7 WEB APP GAMIFICATION STRATEGIES EXPLAINED
Gamification as a concept has been around for several years, after receiving a lot of attention, the subject has waned in recent years and become more of a buzzword.
However, there are still solid reasons for including it in your web app or site.
Introduction to gamification
The concept of gamification and its techniques in non-gaming environments is an emerging practice in business. Now at a tipping point, the dynamics and techniques of gamification have been found to be easily transferrable from their gaming software roots into the world of commercial business applications.
The use of gamification techniques and tools has the potential to benefit projects from every industry sector because of their fundamental potential to shape and influence behaviour. It is important for senior decision makes and product owner who are specifing applications to fully understand the concept, how it could be applied to applicaitons and the associated benefits or risks, if its all of the benefits it could bring are to be gained.
What is gamification?
Gamification has its origins in the computer games industry and is the application of game type thinking and game like mechanics in a non-game or business context in order to engage users, to solve problems and drive behaviour in a derired direction. When used in a business application, it is the process of building game like dynamics into a website, business application, mobile app, content or even a marketing campaign to drive participation and promote end-user engagement. At its most basic level gamification techniques tap into and influence peoples’ natural desires for competition, achievement, recognition and motivation.
Software companies have introduced the same kind of concepts into work life that were being developed within games. They have found that their employees responded positively to being given micro rewarded such as ‘badges’ dependent on their performance or level of effort; this concept has been around for cenurites in one form or another; think of gold stars given to reward partiipation in learning of actual cloth badges given at scouting clubs. Gamification appears to be making the leap from pure game-play to the workplace at an ever accelerating pace. A large and growing number of organisations are adopting gaming techniques and game-style rewards mechanisms in order to motivate and incentivise employees and their customers.
Within the last serveral years, knowledge of gamification has started making the transition into mainstream industry as a technique used to increase the end-user engagement and motivation of a workforce. The introduction has been facilitated by an increasing availability of appropriate technology and connectivity, such as smartphones and tablets computures, which can support a gamification environment.
Who uses gamification?
The basic principles of gamification have existed for over a decade in areas such as web applications; mobile applications (apps), loyalty schemes and healthcare fitness programmes and each of these can trace its roots back to physical emdodiments of the idea such as stamps collected in supermarkets. Many companies have introduced gamified schemes in order to encourage customer engagement and have recently exapnded that to employee engagement. These schemes motivate the customer or user of a web application to continue buying or using a product or engage the user’s interest and increase motivation by introduct competion with co-workers.
Major companies including LinkedIn, Apple, SnapChat and TripAdvisor are among the organisations which have found success with the concept of employing game-like activities to help improve business and customer satifisfaction and interactions. Many travel companies have been using gamification in the form of loyalty point for decades, but only recently with the overwhelming popularity of on-line booking have compancies such as TripAdvisor introduct the competiotion elements of gamfication such as badges and levelling up.
Though, as effective as gamification can be, it’s common for some companies to include game-like elements as a part their product offering just to say they can offer it.
Conclusion
The result of poorly thought out game-like mechanics is poor engagement and further, poor business results. To add gamification the right way, it’s always important to have an overarching strategy that makes sense within the application domain and clearly expresses the link between the gamification and what the application exists to achieve.