VIDEO: Gamification In Business

hello thanks for joining us uh this is the technology advice webinar my name is zach watson i'm a web content writer here at technologyadvice and i'm a lifelong gamer which explains why today we're going to be talking about gamification 101. so as you probably realize that means this is going to be an introduction to gamification um some of the things we're going to be talking about during this presentation is what exactly is gamification um also why is gamification popular now why does gamification work right so what makes this new trend so popular in society and then finally we'll close with talking about where we think gamification is going to go so let's get started right so basically what is gamification um there are a couple of different different missions floating around out there and they're all basically saying the same thing gamification is the application of game elements to non-game contexts so again in simpler terms gamification is taking the things that we like about games and applying them to everyday activities to make them more interesting or to give them more meaning so everyday activities could be things that we do at our job like data entry you know clean up around the office um it could be exercising so going for a run lifting weights or something like recycling right so recycling something that we know we need to do but it definitely doesn't have any game elements attached to it or as we see here it could be as simple as brushing your teeth so game gamification it uses again it uses the things that we like about games um to encourage people to take certain actions gamification is an excellent motivator so it leads me it leads us to the question as a business owner or as a business person why do i care about gamification well as business people our job is to get people to take action whether that's our employees getting to take action to be more productive in their daily work or that's our customers so getting them to engage with our product or with our service or with our marketing materials better and gamification is one of the best ways if not the best way to get people to change their behavior so if we can make people think about certain actions in a different way make them more like games and make them more fun to do we can get people to change their habits which is very very powerful stuff so before we dive in to why gamification is popular now i want to give you a quick quick case study so dev hub was is a an online way to create websites similar to wordpress people come to the site to create blogs and to create different kinds of websites for their business dev launched in 2009 and while they were getting some traffic to the website they realized that a lot of people were coming and they were only completing a couple of actions so they may come and build a very simple website or they were coming and building a blog or they were coming just doing a couple of things and not finishing the website all the way through so this was this is a problem because dev hub wanted to monetize this model and to get to make money they need people to be more involved with the software they needed better engagement which is something that as we just learned gamification is great at so what devhub did is they added gamification to their platform they made tasks they made each different tasks you can put on the website like adding a blog role or adding different widgets to a website they formed these as missions which added a bit of narrative to the process they also rewarded users with points once people completed a task they got points for um they got points for completing that task which they could actually save and turn in for rewards and they also made it to where users could build sites with their friends they they add a social aspect which um is is another form of gamification because we like to play games with our friends and so what was the result of adding gamification to their website well before devops gamification they had about a 10 engagement rate after they added gamification they had an 80 engagement rate which is a huge increase and so let's define what engagement meant for dev hub it meant actions so before gamification users were coming to the site and they were performing about two out two actions per session after gamification they were they were performing nine times as many actions per session and gamification also added to the bottom line for dev hub now that now their users uh their average revenue per user has increased fourfold after gamification and now dev hub is not a huge you know multinational corporation but what's really interesting about the results they got from gamification is the relative change right going from 10 percent engagement to 80 engagement is very very impressive and going from two actions per session to nine actions per session is also uh very very impressive and then again increasing your revenue by uh four times per user is a phenomenal result and so the relative change is what's really interesting about dev hub and it's also the timing dev hub launched in 2009 and gamification really came together as an industry in 2010 gamification had existed you know as an industry before but the term gamification really came to prominence in 2010 so devops was also one of the earliest examples of adding gamification to increase user engagement so that leads me into why is gamification popular now right we just mentioned that as an industry it came together in 2010 but to figure out why gamification is popular we have to go back a little bit so in 1973 charles kunrot founded a consulting firm called the game of work and what charles was trying to do was he was trying to take the elements that we liked about sports right or games and bring them into the workplace he also wrote a book by the same title in 1984. so this really shows that gamification goes pretty far back even you know several decades ago people were experimenting and trying to figure out why we liked games so much and trying to apply that to work and as you can see here we're actually on on the technology device website we have our history