Gamification: The buzzword that can ruin your apps and business

The tech industry loves a good buzzword. Marketing people like them even more. One that got a boost recently (thanks to some work at Stanford University and aficionados of the technoglitterati-oriented TED conference) is “gamification.” Gamification, they claim, is the answer in this era of consumerization of IT. But the answer to what, exactly?

The unfortunate truth is that gamification is a largely hollow new buzzword for a very old marketing and sales technique: bribe customers with prizes or recognition to get them in the door when the appeal of your actual products and services isn’t doing the trick. In tech circles, there’s no shortage of “gamification consultants” who will help you rework your website to attract more visitors. The whole thing has the “get rich quick” feel of SEO (search engine optimization) consulting — another area where for a while anyone could make a quick buck teaching a basic principle as if it were arcane revelation from on high.

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The roots of gamification You know those scratch-off games given out at fast-food places? That’s pretech gamification. So are the leaderboards on 1970s-era pinball machines, where the list of high scorers got kids to keep playing not for the joy of the game necessarily but for the desire to be recognized. The “gamification” label is a new way of saying “incentive-based marketing,” and consultancies like Badgeville and services like Klout are pushing the notion in the virtual world.

There’s nothing wrong with gamification per se, as long as you realize that most people lured by the promise of prizes and fame stop coming as soon as the games end. That’s why in the virtual world, gamification is often built in as a permanent feature. Your Klout score, that dubious measure of your influence, is one example. So are all the badges that pop up on social sites — how many +1s or Likes a post has. Or how many friends you have in your Google+ circle or Facebook wall, or the number of LinkedIn contacts. Competition around issues of reputation and self-worth is a very effective motivator.

Gamification is an old concept prettied up with a techie-friendly label.

How to use gamification to get people to do more Does gamification have uses outside of marketing? The answer is yes. Microsoft, for example, uses gamification to encourage non-QA staff to do bug testing and to get employees to contribute better language translations in its software localization efforts. People are rewarded for doing this extra work through ego-oriented motivations from managers (attaboy emails, temporary use of more convenient parking spaces, and in-house certificates) and by publicizing top contributors to create a sense of competition for status among peers.

Forrester Research analyst TJ Keitt says these status-tapping “games” are common and effective. NewsGator uses “badges” as a way to get people to complete certain tasks in Microsoft SharePoint, he notes. And the Google Image Labeler effort attempts to crowdsource image identification by capturing where people agree on conceptual terms as they tag pictures in an online “game.” Applied Marketing Science has a technology called Idealyst that is designed to use badges and other reputation enhancements to encourage employees to contribute to product-development and process-improvement ideation systems. (Contributors’ scores are public but not the ideas they submitted, so the game can’t get personal in a bad way.)

But Keitt singles out Microsoft as especially effective in using gamelike approaches that tap self-worth motivation and make normally unappealing tasks fun by turning them into a game. Those who help debug the Microsoft Office ribbon user interface aren’t debugging — they’re playing Ribbon Hero.

Gamification for software developers There’s one more meaning to “gamification,” namely the use of gaming interfaces in applications. Being told that you should “gamify” your apps so that people use them more can be very dangerous advice. An app meant to be played, rather than used, often requires more work because it’s not designed for efficiency or effectiveness but for increasing engagement time. Instead of being able to just do your work, you have to go through all those levels (or whatever) each time.

A game-savvy UI makes sense for a game, and it could make sense in a training or learning app. But once you know how to use the app, a gamified UI could become a big problem.

Some user experience advocates yield the trendy gamification label to sell the long-standing principles of user-oriented software design. If the “gamification” term helps get us past the arcane, unfriendly, overly complex, and inconsistent user interfaces so common in both consumer and business technology products — from unfathomable controls on VCRs and TVs to Microsoft’s hieroglyphic ribbon interface — then I’m all for it.

The perils of gamification Although gamification can be an effective technique, it can also backfire. Keitt notes that gamification is best-suited for dull jobs that are not intrinsically motivating. That’s why it’s popular in call centers and fast-food service, where the number of calls resolved or burgers grilled per hour become results to compete over and where games are used periodically to distract the employees from the drudgery of their actual work. (Turnover in these jobs remains high, but Keitt says gamification has reduced it to more manageable levels.)

On the flip side, gamification can turn off smart, self-motivated employees and customers who see it as insincere or manipulative, Keitt says. Thus, gamification can depress the involvement of the best employees and drive away customers. Keitt says research shows that these people respond better to gamification in situations such as training and education, where they are competing mainly with themselves and being rewarded for showing their smarts and abilities.

There is the peril that the effectiveness of gamification wears off. People get tired of the scratch-off game or bug hunt and they stop responding — especially the vast majority that doesn’t “win.” I suspect that even systems with ego boosting at their core will see people tire of the abstract rewards and leave if real ones don’t arrive. If your Klout score doesn’t translate to a meaningful job, promotion, or reward, you’ll move onto some new game or fad. Remember Second Life?

This article, “Gamification: The buzzword that can ruin your apps and business,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.