Five gamification ideas to better engage your audience

Can you captivate your audience?
(photo credit: apogee photography)

Gamification has been all the hype for me in the past months, as it got prominently mentioned in several of the classes I took.  Are there anything valuable one can take from it after digging past the marketing hype?  My classmates and I worked together over the past few months to formulate five recommendations for a financial firm, on how it could use gamification to better engage its customers in the use of its financial planning tools.  The company loved our recommendations, and we felt that the same recommendations can be applied in many different settings.  So here they are for you to try in your own settings.

#1 Focus on the first minute

The first minute a new user interacts with the tool is extremely important, as it decides if the user will continue using the tool or if he will go somewhere else. The firm thus needs a clear idea of what it wants new users to experience during that first minute.  In the first minute, the user should not experience long, boring instructions.  He should not experience painful registration processes, or hard-to-understand terms and conditions.  Instead, he should experience the core experience of the tool.  If the core experience is fun and interactivity, he should experience it.  If the core experience is easing his financial planning tasks, he should experience it.

The challenge for delivering the experience is that there are no definite points on the firm’s website where users will enter. Users can come in through the company’s main webpage, or to the planning tools’ landing page, or even directly to one of the planning tools. How then can the firm deliver consistent first minute experience to first time users? One idea is to have a prominent button on all webpages that will take first time users to a starter page. Another idea is to focus on the navigation menu on the side or top, since it shows up on all webpages.

As part of the first minute experience, the website can ask meaningful questions to help users navigate the sea of content available. One possible question is “What are you planning to save for?” and the choices can be “Buying a car”, “Getting married”, “Buying a house”, “Children’s education”, “Retirement”, etc. Based on the user’s choice, he can be taken to content that is most relevant to what he is trying to accomplish. These questions can be asked proactively (e.g. via a pop-up questionnaire) or passively (e.g. as a section of text on a webpage). 

#2: Leverage on users' current concerns

We interviewed 25 users on their financial planning priorities, and many of them were more concerned with near term goals like “buying a car” or “getting married” than they are with long term goals of retirement planning. These life-stage events present precious windows of opportunity that can be leveraged to deepen users’ engagement with the tool. Minimally, users will grow more familiar with the tool’s user interface. More importantly, relevant user information (e.g. amount to save each month) can be collected, which increase the chances of them coming back in the future for other related financial planning tasks.

Games implement this idea through “Challenges and Quests”, like FourSquare’s badges and Farmville’s ribbons. Through challenges and quests, users are focused on smaller and more immediate tasks, and they might use the system for tasks even though they are not interested in the system (yet…). 

#3: Provide feedback using a progress bar

Business networking site LinkedIn has a visual indicator telling users how complete their professional profile is. If a user only provided his education information, his profile might be tagged as “20% complete”. If he has included his work experience, it might be “50% complete”. This progress bar is very helpful in helping users know how complete their profiles are, and it taps on inherent motivations in humans to complete tasks.

The tool can take on similar concept: tag users as “20% complete” if he provides his monthly savings goal, “50% complete” if he adds his current assets, and so on.

LinkedIn also frames this concept using a different idea. It includes an “Improve your profile” button on users’ profile pages, and when users click on the button, it shows a number of “To-dos” that users can do to improve their profiles, highlighting the first to-do task. This is an excellent way of focusing users to the next bite-size task they can focus on to improve their profiles. 

#4: Give more free rewards, more often

It is very hard to motivate people to plan for something that will only happen 40 years later. It is said that people spend more time planning for their vacations than they do for retirement, and it is not hard to believe that, because 40 years is a very long time! It is also very easy for other tasks to take precedence since in comparison; all other tasks are more urgent.

One way around this challenge is to help users break down their long financial planning journey into “levels”, and reward users each time they attain a new level.  Thus the concept "more rewards, more often".  For example, a user might promote into the next level when he has setup an investment plan, or if he has re-balanced his portfolio at least once in the past year.

The reward can be monetary, based on the firm’s estimation of the lifetime value of such a customer.  But there are also many other "free" rewards. The book "Gamification by Design" laid out four categories of rewards strung together by the acronym “SAPS”. Figure 1 lists the four categories along with some examples.

