Most of you know that gamification is an area that I have
been very interested in lately. If you
don’t know, gamification is not about designing games. It is investigating the fundamental mechanics
that make games engaging, motivating, and even addictive and then trying to
apply those mechanics to other processes, like work, consumer behavior, health
care, home life, and education. This
does not mean turning these things into games – that is one of the most common
ways of doing it wrong. It is also not
about adding points and badges, which is also a common way of doing it wrong
and pejoratively referred to as pointsification or contestification. In stark contrast, gamification is lot more
complicated and comprehensive than that.
There are dozens of game mechanics that make up the gamification toolbox
and it generally requires applying quite a few of them to a process in order to
have a lasting impact on performance.
OK, so with that introduction, I want to present an
application of gamification that I had not thought of until I saw Jamie Madigan’s
recent post at the
Psychology of Games on Steam’s Summer Sale.
Steam is a store and they had a sale this
past summer.
Jamie posted about it in
July, but I am just getting around to blogging the ideas that it generated in
me.
Perhaps if I apply some of these
game mechanics to my blogging, I would get to it faster
J.
What I am going to present to you today is the gamified
flash deal.
You all know what flash
deals are.
Something is available for a
limited time only.
The original versions of
Groupon and
Woot
worked this way.
By putting the time
constraint on it, they create the feeling of scarcity (a game motivator).
It is similar to the old infomercial trick of
screaming “Limited time offer!!!
Only 3
left !!”
“Only 25 will be sold!!”
In the Web flash deal version, you had to
log in (or subscribe to the email notification) every day to find out what it
was and to purchase it.
In contrast to
the infomercial, they didn’t scream.
They actually made it hard to find to add some mystery (another game
motivator).
And you never know what the
item might be – the more variety in their offerings the better (the anticipation
motivator and the surprise motivator). It also makes you feel special if you
are “in the know” (the secret information motivator).
In some flash deals, a minimum number of people need to
commit to buying it before the sale goes through (Groupon’s original model). This
adds the social promotion motivator. If
you wanted to buy it, not only do you need to commit, you also need to tell all
your friends to buy it too, just in case.
Remember how many times Farmville, and Mafia Wars announcements flooded
your Facebook feed from friends who were playing? Same idea.
We can use reward motivators in several ways. If you frame the flash deal properly, customers
will feel like they have “won” when their purchase goes through. Perhaps counterintuitively, the more effort
they invested in making the deal happen (logging in every morning, recruiting
several friends to join) the bigger the reward feels when they win. This winning
feeling is one of the reward motivators.
We can add a long term component to this through a loyalty program. Building up the reward over time based on
frequency, volume, duration, etc. can make the reward motivator more powerful.
The mastery motivator is one that is rarely used with flash
deals, but we can add it if we think creatively. What if getting the flash deal requires first
solving some puzzle that is related to the brand or product being sold? If Groupon offered a $25 certification at
American Apparel, perhaps users have to solve a word scramble to figure out the
name before they can sign up. The trick
is to balance making it hard enough so that the customer feels that sense of
accomplishment, but not so hard that any potential customers might fail or give
up before they finish. Adding effort is
OK, but adding “work” is not.
But now I am getting into mechanics – which are the ways we
design the system to elicit and engage the motivators. The word scramble would be an example of the
puzzle mechanic, which leads to the mastery motivator. Designing the flash deal to be announced at
the stroke of midnight and to have a limited supply is a way to use the schedule
mechanic to elicit the mastery, scarcity and secret information motivators – because
they had to learn the time, make the effort to log in exactly at that time, and
be faster than anyone else who tries.
There are two ways we can elicit the social promotion
motivator and the difference illustrates good gamification from weak
gamification. We can elicit the social promotion
motivator by automatically posting their successful purchase to their Facebook
feed. But feeling in control is another
motivator and this violates control (even as it makes your marketing department
happy). So instead, we make it really
really easy for them to do it themselves.
Making it easy increases the chance they will do it (effort wouldn’t
work here) and letting them make the decision adds the empowerment
motivator. So have the message already
written out, in quotes to make it obvious what would be posted, editable in
case they want to change it (but not mandatory in case they don’t), and a
one-click activation.
You could add all kinds of loyalty, reward, and competition
motivators through a loyalty program.
The cheap way is to award points for purchases and have a leaderboard to
help them show off. But this is an
example of extrinsic tangible reward, with is the least effective and shortest
term. When you give points for their
spending, it makes it seem like you only love them for their money. True or not, you don’t want this to be
obvious. Instead, give them points for
other actions that still benefit your company but are not directly linked to the
purchase. You can give them points for
posting on their Facebook feed or writing a review of the purchased product
after they use it. And instead of points
being usable for discounts or free products (which is extrinsic tangible
again), use them for more intangible rewards.
Perhaps have t-shirts for the flash deal company (rather than a client)
that are not for sale and can only be acquired by being a loyalty program
star. This adds to the feeling special
motivator and the social promotion motivator because wearing that t-shirt
demonstrates that you are star and anyone who doesn’t know how you got it might
ask.
Randomness is something that adds to the surprise motivator,
similar to the mystery motivator. We can
elicit this by having a sale at noon maybe once a month but on unpredictable
days and unannounced. Someone happens
to be surfing by the site, sees the sale, and WOW – dopamine rush. They tell their friends (social promotion)
either because they think their friends might want to join or just to show off
their luck and good fortune. Or perhaps
every 1000 product reviews you give the reviewer a random award. One of the special products that I mentioned
earlier. There is no way to know if you
are the thousandth reviewer, so you have to keep trying (and keep reviewing). And if you get it, the feeling of accomplishment
kicks in.
If we want to make the scarcity motivator more powerful, we
can make it salient. Have a countdown
clock for limited offers. “Only 10 left,
9, 8, 7 . . . . only 1 left!!!”
Another motivator that affects many people is the desire to
collect. We collect baseball cards,
stamps, shot glasses, baseball caps, etc.
You can leverage this by giving special rewards for the 10th
restaurant deal a customer joins. You
can make this visible by showing it on the page when they log in or posting it
to their Facebook page. “Joe Smith has 8
stamps on his restaurant set, with only 2 to go for a free dinner.” This increases the motivation for Joe to
purchase another restaurant deal because he wants to complete his set, he wants
the free dinner, he wants the feeling of winning, and he wants his friends to
know all of the above.
Another mechanic that we can use to help motivate (or
prevent demotivation) is onboarding.
When a potential customer hears about all of these great game motivators,
they may want to join the fun. But what chance
to they have when there is all this secret information to learn, puzzles to
master, sets to start collecting, etc.
What can we do to make this onboarding process easier and less
intimidating? “Join now and get two
stamps on your restaurant card.” Or give
new users a button to solve the word scramble if they can’t figure it out – can
be used up to 2 times before it disappears.
There are so many more of these that we can add. And this is just for a flash deal
service. Imagine what you can do for a
more complex environment like high school.