of gamification infographic which is a great resource if you're curious to learn more about the history because i'm just going to go through this very briefly um but so after charles coonrat founded the game the the game of work in 1973 um you know he continued to implement different uh game techniques and bring game into the workplace and he found some success but as far as digital technology goes um computer technology became more prominent in the 1980s in the 1990s which helped the rise of digital video games so much so that in 1990 30 of americans had an nes in their household so this has been over 20 years ago now when one third of the population was playing video games and so what that means is that this entire generation has grown up with video games so we're conditioned to respond to the different feedback that digital games give us right we appreciate um the different point systems the different feedback loops we're used to it which contributes to why gamification has so easily integrated into our society so much so now that uh the research from gartner predicts that 70 percent of global 2000 organizations will be using at least one gamification application in their business by this year and that's that's a number that is you know pretty mainstream a lot of people may have seen that statistic but i think it's interesting to reflect on it and consider that out of the 2000 biggest organizations in the world 70 percent are already using gamification this year i think that really speaks to how mainstream the technology has become furthermore m2 research predicts that by 2016 gamification will be a 2.8 billion dollar industry so for it for a technology industry that only started in 2010 in the span of six years it's become almost a three billion dollar industry and so what do these statistics mean now well it means that playing video games digital video games and uh vis-a-vis gamification is mainstream so uh this this poll these stats were gathered in 2013 58 of americans play video games now so that's almost two out of every three um citizens you know play video games and video game video gamers aren't necessarily just um males you know like the stereotype may suggest 55 percent are males but another 45 are females and so while gamification is mainstream or game video games are mainstream now they're going to continue to be so in the future because in the same survey they found that the same number of americans that play video games now 58 percent also play video games at least once a month with their kids which means that the next generation and then most likely the next generation will grow up to be very very familiar with video game technology and also so having going back to the any you know the one in three households that had an nes in 1990 what this means 20 years on from that is the average gamer is not a 15 year old kid living with his parents the average gamer is 30 years old um has a steady job and probably has a family as you can see there the bottom graph is particularly interesting because um only 32 percent of video gamers in the united states are under the age of 18. the vast majority um 58 are over the age of 18 and 36 percent are over the age of 36. gamification is um very very mainstream video games in general very mainstream and this is reflected in the in a survey that jtw intelligence did in 2011 they polled british and american citizens and what they found was 73 percent of adults aged 33 to 45 said that they would approve of gamification making everyday activities more rewarding which again this really brings the this whole uh phenomenon together that because digital video games have been so popular for the past several decades it's been very very easy for gamification to become popular in the mainstream because as consumers as users of technology we understand digital video game technology and we respond to it so however it's important to remember that gamification isn't just digital so it doesn't always occur in a digital space even though i would i would posit that going forward most gamification experiences will be happened will be happening digitally but despite its popularity gamification won't work all the time um gartner which is the same firm that predicted that 70 of the global 2000 organizations would be using gamification by this year also predicted that gamification is going to fail about 80 percent of the time uh when employed by businesses and so when they said fail they didn't mean that you that businesses wouldn't see any positive uh statistics or any positive um metrics from gamification what they meant was that gamification eighty percent of the time would fail to meet the return on investment that businesses were hoping for and overwhelmingly there is one um one contributing factor to gamification failing and that's poor design that is implementing gamification elements um perhaps in the wrong system right so gamification won't fix a broken system it can motivate people to take action to take action more often or to take action in a more uh concerted focused way but it can't fix a system that is fundamentally broken or that is fundamentally flawed so that leads me into the next um part of this discussion so we've talked about you know what is gamification we've talked a little bit about why gamification is popular now what's inter now let's move on to what makes good gamification right so we know that gamification encourages behavior with instant positive feedback which is a very very important uh part of what makes gamification successful so let's define a few terms users or anyone who's going to use the gamification platform for companies this could be their customers uh for other companies this could be their employees so a lot of companies are using gamification now to increase employee participation and wellness programs uh consumerization consumer facing gamification could be something that encourages employees to uh engage with the platform more often or engage with marketing materials more often so let's let's discuss some of the elements that um gamification borrows from from games that we like so much and the first element