Reward Category	Examples
Status	Badges, Levels
Access	Lunch with CEO or celebrity, Access to the firm’s clubs, Priority queue at banks
Power	Moderator on a forum, more say in what new features to include in the tool
Stuff	Freebies

Figure 1 Four Categories of Rewards

#5: Define an engagement score

How can the firm know the impact of its gamification efforts unless it measures it? An engagement score should measure more than just the conventional page views or number of unique visitors. It should also measure how much time users spend on the website, how often they return to it, if they have registered accounts, etc. A good way to create the engagement score is to think along five dimensions: recency, frequency, duration, virality and ratings (detailed in the book "Gamification by design").

With a good engagement score, the firm can measure where it is at before it implements gamification, and later have a clear way to assess the effectiveness of the gamification efforts. In addition, the score will also be useful for incremental calibrations, as the firm experiments with tweaks in its engagement efforts.

References

[1] Gamification by Design, “Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps” By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham
[2] Lee, H., Schlossberg, E., Seelhof, M., Teo, K. S., & Wong, M. F. (2012). Fidelity Engagement and Gamification. MIT.

One of my classmates who worked on this project also wrote about the project on his blog, check out his article "Are You Game?".

Telltale Signs of Organizations with Strong EA

Footprints on fresh snow
(photo credit: dru!)

Walking on fresh snow is one of my favorite activities, as I enjoy leaving the first footprints in the soft, fluffy snow.  My impact on the snow is evident to those that come after me.  What impacts should EA have on organizations?  What do EA's footprints look like?  Here are answers from three authoritative sources, on tell tale signs that an organization has effective EA.

1. Clarity on Long-term Plans

The book “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy” believes that enterprise architecture help organizations focus on building strategic capabilities, instead of constantly being distracted by immediate needs. It does that by providing a long-term view of an organization's processes, systems and technologies [1].  This clarity works hand-in-hand with strong governance to help organizations achieve future states they desire.

Following on this point, EA should also enable organizations to have clarity on current capabilities.  Without this clarity, organizations end up building capabilities that they already have, or capabilities that are not supported by their existing processes, systems and technologies.

2. Strategic, Responsive and Cheap IT 

CIO.com sees that enterprise architecture makes IT cheaper, more strategic and responsive, and help promote alignment, standardization and re-use of IT assets [2].  This builds on the clarity mentioned in the previous point, such that IT works on what matters, is positioned for the future and designed to maximize reuse and reduce duplication.

3. Agile

Gartner sees enterprise architecture as a change enabler by "by creating, communicating and improving the key requirements, principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution." [3]  In a way this is similar to #2, but this brings the impact beyond IT to the entire organization.

Other Impacts?

What other impacts should EA have?

References

1. Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson
2. Enterprise Architecture on CIO.com, http://www.cio.com/topic/3020/Enterprise_architecture
3. Gartner's Definition of Enterprise Architecture, http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/enterprise-architecture-ea/

6 Rules of Thumb for Enterprise Architecting

What rules of thumb guide your EA efforts?
(photo credit: Sanna R)

This is the second half of my 12 heuristics for Enterprise Architecting.  I have already started using some of them to guide me in EA exercises, for example heuristic #7.  And there are those like #11 that I need to constantly remind myself of.  Hope you will find the following six heuristics useful for guiding your work.

Heuristic #7: Eat your own dog food

When proposing a tool for use in an enterprise architecting project, one should ask oneself “Will I use this tool for analyzing my own business?”. If not, why is it being used in that project? When I was working at Oracle, the company “forced” employees to use software tools made by the company, ranging from employee directories to collaboration tools to software development environments. This “eat your own dog food” culture helped Oracle employees understand the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s offerings, and thus be better positioned to improve those tools. In the same way, enterprise architects should eat their own dog food, applying tools they advocate to their own enterprises, which can range from their family businesses, their social clubs, their churches and even their personal lives (think “Me Inc.”).

During the exercise, I wanted to show the organization how an enterprise architecting tool can bring value to what they do. I decided to try the tool on my own life first: I used it to map out my strategic objectives, and then linked it down to processes in my life (i.e. habits), and eventually connected processes with their supporting technologies (see post on "Architecture of my life"). The exercise helped me see that doing the exercise with the tool created more meaningful artifacts comparing to doing the same in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. Subsequently, I was able to transfer that insight in my recommendations to the organization.

Heuristic #8: Don’t overlook the tools and the venue!

Enterprise architecting involves many meetings: interviews with stakeholders, internal information sharing, brainstorming, constructing future architectures, etc. Good tools and venue play an important part to the successes of these meetings. As such, it is crucial that considerable thought be given to these two items.

