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A couple of weeks ago, we were targeting a persona that is very goal oriented, someone who is training for a marathon or a bike race or want to lose a few pounds for an event. We introduced the concept of Gamefication and Behavioral Economics in our discussions and started doing a detailed research on ways to make our app catchy and addictive. The plan was to provide a fitness plan for our users. Initially, we were going to provide free personalized advice from our dietitians, nutritionists or fitness trainers and once we collected enough data for FAQ we were going to start charging for additional questions (Premium). We discussed the pros and cons of the different features, including the idea of rewards and trophies. We developed our first prototype and shared different ideas and approaches. Some got into a heated discussion about the customer groups we should target, the achievement screen, the differentiating main points, and the free vs premium features of the app. In class last week, we could not make a decision and decided to interview one of our classmates, who is a fitness enthusiast and uses Strava Premium. He gave us very good insights and helped us decide on how to proceed.
Gamification Learning and Ideas
In session six we agreed that gamification is not only common among fitness apps it is necessary. I decided to take to amazon and find a good source of information on what makes for good, engaging gamification and came across this book by Yu-Kai Chou which examines gamification from a behavioral level. He references "Thinking Fast and Slow" and Prospect theory multiple times and it seemed very on theme with this class and user engagement. The cornerstone of the book is built around human core drives and why users engage with games, apps, websites ect. He also lists different examples and common gamificiation implementations that correspond to each drive. I wanted to get these ideas listed on our blog so we can decide how we can best engage our users and keep them engaged since user attrition in fitness/nutrition applications is around 80%. Also its very clear that you do not need all of these core drives to be successful. Just focus on the applicable ones and appeal to the user. I will put my own comments in green Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling Epic Meaning & Calling is the Core Drive that is in play when a person believes they are doing something greater than themselves and/or were “chosen” to take that action. This can be hard in intrinsic gamification. The fact based goal of our team does not necessarily reflect in our user personas but maybe for our content providers we can target this. This idea could be a decent one for how we get people "hooked" on our product. Free Lunch (Game Technique #24) Along the lines of the “Calling” theme, giving freebies (that are normally not free) to selected people in such a way that it binds them to a larger theme can make customers feel special and encourage them to take further action. For example, Spoleto, a Brazilian restaurant chain with over 200 restaurants throughout Brazil, Spain, and Mexico, gave a literal free lunch to any female who told them she was beautiful, in celebration of International Women’s Day.17 This helped promote a positive message and made women feel special for that day. This will likely bring them back in the future too, as this venue is now associated with a positive memory that makes them feel unique. Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment Development & Accomplishment is our internal drive for making progress, developing skills, achieving mastery, and eventually overcoming challenges. The word “challenge” here is very important, as a badge or trophy without a challenge is not meaningful at all. This is also the core drive that is the easiest to design for and, coincidently, is where the majority of the PBLs: points, badges, leaderboards mostly focus on. I will focus on this item because I feel when it comes to fitness this is the main drive we can appeal too. Here are Yu-Kai's inputs on Achievements and Points. If we are considering making exchangeable points (for discounts on products) here are some guidelines. Achievement Symbols (Game Technique #2) As discussed in Chapter 2, points and badges can ruin good gamification design as often so-called “gamification experts” slap them onto everything they see. However, they are useful tools to drive Development & Accomplishment and have their place in a gamified system. Badges are what I call “Achievement Symbols” and can come in many forms – badges, stars, belts, hats, uniforms, trophies, medals, etc.. The important thing about Achievement Symbols, is that they must symbolize “achievement.” If you go on a website and click a button, and then suddenly a popup springs out and says, “CONGRATULATIONS!!! You just earned your ‘Clicked On My First Button Badge’! Click here to see other cool badges you can earn!” Are you going to be excited? Probably not. You may even think, “Well this is pretty lame…what else is there? A ‘Scrolling Down Badge’? A ‘Click on the About Us Page Badge’?” You’re almost insulted. But if through your creative skills you solved a unique problem that not everyone could solve, and as a result received a badge to symbolize that achievement, you feel proud and accomplished. Now the motivation is valid. Achievement Symbols merely reflect achievement, but are not achievements by themselves. A similar example evolved from where badges came from – the military. If you join the military, and immediately get a badge on your chest, “Joined the Military Badge!” And on the next day, another badge gets pinned on your chest that says, “Survived My First Day Badge!” followed by “Made my First Friend Badge!” “Made Five Friends Badge!” You probably won’t feel accomplished and wear all these badges to your social gatherings. You are more likely to feel nonplused or even insulted. But if you performed acts of valor – you risked your life to save a fellow soldier, and as a result received a Medal of Honor on your chest, you are likely to truly feel proud and accomplished. Keep in mind some of those “insulting badges” do work great for children, because as small children, these are actual feats and accomplishments. More often than not, making your first friend is not something you have a parade about when you are a grown person. Therefore, when I work with clients on gamification, I never ask them, “Do