Gamification in Product Management
I recently attended SMB21 in Ottawa last week where David Nicholson was speaking on the topic of Gamification. It’s a term that I’ve heard thrown around quite a bit over the last little while. If you don't know, Gamification is the use of game play mechanics in non-game applications. The ultimate goal of gamification is to encourage users to connect with your application on a deeper level (and albeit more involved level).
At the core of Gamification is your score/rank/reputation. Yahoo has a great page on Reputation that outlines the different systems that can be adapted to your products (Named/Numbered Levels, Labels, Points, etc). Take sites like Twitter (# of followers) and Facebook (# of friends) out of the equation and look to the badges people receive when they post responses on community forums. I use the MSDN forums quite a bit and it never donned on me that all these people had badges signifying their level of participation (incidentally one component of becoming a Microsoft MVP is your community participation and responses to people’s questions).
If you think about Gamification at its root, it about moving forward, moving up and working towards a goal. A similar sentiment was echoed by Jane McGonigal in her TED speech on "Gaming can make a better world" where she described how people playing World of Warcraft could learn how to solve problems (on a smaller scale) that could benefit the world (building teams, working, saving money, etc). She even goes so far as to advocate that people play more gaming on a daily basis (I try but sometimes I fail).
But these are all the fresh-faced applications that are built around communities so the real question becomes - can every product benefit from the concepts of Gamification?
Of course they can, not always directly, and maybe not immediately noticeable to your customers but remember the key value that Gamification can bring to you as a Product Manager – finding qualified customers, learning their behaviours in relation to your product and working with them to build a better product. I started this blog post with some hypothetical industries each analyzing one tenet of Gamification, but though I’d junk that in favour of just throwing out a whole bunch of ideas;
- Use your Product Forums - institute a rewarding system for customers that are consistently helping other customers (they are taking the load off of you and your customer support teams) and providing valuable insight into how people are using your product.
- Go Internal - Who says you have to implement Gamification external to your product? Create games/levels for people working on the product – how many bugs closed, "Bug Crushing Legend" when you hit 500? Make your product fun and blog to your customers on how you did this.
- New Trial Introductions – Make your customers feel validated by finding bugs in your product, hey thanks we’d like to thank you with some free licenses or set out a challenge, the trial site that finds the most issues gets free software assurance for a year? Only one company wins, but many will play and they all will scour your software for issues.
I think Gamification is really starting to hit its stride (as it now has its own name to boot). And there are a number of great resources out there to help you in your journey in understanding this concept, what it is and how to work it into your products, so go now, stop reading this blog and have some fun with your products.