the gamification borrows from is as we mentioned feedback so when we're playing games one of the things that we like about video games so much is it gives us instant feedback even if we fail at something right we know that we failed ad instantly so think about way back to mario if the uh the goomba which was basically the um mushroom with legs came and bit you mario shrank right or you either had to start the level over so you knew instantly that you'd failed at that activity um feedback is something that instant feedback like that or feedback even timely feedback is something that's often missing in our everyday lives in our business you know in business experiences perhaps you have a three-month review or you're giving projects that are going to take several days several weeks even several months a lot of times these projects are missing very specific feedback loops so you could work on something for weeks at a time and have no idea how you're doing specifically you know whether you're your superior hasn't um been giving you enough feedback or whether you're just not sure if the project's going to succeed because you have no way to test it you have no way to uh gain any kind of positive or negative feedback and this is something that we really really like about gamification uh an example of this is nike plus so the nike plus rhine app takes something that is usually usually um without very very immediate feedback right so like running traditionally people have been able to calculate perhaps how far they ran you know a couple of miles or how long it took them but they weren't able to calculate how many steps they took uh how well they did each part of the run like you can see that the uh the line there indicates how you performed during throughout the run they weren't able to necessarily calculate how many calories they burned and um they also weren't able to calculate or it was more difficult to calculate their cumulative run over a certain amount of weeks right so this app can track how many how many how far you've run per month how many uh how far you've run per week things like that and these are examples of feedback and this is one example why gamification is so popular among fitness aficionados because they get um instant positive feedback as soon as you're done with the run you may be tired which is a for which is a form of feedback that your body is giving you but again you don't have these kind of granular statistical uh feedback elements that really break down how you performed on your run and so feedback something that's very very important in gamification something else that we like about gamification is progress so as we move through different tasks that were given in video games we're told when we complete the tasks and how the tasks relate to larger goals often in work environments or even in our personal lives we do we have a number of mundane tasks that we do and that we find boring or monotonous because we don't get any sense of progress perhaps data entry right you're entering a lot of data for hours and hours and hours on the end and you realize that entering data is what you get paid for so there's there's a form of progress there but you're not sure how it's perhaps improving you as an employee how it's helping your business or how it's moving you towards some kind of larger goal video games are great at telling us what each task that we're doing means in a larger context so think about you do a bunch of different tasks and you always know what those tasks refer to what the point of those tasks are they always have meaning to you so a great example of gamification is codeacademy right we have my code accounting profile pulled up here um and some very basic html lessons so code academy is an online platform that teaches people different kinds of computer languages whether that's html or cascading style sheets but as you move through the different modules the you always have a sense of your progress so as we see here on the left we know as we finish html and css or basic terminology we know this is building up to the completion of body elements that our progress is very very obvious and it's very specific and again this is something that we really really enjoy about gamification there was actually a study published in the harvard business review that stated that the best motivator for employees is not financial incentive right so it's not a promotion or raise or it's not a uh even perhaps a finder's fee if you work in human resources um it's also not necessarily even recognition right so while recognition is a very powerful uh motivator it's not the most effective one the most effective motivator for employees is progress it's the idea it's the feeling that you're making meaningful progress toward a larger goal and so that's actually called the progress principle which is very very interesting in terms of gamification so it speaks to why we enjoy gamification so much because it pulls that product that type of progress from games and it always keeps us on track it gives us context for the uh activities that we're completing on a daily basis so yep feedback and so what feedback can look like sometimes going back to feedback and away from progress is feedback can look like badges right so badges are a common form of feedback that are often used to signify um proficiency in a certain in a certain area khan academy is using this right now that after students complete a certain number of history courses maybe you've completed a certain number of european history courses for example you'll receive a badge that shows that you're proficient in european history and what this is great at is it shows that um it gives you a reward other than just saying okay you've completed this and move on it shows it's the type of feedback that shows yes you've completed this you've completed this effectively and uh you're now proficient in this certain area another type of feedback that's very common is points right so points are perhaps the um the lowest form or the easiest form of feedback and they're great for symbolizing not only progress right so you get you complete activity and you