you have badges?” I ask, “Do you make your users feel accomplished?” Having badges (or any game element in itself) does not mean users are motivated towards the Win-State. That’s why we focus on the 8 Core Drives instead of game elements. Status Points (Game Technique #1) There are two types of points in a motivation system: Status Points, and Exchangeable Points. Status Points are for keeping score of progress. Internally, it allows the system to know how close players are towards the win-state. Externally, it gives players a feedback system for tracking their progress. As a great candidate for “Feedback Mechanics” in the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard (discussed in more detail in Chapter 17), showing people their score and how it changes based on small improvements often motivates them towards the right direction. Within Status Points, there are also smaller divisions of types. For example, Absolute Status Points (which measures the total amount of points earned during a journey) versus Marginal Status Points (which are points that are specifically set for a given challenge or one time period, and can be reset once that challenge or time period is over). Another example is that of the One-Way Status Points (points that can only go up) verses Two-Way Status Points (it can also go down as the user fails to achieve the Win-State). How you craft the gain and loss of points, as well as meaning behind the points can significantly change the users’ perception of your product. Done incorrectly, it can cause the user to devalue the entire experience and distrust your intentions as a systems designer. A year prior to my advisory role as Behavioral Scientist to the Israel-based company Captain Up17, I was looking for a good PBL platform to use for my own blog yukaichou.com. I found Captain Up’s gamification platform to be the most customizable and easiest to use out of my options during the time. When I was designing my Points and Badges system using the Captain Up platform, the first thing I did was to change almost everything in the default settings. The default settings at the time rewarded a few points for watching a video and commenting on my blog posts, and a lot more for tweeting and sharing the post on Facebook. This design is generally sound, especially since I indeed get more value when my readers are sharing my content to others. However, I felt the default points/rewards economy was not optimized. The first thing I changed, was to make commenting on my blog worth 100 points, and watching a video worth 40 points. Facebook Liking and Tweeting were only worth 25 and 10 points. After I made the changes on the platform, the supportive team members from Captain Up reached out to me to make sure I felt comfortable with their platform. They also asked, “Isn’t 100 points way too much for just commenting?” That’s a very good question. During the Discovery and Onboarding Phases of a Player’s Journey (the initial two phases) the first thing you want to communicate to users is whether this is “a game worth playing?” With the rules you set, you are establishing an interaction with the user and communicating your values. If you give people a bunch of points just to do marketing for you, or reward them with virtual items for every little stupid thing, users will feel like the game is shallow – this is not a game worth playing. Users have no interest in a game if they know the game designer is just trying to benefit themselves instead of caring about their community. For instance, if there are points, progress bars, and badges for “How much money you donated to the site owner,” people will feel insulted by your lame attempt to use them for solely personal gains. People know that sharing on Twitter/Facebook mostly benefits me, and so I don’t want to tell them that my game is about sharing. When I state that commenting on my site is worth more than anything else, I’m expressing that I value interacting with you more than anything else. I want to communicate with you, and that is what I value. And if you don’t want to talk to me, at least watch my videos so you can learn something! And of course, if you are willing to share my content with your friends and family, I would be very grateful too, but I’m not going to use that as a big carrot in my site. This tells users that the key of this game is “engagement.” I want you to be engaged, learn a lot, and participate in a community. This becomes a game worth playing. When you design your Status Point systems, make sure it is based on something meaningful - something that the users themselves want to engage in. Or else, points just become meaningless counters meant to stress people out. Milestone Unlock (Game Technique #19) This one could apply to opening new goals, tasks, challenges, training options ect. One of the most successful design techniques within games is something I call the Milestone Unlock. When people play games, they often set an internal stop time in the form of a milestone – “Let me beat this boss and then I’m done.” “I’m close to leveling up. Once I level up I’ll go to bed.” What the Milestone Unlock does is open up an exciting possibility that wasn’t there before that milestone was reached. Progress Bars (Game Technique #4) This would be a great way for us to gather more information about our users to provide better content and plans for them One of the simplest and best known examples of Development & Accomplishment is the LinkedIn Progress Bar. As the largest professional social network in the world, LinkedIn realized that its value is only as good as the information people choose to input into the system. But inputting one’s profile and job history on LinkedIn is tedious, and users quickly drop out early in the onboarding process. LinkedIn realizes that simply making the interface easier for users to maneuver was not enough. They needed to make the interface more motivating. As a result LinkedIn introduced a little Progress Bar (Game Technique #4) on the side of user profiles to show people how complete theirs are. Our brains hate it when incomplete things are dangled in front of our faces. When we see a progress bar that is taunting us as only being 70% of a human being, it gives us that extra push to finish the Desired Actions and achieve the Win-State of completeness. The amazing thing is, this progress bar didn’t take developers many hours to code, but improved LinkedIn’s profile completeness by 20%, an impressive change considering how they have spent millions of dollars into achieving this same goal14. Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is expressed when users are engaged in a creative process where they repeatedly figure new things out and try different combinations. The key for our app here needs to be feedback but perhaps this is more towards Core Drive 5 Social relatedness and feedback. Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession Ownership & Possession is where users are motivated because they feel like they own or control something. When a person feels ownership over something, they innately want to increase and improve what they own. How do we improve customer retention and draw them back to our app vs the competition? The below seems to be applicable. The Alfred Effect (Game Technique #83) The Alfred Effect is when users feel that a product or service is so personalized to their own needs that they cannot imagine using another service. As we march towards a fast-food world of more convenient and off-the-shelf options, people start to long for a deeper experience that is uniquely their own. That’s why some wealthy people would spend ten times more to customize a product to uniquely fit their style and preferences. Through Big Data, we are now able to provide users that sense of personalization by tailoring options based on what smart systems collect on users preferences and habits. Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness Social Influence & Relatedness incorporates all the social elements that motivate people, including: mentorship, social acceptance, social feedback, companionship, and even competition and envy. I think our questions to experts database is the key here. We can also have a goal map/trophy shelf. In addition we could try mentorship. Brag Buttons (Game Technique #57) and Trophy Shelves (Game Technique #64) Bragging is when a person explicitly and vocally expresses their accomplishments and achievements, whereas a Trophy Shelf allows a person to implicitly show off what they have accomplished without really saying it. Intuitively encouraging users to brag about and show off their achievements comes in handy when it comes to recruiting new players and keeping veteran players active, but the two techniques are appropriate for different scenarios. A Brag Button is a Desired Action that users can take in order to broadcast what they feel accomplished about - driven by Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. In other words, Brag Buttons are little action tools and mechanisms for users to broadcast how awesome they are. Take the game Temple Run for example. Whenever a game is over, there is a quick and easy way for users to tap a button and share a screenshot of their high scores on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Group Quests (Game Technique #22) Another Game Technique that draws power from Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness is the Group Quest. Group Quests are very effective in collaborative play as well as viral marketing because it requires group participation before any individual can achieve the Win-State. A successful game that utilizes this is World of Warcraft (WoW), another hugely successful and addictive game produced by Blizzard Entertainment19. In WoW, there are many quests that are so challenging that it requires an entire team of forty max-leveled players to work collaboratively, each specialized in their own responsibilities, before they have a chance of fulfilling the quest. In well-designed instances, even though the 40-player requirement is not imposed by the program, the users simply find it difficult to succeed if they only have 39 players. This motivated many players to group together into clans and guilds to orchestrate raids on a regularly basis. Because of this, people were encouraged to login regularly and not drop out due to the social pressure. Social Prods (Game Technique #62) Another game technique that is often seen within Core Drive 5 is the Social Prod. A Social Prod is an action of minimal effort to create a social interaction, often a simple click of a button. Good examples are Facebook Pokes/Likes and Google’s +1s. Mentorship (Game Technique #61) American universities are well known for their student social groups consisting of highly active fraternities and sororities. Many fraternities have rather long and involved initiation rituals for their new members. During the rigorous process of joining a fraternity, a “Big Bro/Little Bro” system is employed where an experienced member in the organization will be matched up with a new potential member going through a semester-long training process known as “pledging.” The Big Bro is there to serve as a mentor,not only providing directional guidance, but also emotional support to make sure the time-consuming process of pledging becomes more bearable. This practice has endured for over a century and shown to improve the Onboarding experience of members joining the organization. Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience Scarcity & Impatience is the Core Drive of wanting something simply because it is extremely rare, exclusive, or immediately unattainable. I don't think this applies to fitness apps. Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity Unpredictability is the Core Drive of constantly being engaged because you don’t know what is going to happen next. This seems like an add on feature. We don't need random events/rewards at the start. Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance This Core Drive should come as no surprise – it’s the motivation to avoid something negative from happening. This is where the blackhat techniques come into play. IE Automatic phone locking until the user goes on a run. In order to understand different product features and how they are linked together, we decided to visually put value propositions together. There are a lot of interconnections between our product features and helped us understand how to build out our product flow.
Week 7 - revisiting collaboration plan.
There were definitely areas of improvement in our team that called for new agreements and also start initiatives that we did not begin. As a team, we have been extremely efficient and effective in getting down to decisions. From now until final presentation, we need to focus on building the MVP, getting customer reactions to the MVP, and putting together our product proposal. |
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