Podcast 18: What makes gamification fail?

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the show host of the Question of Gamification podcast and the CEO and founder of Gamification Nation or aka chief game changer. Today's question of gamification is: what makes gamification fail? Now, first thing, one of my mentors told me at one stage when I was saying, Oh, I don't want to talk about failure, I think failure is bad. And I do, I do have some hang ups talking about failure. I think they're private things I do in private. I don't necessarily want the world to know, he said, "Yeah, but failure is, your first attempt in learning" (First Attempt In Learning =FAIL) If we look at failure as finding ways of how something doesn't work. Then we are also accepting that, we are learning. We are not perfect as we come out, day one, which is also a good starting point, because most of us had to learn the hard way on how to do something right and how things have gone wrong. The podcast this week, therefore, focuses on what makes gamification fail. Unrealistic objectives First thing, I would say is having unrealistic objectives. We sometimes get asked really unrealistic objectives. We want to have a hundred per cent increase in engagement. Oh, good. Well, and dandy, but what's your starting point? Do you know what that is? In most cases, companies don't know the answer to that either. So how can you then know that you are looking for a 100% increase in engagement if you don't even have a baseline? So be real, get real and start with finding out what your baseline is before you start asking and setting really crazy objectives. I'm all for stretch goals. I'm all for being ambitious. But I also want to say that in most cases, gamification has had a positive impact. It's not a regular occurrence that it results in 90, 100 or 200% increase in something. I find those numbers a statistically challenging to accept. If something achieves a 200% improvement then what on earth were you doing before? Or did you exist before? There is a bit of an element of cynicism in that comment for me. Irrelevant to the end-user What else makes gamification fail? Well, if it's not relevant to the end user. Now, that means that you need to get to know your end user. A lot of the time, people who start in gamification, (and we have that sometimes) we are attracted by shiny objects, we could have this and we could have that. And all of a sudden, you end up with a wishlist of ideas. Definitely, in the early days of our gamification company, we would have been guilty of maybe adding more than we needed. Adding way too many mechanics that made it too complex. And in some of our designs, that still happens and then we take them to user testing. And we find out that they're not responding quite as enthusiastic as we had hoped, or as we did, and that happens. Knowing that you are probably going to get excited, you are probably going to add in more than you needed to add in. That is something to be mindful of. And that is something that is also the main reason why you need to have user research and user testing as part of your process. Because that will tell you for real, if you are hitting the mark or not in terms of your designs. So I would say make it relevant. Understand your user. One shortcut to avoid some of these things, is to actually get to know your user better from day one. We're currently working on a project where we are not even sure that gamification is the right answer. Because the first survey that came back from the large user base is telling us that really, they are not interested in game mechanics, they're really not even remotely interested in gaming. They actually want the companies to stick with what it's great at. So we are questioning whether we should even add gamification at all. In our user research step two where we do more ...