get a certain number of points they're also great for showing how well you did on something and this really speaks to the common grading scale that we use here right it's it's on a point scale which relates to a letter grade and video games um you know you complete an activity and the feedback is instant and it rates the point your points value instantaneously again we really appreciate this kind of feedback because it's something that we like it gives us context it tells us how we did instantly so we can either improve or we know that we are doing a good job at this and so the final um really main phase of feedback is leaderboards right so leaderboards perhaps take badges and points and they rank people that are getting the most badges and points on uh you know in in from top performer to lowest performer leaderboards are good at creating a sense of social atmosphere so because especially if you're if you're having a leaderboard in your own office you're ranked against your colleagues and against your peers or sometimes leaderboards rank different teams so if teams are competing against one another uh it inspires a sense of collaboration between those different members of the team to get things done and to rank higher on the leaderboard now leaderboards are usually best used with um especially competitive industries like sales so a great example of that is fantasy sales team so fantasy sales team uses gamification to run sales contests that motivate uh sales representatives as you can see here is basically based on different fantasy sports but it uses gamification to inspire people that are inherently competitive to do more and they you know leaderboards again is one of the main things that they use so another thing that we like about um we are naturally gameplay and as we play video games or games in general you can think about sports as well many times they're based on competition which speaks to our inherent nature to compete you know we compete in our everyday lives for many things we compete for jobs which is the entire purpose of the interview process you come in and you compete and you convince your that potential employer that you're the best fit for that job we also compete for relationships so we compete you know to find that right partner that we'd like to hopefully spend the rest of our life with and so this inherent nature to compete is uh is really broadcast in games and then in gamification competition is something that we enjoy but um games make it more fun or perhaps take it out of such stressful contexts so competition is again another element of games that we like about or another yeah another element that we like about games which gamification borrows from and so the next thing that we like about games is fun right we play games for the pure enjoyment of it um whether that's sports whether that's video games we play games because they're leisurely now fun is a bit difficult to define um it's actually a pretty complex psychological idea but we know fun when we see it and when something's fun it's very very powerful a couple of years ago volkswagen used gamification to try to introduce fun into the lives of everyday people they wanted to see if making something fun would change people's behavior which again correlates directly with gamification because we want to introduce different game elements to change fuels behavior so what volkswagen did was they partnered with a an advertising agency in sweden and they set up some uh piano key stairs in stockholm these stairs were positioned in a subway right next to an elevator and people almost always took the elevator coming out of the subway and volkswagen wanted to see if they can convince them to take the stairs so they made their shares look like piano keys but they also made the stairs behave like piano keys so when people stepped on the stairs they played notes and obviously you can see here people really really enjoyed it so volkswagen set up some hidden cameras and they ran some reports did some analysis and what they found was after they made the stairs piano keys 66 more people use the stairs rather than the elevator which is a huge uh huge number a huge number of people that changes their everyday behavior just because something's fun or just because uh something is more like a game so another thing that we like about games besides fun is we like autonomy right we like to be able to express ourselves within the context of the game and we we do this because we like to have control over our environment games give us a great deal of control over our environment especially video games in our everyday lives it's often much more difficult to have control over an entire organization where we work which is very unreasonable or um even over the people that we drive with right there's so much out of our in our environment that's out of our control we turn to games because they give us the control back and so this is often reflected in social media which is very very interesting so besides the social aspect which we'll get to in a moment which is also very important social media is uh one of the best ways to express yourself that's ever been created facebook is the biggest publishing platform in the world with i mean millions and millions if not perhaps a billion users and there's no editors so it gives you a great deal of control to express yourself however you choose and that's what we like about it so much not only that but we can uh edit our profiles we can change the way that our profiles look um so we can we can exercise all this control within the technology and while it may come as a surprise uh facebook in these different social media platforms actually employ a lot of gamification aspects and the next the the next aspect aspect of gamification that they employ is of course um the social aspect so again another thing that we like about games which gamification borrows from is the ability to play with our friends or even to play with strangers but to play it with other people you know humans are naturally gregarious creatures right we want to be part of a community we like to feel like we're involved and that we