Gamification
The principle of gamification is the method of designing an experience that would not usually be experienced in a game like way. Applying a gaming experience to a non-game context is done to help “enhance the user experience and modify behavior”. Most importantly it helps with users overall engagement. Some examples of gamification are scorekeeping, showing progress, coaching along with a process, and motivating the user.
Example 1: The Pocket Universal Principles of Decision
In order to increase the number of people and motivate them to use the stairs instead of the escalator, a Swedish team created this “Stair Piano” in a busy transit area in Stockholm. They turned each stair into a piano key that would play once someone would step on it.
Watch the video of the experiment here.
Example 2: Online Careers Page: Ueno.com
One of my favorite examples of gamification is from the design agency, Ueno. They created a very engaging and fun applicant experience as part of their career’s page. Through playful animations, storytelling, sounds, and illustrations, the user is taking through an adventure, meeting characters who represent the people who are part of the team and hiring process. This experience is much different than most career pages and the gamification helps to tell a story about who the company is and helps to keep the user highly engaged.
Visit the website to experience the gamification career page here.
Example 3: My You Version Bible App
I have an app on my phone that allows me to read the bible daily. Some of the features include sending me push notifications with daily scriptures that take me to the full bible book and verse(s). One of the gamification elements of the app is a status notification that lets me know how many consecutive days have I read and engaged with the app. It’s a great way to remind me of how consistent I have been as well as it serves as an encouragement to not break the streak and also plays to my competitiveness.
References
William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler (2015), The Pocket Universal Principles of Design, Beverly, MA: Rockport, 2015
Renee, you’re after my heart! I was in Sweden when they still had the piano experiment up, and saw Haraldur THorleiffson speak at Awwwards this past year!
Something I noticed when was studying abroad in Scandinavia is that they tend to do minimalism and playful design really well, and one of the biggest elements of playful design is gamification. Did you see The Fun Theory’s recycling bin? Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW5AocU1V5M.
They also did a trash can that did a freefall noise every time you put something in, and that can held 41kg more trash than the closest trash can nearby.
Another example that I thought was cute and surprised me was Yelp Badges – after checking into places around the world, I received a notification that I earned the “Globetrotter” badge. I saw a few others and really wanted to earn more – which is really a great way for Yelp to incentivize people to use Yelp (aside from reviews). You can see all the badges here: http://yelpbadger.blogspot.com/
Also can’t talk about gamification without mentioning Jane McGonigal, who went through a really bad time and place in her life. She was able to pick herself up through gamification – one or two things at first, little achievements and whatnot, and soon started SuperBetter, which is an app that gamified the way you do things on an everyday basis. It changed her life that made her a better, healthier, and stronger person.
Hilariously, my professor at the time wrote a very controversial response to the burgeoning popularity of gamification, especially after Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk, that gamification does not work (http://bogost.com/writing/blog/gamification_is_bullshit/). To tl;dr it, he basically says that gamification isn’t necessarily the end-all answer as it addresses symptoms of problems, is short-term, and looks at the more surface level reasons behind human interaction.
I think the appropriateness of gamification, like all design, really depends on the entire system – the context, use case, people, changes over time, etc, and it’s up to us as designers to figure out whether it’s an appropriate concept to apply.
I enjoyed reading your post. The explanations are clear and concise. I also loved the examples. I believe with gamification we can improve users engagements with our products. Gamification principle is specially useful in advertisement, when we want to value the users’ time to watch ads. By rewarding people a pleasurable experience, we can generate more profit by attracting more customers.
One example of gamification I love is the Socrative app, which is a racing spaceships game. It engage students with learning by asking them questions. Students use this app compete with each other not only in racing but also in learning.
https://www.socrative.com/apps.html
This post caught my eye because I used to work at Duolingo, a language learning app that has mastered the use of gamification to keep users engaged.
Some of the elements used include various kinds of “streaks” as Renee mentions, as well as accumulating points, and a leaderboard, among a host of other interaction elements. Duolingo also understands the powerful psychology of losing as part of gamification – thus, you can lose points for breaking a streak, getting a question wrong, etc.
What makes Duolingo a master of this domain is that they do massive amounts of testing and data crunching to determine what are the most effective ways to do this. They have played with setting various goals (a streak of 3 days vs 5 days for example) as well as the effect of taking a half point vs a whole point.
Duolingo’s founder is Luis von Ahn, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Von Ahn’s doctoral research is in the area of “human computation” which are systems in which humans and computers work together to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone (https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1168246). As part of that work, von Ahn also focused on “Games with a Purpose” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1642623) which are games that are “designed to be fun and accomplish tasks that are easy for humans but beyond the capability of today’s computers” (https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2008/summer/games-with-a-purpose.shtml)
Duolingo began as one of Luis’ grad student’s thesis work (co-founder Severin Hacker) and was originally aimed at accomplishing the twin tasks of aiding humans in learning a language and translating the Web at the same time.
In the decade between when GWAP first originated and now, much has changed. Computers have been trained to do a lot of tasks that couldn’t be done before, such as machine translation, and I’ve wondered if that was part of the reason why the computation element of Duolingo was phased out. (https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/18840703/Translating-Articles)
What remains is the gamification of language learning, and it is a worthy and admirable goal to help the world learn to speak another language.
Thank you Tara for this great insight and information! Gamification is one of my fav top principles and jumped on using it right away!
Duolingo is a great example. I used to use that app and enjoyed their gamification UX.
Loved the example from Sweden. We need more such social experiments to go mainstream.
The principle of gamification is one of my favourites. I love it not just in design context but also in context of modulating human behavior. We, as a species, are not easy to manage, organize and motivate. More often than not, we can be unpredictable and potentially dangerous (not just to others but to ourselves too). This is where gamification comes in. It offers a way to engage people constructively towards their long-term goals.
If I were to think of an all-encompassing example of gamification, it would be Capitalism.
Here’s the reasoning:
Capitalism = an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit in a free market situation.
Key components:
Free market = System
Profit = Reward/incentive
Private ownership = Autonomy
These these components integral to any kind of context that is looking to apply principles of game theory a.k.a. gamification.
Here’s some commentary:
Capitalism gamifies society and keeps it productive. It harnesses human potential and channelizes it for value creation. To top it all, it remains invisible. Unless people travel across societies and cultures, people usually don’t come to know about the extent of influence Capitalism has on their hopes, dreams, goals, fears and destiny.