The Top-5 Points you need to know before starting your #Gamification project

1. to guide your Gamification effort
Roman Rack witz
roman@engaginglab.com
engaginglab.de
enterp rise-gamification.com
@RomanRackwit z
5 Points
"Gamification is a
- STRATEGY -
so, treat it like one!"
you t ube.com/
Rom anRac kwitz

2. #
Target for business results
but design for the user.
Of course, every company's project has to contribute to
an overall performance, directly or indirectly.
Keeping this in mind, every Gamification project has two
stakeholders & two success-factors:
1. There are business-metrics to achieve. Make sure you
know exactly what they are, how to measure them and
when it will be counted as success or failure.
2. It is all about the user. Gamification targets the
engagement & motivation of the users involved. Make
sure that your approach is focused on improving &
enhancing the experience for every individual involved.
Only if you can merge these two (sometimes even
counter-directional) views, Gamification can be
successful.,

3. #
Engagement depends on
the activity, not on rewards.
If there is a dull activity that has to be done and a reward
is offered for the user to perform it, the activity itself will
still be dull.
As a consequence: As soon as you stop rewarding
people, they will stop doing it.
Gamification means enriching the people's journey
instead of just waiting at the finish line to reward them.
Activities that are experienced as being engaging and fun,
often share at least one common denominator:
A task that has to be solved by the user. But this task has
to be challenging and solvable at the same time.
Otherwise it would be either boring or frustrating.
This means that there always has to be an individual 'Path
to Mastery' for every user.

4. #
Everything starts with
personal progress.
One of the most common misconceptions is that we
always love competitions. Of course, it can be satisfying
to see oneself at the top of a leaderboard but this is only
true for that single person at the top.
What happens when you earn your way up to the top
just because your opponents are a miserable failure?
Not really a fact to be proud of.
No matter the context of an activity, the one and only fact
a person really cares about, is personal progress. If we
know we improved from the last time, even if at
the same time we lost against others, we know that we
are
on the right track. This is why we want to experience
personal progress, before being challenged by
colleagues/strangers.

5. #
Differentiate between
white & blue activities.
There are two main categories of activities:
1. (blue) the repetitive one that has to be performed on a
regular basis & always in the same way (like an assembly
line), and 2. (white) the individual one that depends on
individual requirements every time it has to be done and
also, often needs cognitive efforts to be performed
correctly.
Depending on what type of activity has to be gamified
you
have to take its characteristics into account. On the left
you can see four main differences.
Only if you know exactly if an activity is a WHITE or a
BLUE one, or at which part is starts to change from one
category into the other, you will be able to define the
proper mechanics, dynamics, and more, to achieve the
desired gamified approach.

6. #
Measure, analyze, and
provide feedback.
The most powerful element of a game-like environment
is its realtime feedback. Only if something can be
measured, it can be evaluated, communicated, and so,
understood.
Let me tell you what I mean by that:
"Only if performance is measured it can be improved.
And only if there is a prompt and intuitive performance-feedback
provided, improvement can become efficient
and effective.
So, each activity that is completed and, at the same time,
has its own impact on the overall context, must create a
measurable change within the system.
An adequate feedback-loop has to provide the right
information for the user to see the relevance of
this change. Only with this kind of feedback he
will be able to make decisions in the context of his own
progress and the overall company-goals.

8. Similar presentations from Roman Rackwitz:
TOP 5 Gamification Fallacies
"Don't start a Gamification project
with these 5 fallacies."
Speaker Profile Roman Rackwitz
Hire me to speak at your event &
to do full day workshops around Gamification.
Gamification & Serious Games
'Learn about difference of these two
approaches and why to use one or the other."