belong to a certain community and the social aspect of gamification is something that we really respond to i mean in social media people build up huge huge networks of friends on these platforms and um they spend they spend a great deal of time doing that and so social uh social pla or social um recognition is something that we really really enjoy about gamification and it's very very effective um the next the next thing we like about games that social media does or i'm sorry the gamification does a great job of borrowing from is challenge so we use challenge to solve problems right q as humans were natural problem solvers um and so one of the things that gamification and the games are good at is giving us an opportunity to solve problems some problems are more difficult than others to solve so it's very important in the context of games to get the level of difficulty just right if something is too easy we'll beat it a couple of times and then move on if something is too complex then we will um or too difficult then we'll try a couple of times depending on your tenacity um perhaps you'll try for a couple of hours and then you'll give up and move so one of the most important things in challenge in the challenge aspect of games is getting without what's called the optimal challenge right it's finding that middle ground where you can you get someone's attention and you hold someone's attention and they get into what's called the zone right as we were all familiar with the zone um but it becomes a great way to solve problems then to learn as well it's one of the things that makes gamification so great about learning and so an example of this is liveops right so liveops is a cloud-based call center company and they wanted to enhance their training program and increase their sales so what they did was they added gamification to their onboarded training program so they implemented a gamified platform with some points some leaderboards and some badges and the results were pretty astounding so after they added gamification 72 percent of live ops employees uh went on to complete additional certification programs after they were done with the required training so at 72 percent of uh users that went on to complete additional actions and pursue additional learning specifically that wasn't required they were enjoying themselves so much and so engaged with the platform that they wanted to take more action so the service levels also increased for employees as well by nine percent so what this signifies is that not only were employees more engaged with uh the learning process it was also more effective right they retained what they learned better and applied it better to increase their sales performance and finally a new employee training time decreased from four weeks to 14 hours so employees were more engaged with the platform they the education they received was more effective they retained it better and they also completed it more quickly this is all based around game elements because um live ops added gamification it was much easier it was more natural for people to respond and to complete the training easily which is very very interesting not only in the context of business but also in the context of the classroom or in the context of learning um it's one of the reasons why people have been studying learning and gamification games for since the 80s since really digital technology started becoming mainstream so in the challenge aspect of it the problem-solving aspect of uh gamification is something that we really really enjoy and it's something that's really uh very very effective so another thing that we like about games or another way to apply gamification to your business is through rewards so rewards are another type of feedback but they're a bit more they're a bit different than just points badges and leaderboards now which are also known as the pbl triangle points badges and leaderboards are often um the only thing that people think of when they think of gamification but gamification as we as we're learning actually goes much deeper than that but rewards do offer some very very interesting um ways to implement gamification so and they're best used as an incentive to complete activities um they don't always have to be money right we think of rewards and we instantly think that oh this is a this is a type of um type of financial incentive just to get me to do something and um you know it's difficult to totally dispel that you know it's one of the reasons that we all show up to work is that we're being financially compensated for our efforts but rewards can also be virtual currency right so a type of currency that isn't just cash based it can be redeemed perhaps inside the gamification platform for rewards or um it can be redeemed outside of the gamification platform for in fact money but rewards can also be recognition so we just finished up our weekly meeting here at technologyadvice we have a meeting every friday and every friday we give applause to certain teammates right that have been doing a good job over the past couple of weeks um we'll recommend different teammates that we think deserve applause and then they get recognized during their friday meeting and that's a type of reward and it's actually one i've read several studies that say that recognition is a uh more powerful reward in certain contexts than um prizes you know ver than money because we're being congratulated uh for doing a good job we're not saying no there's no implication that well you're just doing this because you're getting paid um that type of recognition is and we really appreciate your efforts and we know that you're passionate about what you're doing so verbal recognition or social recognition can be a very powerful reward now rewards come in two pretty broad categories one is fixed interval this is the simplest kind of reward right so the reward will happen a specific time for the completion of a specific action um the best example of this are frequent flyer miles so you if you if you fly enough times right if you if you get on airplane enough and take it from one airport to the other you're going to crew