About being number 1 in your market...an oldie but a goodie from Joel →

An example of gamification in use.

Use gamification scores to drive usage

You can increase engagement and user interaction by adding features that encourage results like a percentage profile complete or score on a leader board.  We used a weekly score feature to increase usage and drive adoption on a site we created about living a better life.  Here’s our story.

We built improovme.com to collect tips on living better, everything from drink water every day to save $100 a month toward your retirement.  Users put in suggestions under various categories.  See a suggestion you like that inspires you? Click “follow” and add it to your plan. 

How am I doing against my plan?

Users received feedback for how well they were doing against their plan from a score in the upper right corner.  They achieved 100% if they did everything they signed up to do.  A user planning to run 4 times a week had a a score of 50% after running twice. 

Pretty simple stuff, except users noticed they rarely hit 100%, and if they did it was at the very end of the week.  Where’s the fun in that?  

Adding the encouragement part.

We adjusted the feature to prorate over the course of a week.  The 4-time-a-week runner reached 100% if she ran more or less every other day.  Users would only lose points if they fell behind.  This approach to calculating the score bettered reflected how well a user was meeting her plan.

We added one final caveat.  Each user had to do at least one thing to have any score at all.  They started each week at zero, and that reminded them it was time to start.  After one step, they catapulted to 100% where they stayed so long as they followed their plan.  Bingo!

Any time a user fell below 100%, we offered information to let them know exactly what they needed to do.  Like this:

• You still need to drink 2 glasses of water today.
• You should have run at least once by this time in the week.
• It’s toward the end of the month and you still have not saved $100.

Tips for increasing engagement.

Here are some suggestions for how to use a score or feedback to encourage engagement:

1. Display the feedback in a visible place.
2. Make success achievable by doing enough but not too much.
3. Provide clear feedback on how to achieve success.

It’s that third point that ultimately leads to increased engagement.  Its fine to get users excited about a game on your site.  Just make sure you show them how their interactions help them reach success.

Playing around with concepts for my profile photo trying to capture my two passions: wine and technology.  What do you think?

The future is here.  I saw this demo at CES last year.  This is a real display!

Starting over

All the content in the world and you had to walk into my blog?  I had a blog a few years back and it did OK, but then I stopped.  Inspiration went with the sale of the content along with a company I started.  Here I am, again, with some things to say about software development, technology, gamification and insert topic here.  I hope you read this, wait, you already are?