The world today is often characterized by its fast pace nature. Things come up ranging from real emergencies to casual distractions, from breaking news to savage tweets, blockbuster movies, and binge-watching. With all these up in the air, it is quite difficult to keep a clear focus on things that matter, be it work, studies, or some other important activity.
Have you ever wondered how you could get yourself or others, say, students, employees, or even children to spend more time willingly doing the needful rather than being swayed by the distractions around?
Think about it for a minute. How nice would it be to get that child to gladly want to do his or her homework or look forward to doing house chores? Wouldn’t it be great to have your employees be devoted to their routine as much as they’d be to social media or their favourite Netflix series?
Well, if you’d like that to be the case, I’m glad to introduce you to a concept that exists purposefully for that. This concept, referred to as Gamification, involves learning from games and applying the lessons learned to other activities that are not games in themselves.
Gamification is a strategic move to improve a person’s (or people’s) experience with processes, products, or services by introducing carefully selected attributes of games into such processes, products, or services. This aims at harnessing the power of games to engage users and motivate or build certain desired behaviours.
Wow!!! You’ve reached the end of this article and have been awarded 5 points😉 (or maybe not). Join me in the gamification community as we explore various ways by which gamification could be applied to drive motivation and engagement today.
Good gamification goes beyond introducing points, badges and leaderboards (PBLs) to your business processes. This said, identifying how gamification can best support the innovation of current business activities or new products and services is crucial for the success of such gamification process.
As great as PBLs could be, it is important to first understand the nature of your business, your business goals and the role you would want gamification to play in supporting your system.
Are you gamifying for members of your organization? Are you gamifying for clients and customers? Are you gamifying for business partners or are you gamifying for some social campaign? Do you seek to increase competition? Foster collaboration? Improve new skills or develop existing ones? Improve communication?
Whoever your target is, their role in your system, and whatever your business goals are should determine what type of game elements you use and how you utilize them.
Doing this enables you to drive the desired experience and behaviour from users because gamification in itself is only a tool which if used correctly, can greatly make the difference in the experience users of your system enjoy.