airline miles which you can eventually redeem for free miles so the proposition is very obvious and it's not going to change this is a fixed interval reward you know what you have to do to receive that reward the other type of reward is variable interval reward so these are rewards that happen at varying times and they're not as easy to predict as fixed interval rewards are so in the case of frequent flyer miles like i said it's very i mean it's unchanging what we need to do to receive the reward variable inner rewards are much more difficult to predict and they introduce a an element of chance into the reward system which is something that we really respond to a very interesting example of this is gambling specifically slot machines so we know that slot machines will pay out eventually we know there will be some type of reward but when that reward happens and even how much that reward will be is variable we're not sure so this this plays into part of why slot machines are so addictive why people go there so often because people want to make sure that they're the person that the slot machine pays out they want to make sure that they receive the reward but it's difficult to predict when it will happen and some and you know and i won't say impossible but it's it's very difficult for the average person to understand uh when they will get paid out by the slot machine spoiler the odds are not very good so that's that that's an example of rewards which again can be very powerful gamification elements um another way to implement gamification into your business or things that we like about games the gamification borrows from is through narrative and so narrative kind of overlaps with progress it gives you a better context and a better sense of what you're doing um which helps fight monotony right that's what progress and that's what narrative do and really gamification in general is great at doing so it motivates you better because it fights that sense of monotony that creeps in when you have to do tasks over and over and over again because again we make them more like games so narrative really means you know there's there's a bit of a story behind what you're doing so we talked a little bit about nike plus earlier which is uses different technology to track different metrics around your run which again is a point is a example of points points value and that's uh that's gamification but another way so an example of narrative which is another running map is called zombies run which is which is an excellent excellent idea i suppose it should actually be said uh zombies run so that's how you would pronounce the title of this app but the basic concept is that the reason why you're running is because zombies are chasing you right so it obviously helps you get fit you can see here that it helps you train for 5ks i assume it can help you train for marathons as well but it puts you through a series of missions in which zombies are chasing you now the idea is you can't stop running because you'll get caught by the zombies which is you know i believe it's implied why that would be a bad thing but you can actually even increase the aggressiveness of the zombies so the zombies can become faster if you think you need to pick up your pace and so this is a very simple yet very effective uh form of narrative that can be introduced into gamification and that could make things more um more effective and so the probably the last thing that we like about gamification is again going back to autonomy and the ability to express yourself is uh the idea of avatars or profiles so having a profile within a gamification platform creates an emotional connection because it gives you something to um to change right to change to reflect yourself and that's something that we like too again it goes back to having that sense of control over our environment and um a very simple but yet effective instance of this is uh xbox live so on xbox live when you log on to that uh game platform you get a little 3d avatar it's just a little person that you can change how it looks right you can dress it in whatever clothes you want you can change his hair however you like you can make it taller shorter however you choose and there's no real point to this um you know it's not a game which is important to emphasize gamification itself is actually not a game it's just again taking things that we like about games and putting them into uh non-game context but when you're using you know when you're customizing the avatar on xbox live um it's purely for your enjoyment again there's no reward after it there's no mission to complete and what's interesting is that microsoft has actually been able to monetize the idea of the avatar of the profile so because people are so concerned with how their avatar looks microsoft actually sells different clothes the avatar to wear different types of types of accessories that you can buy for the avatar and people people purchase these things purely just out of um so they can customize this this small three-dimensional character and again the idea i mentioned earlier the idea of profiles um is also echoed in social media right so social media is a great example of giving you something that you can customize and make more your own and again it's one of the reasons why we like it so much so we've gone through what gamification is we've identified why we like gamification why it's popular now and then we talked a little about what makes good gamification so the ways to avoid being in the 80 percent that gartner predicted um who would employ gamification but that it wouldn't uh meet their return on investment and so i'd like to close by talking a little bit about where we think gamification is going um you know it's a very interesting and very new industry and so i think it's good to look at some trends and perhaps make some predictions so despite what gartner said about 80 of um people that are businesses that are going to employ gamification it won't meet their uh return on investment there's still the contrasting set they gave out that 70 of the global 2000 organizations will still employ gamification and again this