Gamification is the process for objective of user engagement. It has more to do with psychology and less with the technology. It requires thorough understanding of target user segments psychology, their work habits, motivations factors, work schedules etc. It brings the engagement attributes of games on enterprise systems to drive a positive change in the behavior of user. It helps to motivate and engage the workforce in the processes and be more productive. It is not about transformation of the work into a game, but it is about identification of new ways to engage users with progress visibility, performance metrics, instant feedback, rewards and acknowledgement. Gamification process emphasizes on three major aspects as Points, Badges, and Leaderboard, which is also known as PBL system.
- Points: These are the numbers given to any task or flows to end users in solution approach, which brings statistical comparison parameters among different users.
- Badges: These are the labels or recognition to users for their job or task achievement.
- Leaderboard: It is space, which emphasizes on number statistics, recognitions, and highest achiever, ranking etc. It is shared among the target user community and visible to complete user segment. This can be designed via distinctive info-graphical charts.
Other important perspective for gamification process are “Motivation factors”, “Rewards” and “Mission”. Where motivation factors can be studied as per user psychology and introduced as points, badges or leaderboard stats. Mission provides specific details about their work objective with point’s statistics. Rewards can be redeemed after achieving certain defined level.
Gamification requires understanding of user psychology and defining complete solution with target as user engagement with the system. This overall gamification approach requires target user segment study (Psychology, Behaviors, etc.) and accordingly design of game rules. Following are the phases and steps for gamification approach implementation with enterprise solutions.
- Identification phase:
- Identify the target user and study user psychology
- Define the success criteria or objective of overall solution
- Work on motivation factors, mission and rewards
- Design phase:
- Define perfectly challenged levels which should not be too simple / complex
- Keep the game rules simple, define PBL
- Keep the leaderboard small, with well-defined user’s social network and peers in the group
- Design the application
- Gamification elements should be merged with the design
- Execution phase:
- Identify required technical platforms / frameworks
- Implement gamification rules as designed
- Measure & re-iterate
Gamification techniques can be applied to almost all aspects of life and business use cases. Gamification basic elements are Points, Badges and Leaderboard (PBL). And it’s the process of psychological study of the system and implementation of identified game elements with required technologies to achieve goal of user engagement. Gamification is not something new, it already exists from long time.