Getting Gamification Right: 10 Winning Tips

The Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) has announced the recent publication of a white paper entitled “Gamification Done Right – The Do’s and Don’ts.” As nearly 25 percent of corporate programs use some form of gamification, IRF says it is more important than ever to make sure it is done correctly.

Since research firm Gartner Inc. identified gamification as an emerging technology in its Hype Cycle Report, the term has become a new buzzword across multiple industries. Gamification applies the elements of games that make them engaging to drive interaction, competition, innovation, performance and other behaviors in a non-game context. Non-game contexts can be anything from work, learning and civic engagement to health and fitness, meetings and incentive program participation.

Although gamification success stories abound, there are just as many (if not more) failures. In fact, by the end of 2012 there was enough evidence about unsuccessful gamification efforts in business that Gartner noted “80 percent of current gamified applications will fail.” The primary culprit? Research suggests the greatest obstacle to success with most gamification efforts is poor design.

The IRF white paper, produced with support from Dr. Michael Wu, chief scientist at Lithium Technologies, includes implementation recommendations for incentive travel and recognition programs, as well as these essential steps to improve program design and enhance overall execution:

1. Understand the behaviors you’re trying to drive. Productivity is not a single human behavior, nor is relationship-building. Instead, each of these high-level results consists of many specific detailed behaviors. Think of all the different activities that people employ to improve productivity, such as education and adopting new tools. You must know all these behaviors well enough to list them in detail.

2. Have a sophisticated analytics platform for tracking, measurement and inference. After developing a list of behaviors you’re trying to drive, you must have ways to track those behaviors so you can measure them. After all, what good is knowing the behaviors that lead to success if you can’t measure (or improve) them? Although gamification is mostly about psychology, not technology, behavior tracking is where technology can really help.

3. Keep an eye out for unintended consequences. Gamification changes behaviors in the physical world and can affect people in real, tangible ways. One of the great dangers of rewarding any behavior with an incentive is that people try to game the system. Another unintended consequence of gamifying a behavior is that people might overdo the behavior. This often leads to excessive, obsessive (and in extreme cases), addictive behavior.

4. Know your players. This means knowing if your players have the following three underlying behavioral factors: 1) Do they have the motivation and do they want to perform the behavior? 2) Do they have the ability (and access to all the resources necessary) to carry out the behavior? 3) Is there a trigger that prompts them to take action? Most important, do they have all three factors at the same time? Only then will your players reliably carry out the behavior you want.

5. Know the effective timescale of your desired behavior change. Knowing the effective timescale you want to achieve really comes down to picking the right tool for the job. Gamifying engagement of a marketing campaign that lasts a few months requires a very different set of tools from driving participation during a meeting or conference that lasts only for a few days. Likewise, driving loyalty that lasts for many years is very different from gamifying other short-term behavior changes.

6. Create a community for your players. Gamification tools with a feedback timescale longer than a few weeks require a community to be most effective. For example, without a community, leaderboards don’t work very well because your players will be playing with people they don’t know and don’t care about. Consequently, the competition will be less meaningful, and thus less effective at driving the behavior you want.

7. Try to create ways for everyone to play frequently. Whether it’s a video game, poker or golf, not all games appeal to everyone. Similarly, gamification often does not appeal to everyone equally. Consequently, the range of participation levels in your gamification can vary widely. Tying the gamification of the event to behaviors that can happen frequently and are accessible to all (e.g., location check-ins and picture posts) will engage a deeper part of the core audience.

8. Don’t gamify a behavior that doesn’t actually provide value to your players. Regardless of the experience you are gamifying, it must eventually generate some real value. Otherwise, your players will eventually realize that you have wasted a lot of their time playing, but provide no value whatsoever. This leads to gamification backlash, where your players start to resist your future attempts at gamification.

9. Don’t try to fix a broken product or service with gamification. Gamification is the icing on the cake. If your cake is bad, the icing won’t make it taste any better. It may make the cake look more appealing, and many might actually take a bite to try it. But because the cake is bad, they will stop eating and tell others not to bother.

10. Don’t build a game on top of existing processes. Quite a few companies have tried to build games on top of their enterprise systems and workflow processes to drive adoption and usage. These attempts work in the short term, but they all failed eventually, because a game on top of work is generally not fun. Moreover, they often make work less efficient.

To view the full report, click here.

www.theirf.org