is because that the word failure in that 80 context doesn't mean there won't be any positive benefit it just means that the return on investment may perhaps be lower the business we're expecting but of course we've already gone over um why ways to avoid that different ways to implement gamification successfully and avoid being in the eighty percent um but so again this goes into the trend that i think eventually it probably already is actually uh business gamification or enterprise use of gamification is going to start out to outrank in the market uh consumer use of gamification so instead of um gamification strategies that are geared towards consumers to engage for marketing for example or to engage with different software platforms businesses were more and more start to use gamification on their employees like ivops did to make them more productive to increase the efficiency of their training programs or perhaps to get them involved in different corporate programs like wellness programs another example of where gamification is going to go is that vendors will start to specialize right so vendors are going to start to make products that work for specific verticals a great example of this is is kiosk right kiosk makes gamification uh solutions that increase participation in corporate wellness programs and there's several different reasons why corporations will be interested in doing this healthier employees have lower insurance costs so that saves the business money and it also gets the employees it could be some team building if the employees go together i i know kiosk has different um different strategies that are structured around teams as well as restructuring individuals i believe so yeah that's an example of a gamification into this targeting a specific vertical you see here on their site that um seventy 70 of top 100 uh companies in the us are investing in employee engagement which kind of echoes the cinema i just said that um more businesses are going to start to use gamification towards their employees rather towards their uh their consumer audiences and also another thing to check out about kiosks is they actually have some pretty interesting research that revolves around healthier employees being more productive so i recommend that you check that out that's a pretty interesting idea that more engaged healthier employees can actually be more productive another example of a gamification vendor that's targeting a specific vertical is banker's lab so for the finance industry there can be some very robust training that needs to occur when people come on board and they're getting trained to be a tower or regardless of what their actual position is in the organization banker's lab has different gamification modules that target or that work for entry-level positions or any kind of position in a financial firm and it uses gamification again like we saw with live ops to increase the efficiency of the programs and um increase the effectiveness of the programs and finally an education is another example of where the education is already actually a very an industry that is um very very interested in gamification and games and has been for some time one of my favorite examples of a vendor that's very concerned with um gamification or with education is dual lingo so duolingo helps you learn a different language by using different gamification techniques right so you can see here on the screen that when you complete certain modules um for this one is a spanish skill tree so you're in the basics of spanish or you mastered the phrases of spanish so you get a little badge right you get a trophy that symbolizes you complete this and you also get points right so you get these different points for completing the scenarios what i really like about duo wingo which is probably what this is one of my favorite gamification elements in the market is the use of skill trees so this feeds into so many things that we've talked about today this is into progress this feeds into um narrative this feeds this goes into feedback all these different things are symbolized here so as you complete each module it visually shows you your progress throughout the the platform so once you complete the basics of spanish one and the basis of spanish two you can also then become a master of talking about animals in spanish and after you master that you've completed um that whole section of the skill tree so now you can if you encounter someone on the street you can talk about a couple basic phrases and then steal the conversation or talk about animals because you're very very good at that so as these uh organizations become more and more involved and more specific it's going to become more difficult for organizations to uh actually find vendors and perhaps select specific vendors that will meet their needs so lucky for you technology advice we've actually created the smart advisor so what the smart advisor does is it works it you answer a few different questions right it's just a question and answer system that also features an algorithm so as you see here on my screen if you answer what um what field you're in right i'm in computer technology my project goal is to move my employees we have a nice progress there at the progress bar there at the bottom and uh so again this helps you select a gamification vendor for you by narrowing down the choices and the vast choices in the market based on your specific business needs so which employees are you trying to motivate i want to motivate my operations team they're not performing up to stuff and which features are important to you well i want analytics i want mobile uh compatibility and i'd like some social media integration again the entire time you use a smart advisor this is just narrowing down your options you can see here the filter results are changing as we learn more about what your business needs finally we can select um how many users will be using the project right 26 to 100 i've got a decent sized company your budget for the project then also your timeline for the project so we found out some very specific things about what you need to get your gamification project