Why Enterprise gamification is a different ball game

Although the basic tenants of Gamification have been around for a while now, but the faculty started taking shape primarily after social networking explosion. The same got a huge boost by riding on the smart phones revolution that now made these games available within 9 feet distance of the player at all times.

And it wasn't much time before the Enterprises wanted to latch onto the new super kid on the block to get it's mundane activities done. Enterprises when look at their internal processes like trainings, motivation, project management, compliance etc. they've always faced a huge challenge. So, if gamification could get you new customers, keep them engaged with your brands, follow & recommend your products so why won't that work with the employees.

And this is where the last few years in the Enterprise Gamification have been going. But considering that the Enterprise gamification was just another flavor of the outward looking gamification was flawed at a few critical fundamentals. Understanding these is a must for any kind of successful implementation of Enterprise gamification.

1. You have no players to acquire:

The biggest focus of gamification in the social or mobile world is to acquire new customers. This could be in the form of getting new users, ensuring that the stay on, invite their friends, talk about you in their social networks and even probably buy your products. Gamification here focusses on getting more people and then the processes take over. Most of the great implementations of gamification do exhibit this.

But when you move into an Enterprise scenario, your user group is already present in front of you and in most cases captive as well to be on your systems. Thus the whole idea of getting them onto your systems isn't so critical. What's more important is how have you thought through the interaction once your players arrive

2. The player MUST play, so Game enablers not Game Wins

In usual gamification scenarios, you might have to keep the players motivated via challenges or rewards to ensure that the player stays engaged with the game till the end. On the contrary, in Enterprises there emerge multiple scenarios where the underlying act is actually mandatory but mundane or difficult. Here too, gamification can be a great tool but in the sense that it eases the task of the player by guiding or providing transparency or collaboration. This is similar to saying that the aim of a soccer game is scoring goals, but the game elements like score-boards, time keepers etc. go a long way in assisting the players. So in an Enterprise, many times it’s the latter that is more critical

3. Desired time to be spent

In most of the gamified systems developed, the sponsor would want the players to play as much for as long and as many times. But this actually inverts in most of the Enterprise scenarios. Here, the enterprise sponsor's intent is to get in the player only at the right time, spend the minimum time required to do the intended task in the most accurate fashion (so that there are minimum retries) and move out of the system.

The same fact also induces a very different design patters with more focus on reduced distraction (so possibly minimalistic visuals), quick & easy getting through the entire act and certainly an impact on budgets

4. Diversifying and then converging

Unlike customer facing gamification where the objectives/processes could be single (or very limited), once an Enterprise treads down the gamified path, there are multiple internal processes that the same sponsor and the players (i.e. employees ) share. This raises expectations that the remaining internal processes be gamified too. This in turn requires that although the flavor of a particular game be defined by the type of process but still the collectibles from various systems actually flow together and actually converge into something quite meaningful. Of course, the employees are used to such a system where although they all might be into varied kinds of job activities but ultimately there are procedures in place that finally converge into an enterprise wide system of hierarchies and remunerations

So although the basic mechanics of gamification in motivating player actions in a desired manner, but the actions themselves in a customer facing and enterprise element are so different that it takes a whole new perspective to handle the same. Considering the above points could be a good starting point when designing gamified solutions for Enterprise processes.

Games, Gamification & Design

In the last 2 years that I've been associated with the field of gamification, it seems to be changing its meaning every quarter or so. At times PBL is the core and soon it is called as the biggest sham of all. It has been a while it has hit the Gartner hype cycle, still many are even questioning if this term makes sense also or not. But my personal take is that gamification looks pretty much here to stay in one form or the other.

But yes, maybe its time that gamification has to now move to the next level of evolution. And that would be its assimilation as a core component of "Design". This would have far reaching changes on the delivery mechanisms for gamification and those offering gamified solutions. Already, I have worked on over 30 deliveries involving gamification and not once has the client come to me who did require a gamified solution. All they wanted was to get a business process solution.  Yes, at times, a few of them had heard of this new buzz word and wanted to "gamify" their apps without even entirely understanding what it meant. As long as their business aims were met, they absolutely did not care.

Time and again I felt that people like me who were working on gamification, oversold the concept to each and every person we ran into; at times unconsciously. Its only now, after having delivered "gamified" projects from fields as diverse as compliance, learning, performance management, sustainability, innovation (amongst others) I have come to believe that all I was doing was designing user experience.

Certainly, this much I must give to gamification that it does take user experience to the next level. User experience as defined by ISO 9241-201 is - "a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service". Simply put it is the experience that a user has while interacting with a product or service. A system intending to give a great user experience must thus have the following -

1. Clearly defined context and interface

2. User being aware (or quickly on-boarded) to the system requirements, expectations & limitations

3. Extremely effective & efficient feedback system to guide and course correct user towards desired output

And while business and customer solutions were and are struggling to get the above components rights, something very different had it innately baked into it since ever. And they were - Games.

It might sound a little surprising, as it was for me when I first started having these ideas. But the more you think about it, it starts becoming more and more obvious. Any popular game has a single central context (it could be scoring goals or pinning your opponent to the ground) and the entire game rotates around it. It does not try to throw everything available at the user, just because it could be done. Like any great system, the central figure is the player who is playing the game and the rules/system defined as per him and never the referee (usually its opposite, at least in enterprise systems where the admins derive all the requirements). The rules/requirements/limitations are as per this context and well communicated to the user. And finally, it’s the third component that are diametrically opposite between games and systems (at least enterprise systems). Whereas the games are superbly great in giving feedback - at all instances, at all levels & via all preceptory channels, it is commonly most ignored component while designing systems (and this is not by chance, but the effort and importance given to feedback while designing games).

(In fact this forms the first part of the training I give on gamification , where I split applied gamification into three levels - thinking, styling & MDA. This is a very large topic and I've been grossly unfair in explaining the same, so I'll pick up in detail in another blog post. )