Designing a Gamified Experience (A Comprehensive Guide)
Best practices for implementing gamification in your product or service:
To create a game-based solution that emotionally engages people, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the players. Their objectives may not be rational, they may be difficult to recognize, and they may not be consistent among the intended audience.
Step one:
Define the Business Outcome and Success Metrics
Start by clarifying your business objectives and determining how you will measure success. What is the desired outcome, and what metrics will help you gauge whether your gamified strategy is effective?
For instance, if your goal is to boost employee productivity, success metrics might include increased task completion rates or decreased time to complete a task.
Step two:
Define the target audience
- Explore the target audience
- Create User Personas
Define the target audience, understand the demographics, and develop personas that represent the most typical personalities and goals of players.
Understanding your audience is pivotal. For a gamified learning platform targeting young adults, you may consider gaming elements that resonate with popular culture. Creating detailed user personas can guide your design. If your audience includes different age groups, like children and elderly people, your design must cater to their unique preferences and abilities.
Step three:
Aligning Business Objectives with Player Goals
The area of overlap between defined business outcomes and discovered player goals is the sweet spot for gamification.
Understanding what your business aims to achieve and how it connects with the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of the players is vital.
For example, if a company wants to enhance employee productivity, they might find that their employees are motivated by recognition and personal growth. By creating a gamified platform that offers badges for completed projects and paths for skill development, they align business goals with player motivations.
Example: A healthcare app's business goal might be to encourage users to exercise regularly. Understanding that players may be motivated by personal health goals or community engagement, the app could create daily challenges and community leaderboards. The alignment between helping users achieve their fitness goals and increasing engagement with the app creates a win-win situation.
Step four:
Determine the player engagement model
- Collaborative/Competitive: Depending on your objective, decide whether the focus will be competition or collaboration. A corporate training module might use collaborative challenges to foster teamwork, while a sales incentive program might encourage competition.
- Intrinsic/Extrinsic: A fitness app could use intrinsic motivation by providing a personalized fitness journey, while extrinsic rewards might include discounts on fitness products.
- Multiplayer/Solitary: Designing a team-based quest might foster collaboration in a workplace setting, whereas a meditation app might focus on a solitary experience.
- Campaign/Endless: If your gamified system is for a one-time event, a campaign structure may be more fitting, whereas an ongoing customer loyalty program might prefer an endless structure.
Step five:
Define the play space and plan the journey
Play space. This is the environment that you provide for the players to engage with the game and with one another. In contrast to video games, most gamified solutions do not have elaborate virtual worlds with high-quality animation, simulations, and avatars. Most gamified solutions provide a very basic play space that can show players’ profiles, progress, and all the tools necessary for the player to engage in the solution.
Player journey. This describes the path the players take through the solution. From on-boarding the players through taking them to advanced levels, designers must carefully balance challenge and skill as the player progresses, in order to maintain engagement.
Step six:
Define the game economy
An e-commerce platform might create a point system where points can be exchanged for discounts. The game economy must be balanced and fair, encouraging continued engagement without easily maxing out rewards.
Example: In a language-learning platform, the game economy might involve earning points for daily lessons, badges for streaks, and unlocking new levels as proficiency increases. If it's too easy to earn points, players might lose interest; if it's too hard, they might feel discouraged. By analyzing user engagement and learning pace, the platform can fine-tune its point system, badge rewards, and level difficulty to keep users engaged and motivated.
Do not expect to get it 100 percent right the first time around. Gamification solutions are developed iteratively. Launch for a small group of people and develop over the time by understanding the user behaviors and actions.
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Chapter 8:
Common Pitfalls to avoid
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