Denis Duvauchelle is CEO and co-founder of Twoodo, helping your team organize itself using simple #hashtags.
People today are bombarded with information, ads, offers, messages, videos, articles, tools, websites. It’s extremely difficult to get their attention. Even worse, once you have their attention it’s often more difficult to retain it.
This holds true both for consumers and employees across almost all fields and industries. The phenomenon has been dubbed the “user engagement crisis” and this article is about how gamification can help you overcome this scarcity of attention and engage your visitors effectively.
What is gamification?
In its simplest sense, gamification is showing users how to do something and rewarding them for doing it right or figuring out the problem.
Rewards in gamification normally tap into our psychological need to feel successful and accomplished. Typically, you get a “well done” message, some hyped-up music and some kind of virtual token of achievement (like a medal, a bag of gold, a picture of kittens, approval from a mentor or saving someone in distress).
Gamification has been extremely successful in online learning, such as languages. Here you can see how Memrise is using leaderboards, a points system, a completion bar and other features to get users to attain their goal of learning a language whilst making it fun and competitive.
But this is a very advanced example – their entire service is based on gamification.
The gamification process must show users in a logical and bite-sized way how to learn to use your product correctly. This is usually done by beginning with the simplest action and layering on the complexity.
Or, by having a knowledge of user mouse-tracking, a plan can be set out to explain the steps that users naturally seem to go by.
ActiveInbox, an email management extension, has applied gamification to its onboarding. As you begin to perform actions in your inbox, a popup explanation and arrow helps you to learn how to use it as you go.
You can also choose to pause the gamified walkthrough and complete it later, if now is not a good time. This option is important: should you force users through it, or allow it to be paused (but set up reminders to complete it) or allow them to opt out completely?
A UserVoice blog post reminds us of the purpose of gamification: “gamification is not about making something boring interesting, or motivation – it’s about reminding people why they were inspired to be there and use that product.”
After all, you are not making an actual game!
We became interested in gamification after finding out that our onboarding videos explaining our team collaboration tool were only being watched by 20 percent of our registered users. Also, we had been having trouble getting people to learn how to use it by themselves. If they weren’t willing to read the how-to guide or watch the video, gamification seemed like the next logical step to take.
We have decided to apply it to our user onboarding and also in our weekly digest emails. Here’s a sneak preview (it’s not live yet!):
Next: Hook ‘em in during the onboard!
The post Overcoming the user engagement crisis with gamification appeared first on IT Clips.
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