishing the business objectives and define target users. However there is not much help available in terms of technology mapping with Gamification.

We understand that Gamification is a concept and the business process steps defined in Gamification Design Frameworks seem to be relatively simple and can be implemented in any technology landscape. However it requires careful user experience design and product engineering expertise to make gamification successful.

The process of gamification can largely be divided into two parts:

1. Apply the elements of games to existing enterprise applications or business processes
2. New application development along with game mechanics

No matter in what part your product falls in, to provide the desired effect and for gamification to be useful, the gaming elements must be well connected and provide a meaningful way to the business activity. The key is to put the business goals at first and then the technology. There are many frameworks which talk about the former, but very few that guide about the technical considerations to gamify an enterprise application. We will further discuss the areas and factors to be considered while designing and implementing a Gamification product.                                      

                           High Level Design of Gamification Platform

User Interface and Experience:

By far, this is the most important piece in the process of gamification. Doesn’t matter, if you are integrating gaming elements with an existing application or creating it from scratch, the user interface and experience are the key driving factors for success of gamification. One way to integrate at the UX level is to provide easily installable and configurable modules – widgets, badges, web-parts and so forth. This way you can deliver leader-boards, achievement levels, activity streams (work flows) into existing or new UI of your application.

In short, keep the application architecture loosely coupled. This way you can add, delete and modify UI modules as per market trend and user feedback with no impact on business layer.

Social Integration:

Social Media is one of the core parts of human life today. While developing a Gamification product, one cannot underestimate the social factor as it is the best platform through which one can engage and motivate the end users. So application architecture should provide integration points with consumer and enterprise social networks to deliver the gaming experience. This way one can rely on the user profile to keep and display game rewards. Badgeville is a great example of a gamification vendor that provides off-the-shelf integration with common enterprise social networks.

API Integration:

More than often the user experience already exists in a product, however the game mechanics are missing to establish and track user identity, reward points, alerts and notifications, game rules and guide, and many such elements. All this can be integrated into the existing application using APIs exposed from standalone gamification platforms. There are few gamification software development kits (SDKs) available over web that come with advanced APIs, that allow their full gamification feature set to be incorporated into your existing business applications.

Feedback Mechanism:

Gamification is used to engage and motivate end users. At no point it can afford to become monotonous and in the process, boring. Hence always provide mechanism into the application to take the feedback from the user. This helps you understand the most sought-after requirements of end users. The feedbacks need not always be filling up forms, they can be also be hints like time spent by user on certain activity or number of times he visits a particular page.

Business Intelligence, Analytics, Reporting and Dashboard:

There’s no point in getting the data and not performing any action on it. Gamification can be a success only if the underlying databases of the enterprise applications being gamified, are analysed. This data can be integrated with relevant big data analytics sources and then measured against different business metrics and measures of performance (KPIs), to depict progress of desired business outcome.

This reports supply useful and relevant business intelligence in real time, on user behaviour (via dashboards, reports, and so forth) that allows the game architects and business stakeholders to monitor the effectiveness of the game design and plan the strategy accordingly.

Rule Engine:

Actions and rewards are basics of gamification. Simplest form of rewards are points. The very first thing you need to do is figure out what all activities you want to reward users for. You need to do a value based planning to determine what is most important and hence it's rewarded accordingly and in comparison to each other appropriately. Next, you need to think of what rules your game may need to ensure you are getting the behaviour you want. You may set time limits and other rules to limit Players from repetitively doing something over and over when you only want to reward for it once, etc. You also need to take cheating into account to ensure Gameplay is fair. All of these can be configured into a configurable rule engine. There are various rule engines available or you can create one of your own, depending upon how complex your eventual product is.  The rule engine consists of a set of management and administration tools to adjust targets, gaming objectives, business process, and other in-game parameters.

 Gamification Platform:

This is the underlying platform, which provides various core capabilities to the enterprise application. These are the factors or features that need to be considered while defining the technical architecture of the gamification platform.

• Scalability: The platform needs to be flexible in terms of scaling - vertical and horizontal, depending on traffic and load on the application. Cloud based approach is recommended
• Modes: The application should be able to work in online and offline mode when needed. It means that, all the primary features should work even if there’s no internet connection and the data is synced with server as and when its connected to internet
• SSO: This is one of the most common and primary module for every application. However to engage any person to use your application, the entry should be real smooth and hassle free. Hence consider Single Sign On for subscription within your application
• Application Updates: Provide mechanism to push updates on to your application on a regular basis. The idea should always be to start early and iterate often.
• SaaS: SaaS platforms usually give businesses a great deal of control with minimal coding or maintenance. Because they run entirely in the cloud, users can also access the services from any internet connected device.

Conclusion:

While gamification should align with business objectives and support a particular business process, the effort must also be to attempt to get inside the participants’ heads. Effective Gamification is a mixture of psychology, social networking, customer experience, game design, loyalty marketing, business process, real-time analytics etc. and all that wrapped up in technology that can integrate with multiple systems, is customizable, and can function at massive scale. This combination requires a great cross-discipline and cross-functional team.