moving and now we can return your eight highest results based on what you just told us so what this does is it eliminates your research time exponentially right instead of just googling something searching the internet um you've come to one place and you've answered a bunch of different questions just a few different questions actually not a bunch probably in less than two minutes you know that probably took me maybe 120 seconds and now you have different matches that correspond directly with what you're looking for you can request a free demo you can get some pricing information uh you can talk to our project manager jordan who's also very knowledgeable about gamification and if you find something that interests you we can connect you to that vendor and they can help you uh get your gamification program going so that about wraps it up i appreciate your time um thank you for joining me and learning some more about gamification i hope it was educational uh as well as entertaining there's a nice certificate for you nice badge it uh symbolizes that you've completed um technology advice one gamification 101 webinar so i look forward to your questions thank you okay okay okay so we've taken a couple of questions from twitter now um laura schook asked us does gamification work um and that's that's fair enough it is uh interesting to always um question whether technologies like gamification that you know how to hype right now actually do work and the answer is yes so even when gamification programs quote unquote fail right like gartner said um oftentimes business are still seeing a great deal of uh positive metrics right there's still an an increase in behavior perhaps it wasn't as much as they intended but there there is usually that increase and then when you get gamification right it can be absolutely phenomenal like we saw with dev hub there's that tim there's that movement from 10 engagement to 80 engagement which is very very very impressive all based around gamification devop didn't change its value proposition at all it didn't necessarily change the way its software worked or the things that people could do on its website what they did was they just added gamification and so again i think we've illustrated a couple of different examples throughout throughout the webinar today that kind of show why gamification actually does work um now again it's not a silver bullet if you will it's not a one it's not an immediate fix right it's not going to fix a uh a broken system where it's not going to fix any kind of any kind of flaws in your current processes but it can help you target a specific behavior that you want to increase right whether that's with your employees with consumers or even with students in the case of education and it can help you motivate them to do that behavior more often or do that behavior better so good question um another question for twitter is why is gamification a good tool in the classroom well this goes back to challenge right i talked about challenge earlier and it goes back to humans and natural need or not or want to solve problems right so we're great problem solvers that's why we have all this tech these very very complex tools that we've created to solve different problems that's why we're on a webinar right now because our our tools are so complex because we can solve problems so well the thing is the incentive or the feedback or the progress something is happening when students lose motivation in the subject now of course it could be that the student isn't interested in the subject it's always true but using gamification in the classroom works because it gives students instant feedback so when they go home and perhaps they have a term paper due and they're just doing their research for the term term paper um that particular research may be not necessarily them because they're not getting feedback on that the teacher isn't looking over their research and saying hey this is great research nice job but if you introduce some kind of gamification element into that into that aspect of the research or into that particular task that smaller task of the project um they congratulated them or rated what their how their research was or just said great job you've completed your research this is instant feedback that can motivate them to perform the research maybe better perform it quicker or just makes them appreciate the research in relation to its significance to the larger project so gamification and then even games games based learning is a uh is another field that is perhaps a bit um more expensive than just games but it takes the same kind of game elements and applies them to learning so um yeah it's it's a good tool because it takes it makes learning fun basically right we talked about that um elusive notion of fun and gamification and game space learning make learning fun and that's incredibly important uh another question that we have is from uh sharp grade phil on twitter he said i feel gamification right now is two games focused and not enough business focused am i wrong um not wrong wrong necessarily perhaps a couple years ago it was very focused on games right it was focused on consumer facing um different initiatives and wasn't as much focused on the bottom line but now the businesses are adopting it at a greater rate right to this year is the year of the great gartner 70 that we've talked about um now businesses are adopting it and they are going to be more concerned with but the bottom line metrics and how um how gamification either helps them create value or helps their employees um better perform so perhaps that was an observation for a couple of years ago but right now gamification uh really is starting to take on more of a business aspect and is only going to increase in my opinion businesses just use it more and more and more as they get better at implementing it so that's all for me right now we answered a couple of your questions um i hope you found this again educational uh and yeah thank you for joining me learning more about gamification i look forward to talking to you um in the future

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