In our exercise, two tools that proved extremely valuable were Google Docs and post-it notes. Google Docs allow all meeting participants to look at the same document at the same time, and also to edit it simultaneously. It helped all the participants to stay engaged, as they are empowered to make changes. We often voiced our opinions by making changes to the document and then asking, “how does this look?” which sped things up as we were discussing and creating the deliverable at the same time. We collaborated in this way even when we were physically in the same room!

The other valuable tool is post-it notes, which is a must have for brainstorming sessions. The key strength of post-it notes is it enables a group to capture individual ideas first, and then later categorize and sequence the ideas, which is hard to do on a single piece of paper or electronic document. We also created an electronic version of post-it notes by using PowerPoint in Google Docs. We created small, yellow text boxes and used them as post-it notes. Google Docs’ functionalities allowed all participants to simultaneously create and edit the “post-it notes”.

As for venue, we had a brainstorming session at a pub and that made the exercise more fun and relaxing. Having a venue with a big screen is also helpful in making sure that everybody is on the same page. In addition, we experienced difficulty in collaborating with our clients who were stationed in a different location. We could not involve them to brainstorm the way we did among ourselves. This challenge was made harder as our clients could not use Google Docs or collaborate with us using physical post-it notes.

Heuristic #9: A season for good ideas; a season for bad ideas

In creating the to-be architecture, set aside a time to generate ideas, when none of the suggestions are discarded or criticized; and a time to kill ideas, when all ideas except one are bad. This heuristic helps the team in two ways: in the first phase, the team is able to cover as many possibilities as possible, since all suggestions are captured and considered. Next, in the second phase, the team is able to converge on a single idea, as they systematically shoot down options. A common trap is to bypass or speed through the first phase and jump to the second phase.

I learnt from this exercise a useful approach to separate these two phases: first brainstorm for ideas, group them into concepts, and then slowly converge those concepts by creating candidate architectures before finally selecting a single to-be architecture. I had earlier made the error of bypassing the first phase by jumping straight to creating candidate architectures. I saw the value of the idea generation phase since it allows small ideas (e.g. have a beer drinking session every week) to be captured, even though they do not have enough scope to qualify as a candidate architecture.

Having a systematic approach to converging is also very useful. I saw a useful approach from another team, where they did scoring on their concepts and then select the highest scoring ones to create candidate architectures.

Heuristic #10: Draw the house, then the beams, then the house

It is really difficult to create the to-be architecture without knowing the next level details. Often, there are constraints on the ground that make the architecture unrealistic. For example, in our exercise, we wanted to recommend a re-organization but later we realized that a re-organization happened recently and thus another one would face more resistance. Another example is when we made recommendations on knowledge management. After we found out about the organization’s existing knowledge management efforts, we realized that one of the difficulties the organization faced was the existence of multiple knowledge repositories. We subsequently amended our to-be architecture to stress the importance of a single knowledge repository. As such, it is important to chart out the next level details when creating the to-be architecture.

How deep into the details does one have to go? I rely on the analogy of building a house: as long as there are sufficient beams to support the house, the house should be okay. So go down to the level of “beams”, which are key elements in the organization that will make the architecture work, and I suspect that differ from organization to organization.

Heuristic #11: We are blind men too!

While creating the candidate architectures, my teammates proposed ideas that at that time I felt were infeasible, for I thought they were either too theoretical or things that the organization was already doing. What surprised me was our sponsors liked those ideas, and slowly I too grew to appreciate their values. Eventually those ideas were incorporated into our recommended to-be architecture.

My lesson learnt is that I am a blind man too, as my understanding of our target organization is similar to the blind men’s understanding of the elephant—incomplete and flawed in many ways. I needed to rely on other blind men to tell me that the elephant has a tail, a big ear, and legs as thick as tree trunks. As such, do not shoot down ideas too early, hear what others think of them, and remind yourself that you are a blind man too.

Heuristic #12: Make your ideas theirs

When creating the to-be architecture, it is very important to get buy-in of the architecture, as some of them will be implementing it, and some of them will have power to kill it. The ideal case is really when key stakeholders feel that the to-be architecture was their idea. The approach we took to achieve buy-in was to firstly involve the stakeholders as much as possible in the to-be architecture creation process—from evaluation criteria creation, to idea generation, to the eventual selection of the to-be architecture—so that the organization will not see the recommendations as coming from the outside but rather proposed from within. In addition, we got everybody—both the MIT team as well as people from the organization—to propose ideas and put all the ideas in a common pool, consciously not tagging any names to those ideas. The intent was so that people lose track of who came up with what idea, and hopefully find it easier to identify with selected ideas, and in some cases even think that it was their idea.