Gaming Our Lives — A Gamification Workshop by Sumit Singh
“World class products trick you into usage in lieu of rewards.” begins Sumit Singh, the man behind the Times Loyalty points program.
As someone who coaches the subject to everyone from consumer internet developers to defence equipment manufacturers, he definitely knows a thing or two about gamification across industries. His workshop focused on explaining to us the basics of gamification, how user triggers work and understanding the different frameworks for user mapping.
Game vs Play
A game is a structured experience with rules and systems in place, while play is unstructured and random. Similarly, gamification is about providing a structured path for your users to enjoy and feel rewarded. The objective is always to provide clear indications for what you want the user to be doing (or prefer to be doing) so that you can maximise the potential of your product.
This matters especially when you have multiple features available to a customer but want to encourage them to use the high value/high price ones more. You need to provide them with a rewarding experience that will motivate them down that path.
Consumerism 2.0
In a highly networked world, all products are vying for a user’s limited time and attention. Everything from the eponymous Like button on Facebook to reward points in payment wallets are designed to appeal to their pleasure centres and keep them hooked.
This is where gamification comes in. Gamification is all about finding that sweet spot where your users are most vulnerable and using that opportunity to trigger them into action. If the trigger is present at the right time and provides the right motivation with a clearly defined action, the consumers will most likely jump at it.
With deeper understanding of consumer behaviour, it only becomes easier to predict the right triggers for a person. This means going forward expect to see more battles for a user’s mind space through gamification.
Understanding the Right Triggers
At this point, Sumit turns to Nir Eyal’s chart-topping book, Hooked, for an easy-to-understand framework. Without going into too much detail, the framework can be easily divided into 4 steps:
1. The Trigger (the initial motivation)
2. The Action (a deliberate act by the user)
3. The Variable Reward (a reward for their action by or facilitated by the product)
4. The Investment (the reason to keep coming back)
Internal triggers are the most powerful triggers as users don’t even know that they are acting on them. These can take many forms, but primarily help the users to convince themselves of taking action.
External triggers, on the other hand, act on the consumer from the outside and usually require the product to invest time and/or money. These can be paid triggers in the form of advertising, earned triggers in the form of loyalty points, relationship triggers in the form of referral invites and owned triggers in the form of stimuli from already bought products.
For example, people always jump at sales and discounts. Here an external trigger such as advertisements tell the consumer they can save money through the discount, while subconsciously the internal trigger of the fear of of losing out on money drives them. This convinces the user that if they do not avail the discount now (usually by spending their own money) it will be a loss for them.
Making the User Act
The objective of any trigger is to get the user to act. Defined simply, an action is the simplest behaviour in anticipation of rewards.
From a design perspective, you want to keep the action simple and intuitive. You want users to be able to easily take their action and not have to struggle once the desire has been triggered. If the latter happens, then there is a high risk of your trigger failing and customer not returning.
This is why it is important to dig down into the customer requirements and uncover their revealed preferences (which are ones they generally never state upfront) and then work backwards to define a happy flow that makes the action extremely intuitive.
For example, Facebook identified people did not want to keep repeating the action of creating and remembering passwords, so they came up with login through Facebook. This has helped them integrate across multiple platforms easily and turn Facebook into a ubiquitous login system.
Reward Them!
The crux of gamification lies in the reward. Rewards must satisfy a user’s need while completing the action and encourage them to re-engage with the product. The more encouraging the rewards, the more persuasive they are.
Rewards can either be fixed or variable. Fixed rewards are those that are clearly defined to a user upfront. For example, if you spend X amount, you will get Y amount bonus.
Variable rewards, on the other hand, work on the principle of intrigue. They are not revealed to a customer beforehand but the surprise of what it can be drives them. Customers are driven by either an emotional connect to the surprise or the chance of a substantial reward promise (think lottery or the Tez scratch cards).
Making Good On Your Investment
You’ve set the bait, you’ve made them bite, and now it’s time to reel them in.
At the end of the day, everyone values their time, effort and reputation. When users invest or gain either of these three from their interaction with your product, they feel more inclined to carry on. By making sure your customers have either invested or gained the above three, you improve chances of long-term retention.
For example, Reviewers who have a large follower-base in aggregation platforms will feel less inclined to leave the system as it would risk losing the reputation they have built. Or companies that have invested significant time and money setting up a new system will be less inclined to shift even if something better comes along.
Conclusion — Looking Ahead
Sumit Singh concludes by saying, “Gamification is not just your future, It’s your present as well. With AI, Deep learning, machine intelligence and other predictive sciences, the ecosystem is only getting richer with information that matters. Throwing that in your customer’s face in a way that it catches their attention is going to be a function of understanding their innate behaviour and that’s how future applications will game everyone’s existence. Almost everything about you will be programmed and you won’t even know about it.“
This workshop was brought to you by ProductTank Delhi, largest product community in NCR bringing stories from product teams across India.
Subscribe to receive our top stories and stay tuned on our events here.
