Man has always tried to replace old and boring learning methods with new innovative, creative, and interesting ones. It all works on the theory that it is easier to learn a hard thing in an easier way that is unique and interactive for the learner. There is no denying this theory. Gamification is exactly this process. To describe it more thoroughly, it is the integration of game dynamics into any medium such as a website, community, school, etc. to drive a positive response, participation, and engagement from the target audience.

 

This Interaction design provides a system by which we can induce the desired behavior or desired response in our subjects. The response is induced using methods of game mechanics such as currencies, privileges and super powers, etc. to attract the people towards doing a specific task.

 

This method is becoming increasingly popular for several reasons. Most importantly, it provides people with a chance to learn and enjoy both at the same time. Learning and enjoying are among the two most important things a man needs and when you combine them to form a single package, there is just nothing better.

 

From the marketing point of view, there are even more benefits of Gamification. Add a little bit of Gamification to a product or brand and it can do wonders for your business. Loyalty marketers use this strategy a lot to get customers to behave in certain manners that are beneficial for both.

 

For Gamification to be a success, several things should be carefully handled. First comes content. Quality is King! You must have heard that a million times. It has stood the test of time and is now an accepted fact. Get good content for the people and they will come back to you. Your content should also be compelling enough for people to come back to your site consistently for quality material. And most of all their visits should be in the right frequency and not concentrated over a single period.

 

Research and analytics

 

Gamification can spice up customer engagement in areas that have traditionally failed to attract the target market, such as in market research and other fields of data collection. While the internet has given market researchers a wide pool of potential candidates from which to quickly and easily obtain data, poorly-designed online surveys can make customer engagement lower and therefore, less reliable.

 

As a result, this has ‘major implications for data quality with a knock-on effect on the quality of the insights received’, according to Engage Research, which recently wrote about its foray into gamification.

 

Trialing several well-documented gamification practices, the organization found it received ‘two or even three times as much feedback to the more engaging questions and consistently more time taken in providing the answers.

 

When Engage simply asked customers to describe themselves, for example, an average of 85 percent of people answered using an average of 2.4 descriptors. When asked to describe themselves in seven words, however, response rates rose to 98 percent and descriptors increased to 4.5.

 

In a business context, getting the maximum amount of information out of a 20,000-strong workforce could make the difference between adopting a new company-wide policy or not. Only by ensuring the correct level of engagement and detail can businesses truly make the right decisions for all their staff.

 

Illustrating the importance of rewards to individuals, engage also discovered that a question like “What emotions do you think people associate with this?” generated response times of eight seconds, with a 50 percent ‘enjoyment rate’. When respondents were told they’d receive points for correct answers, this rose to a 12-second completion time with a 90 percent enjoyment rate.

 

The results illustrate perfectly how gamification techniques can provoke people not only to be more engaged with the topic at hand – increasing their chances of giving well-thought-out, qualitative answers – but providing more information generally about a specific topic.

Increased performance

Considering the dramatic impact of cinema8 gamification on staff engagement levels, it’s easy to imagine how gamification could be applied within the workplace – in areas such as employee performance management, training, and innovation.

Just like using gamification in a survey, it could be used as part of a task-based project to increase friendly competition among workers. While the rules of gaming will always dictate that one person is ‘better’ than another (perhaps having more points on a sales leader board, for example) the feeling that staff is contributing and adding value to something might be a powerful enough emotion for them to continue doing so.