“Gamification means to enrich the journey of a person instead of waiting at the finish line to reward them" ~ Roman Rackwitz, Gamification Designer and Expert.

People don’t like spending hours on boring things, but they do enjoy spending hours playing and having fun.

We have all played games, and we all like games in some shape or form. Moreover, we have all been hooked on something at some point.

This is why games can be so powerful.

This is the reason why in this article, we want to demystify gamification and help you understand how it can help you increase engagement and make your products easier to deal with.

What is Gamification? Why does it work?

Gamification is about taking fun, compelling, and interactive elements from games and applying them to productive, day-to-day activities.

In the business world, gamification is the process of incentivizing peoples’ engagement and activities to drive results with game-like mechanics.

The goal of gamification is to engage with consumers, employees, and partners to inspire collaboration, sharing, and interaction.

A compelling gamification experience taps into a participant’s emotions and demonstrates, easily the best activities an audience can complete that make an impact on mutually shared goals. As employees or customers interact with your gamification program, they receive immediate feedback on performance and are guided to the next steps toward new achievements.

Types of Gamification in Business

Gamification is about driving engagement to influence business results. When people participate and engage with your gamification initiative, they learn the best way to interact with your business, your products, your services, and your brand.

Engagement with game mechanics provides insightful data that can help influence marketing campaigns, platform utilization, and performance goals. Every employee or customer interaction gives a better sense of where they spend their time and what activities drive their interests.

Which areas of a business stand to gain most from gamification?

According to entrepreneur, speaker, and gamification pioneer Yu-kai Chou, the answer is not straightforward, but the size of the firm will generally dictate what matters.

In his experience, start-ups tend to seek help with product gamification (i.e., creating a winning product that provides an addictive experience); mid-sized companies prefer to focus on marketing gamification (i.e., attracting new customers within the desired segment and keeping them engaged); while Fortune 500 firms and other large organizations gain mostly from workplace gamification (i.e., training/ motivating employees or cultivating solidarity among them in a non-standard, effortless way).

Types of Gamification

Gamification is a great way to promote the desired behaviors that lead to organizational goals. When drawing a gamification strategy for your participants (customers or employees), there are several decisions you have to make.

You have to decide whether you want to add game elements to the structure of the content or to the content itself.

Based on these choices, there are two types of gamification; structural gamification and content gamification.

1. Structural Gamification

Structural Gamification is the application of game elements to the structure of the content, but the content itself remains unaltered.

A common implementation of this type of gamification is to take the scoring elements of a video game, such as points, labels, badges, leaderboards, and achievements, and apply them to a business context.

For example, a training organization employs structural gamification when learners are assigned content to be learned through a daily quiz-type game for a period of time via email or, more likely, a mobile app. If the learner answers correctly, they earn points and progress toward earning a digital badge and a place on a leaderboard. If they answer incorrectly, they are immediately presented with a short instructional piece specifically addressing the question’s topic.

The ultimate aim of structural gamification is to push the participant through the learning process; for example, to make them complete one more task. Through the use of rewards, it motivates the participants to achieve their desired goals.

2. Content Gamification

Content gamification is the application of game elements, game mechanics, and game thinking to alter content to make the content more game-like.

Content gamification makes use of game mechanics such as challenges, storytelling, feedback loops, and freedom to fail in order to immerse learners. Rewards, in general, are the incentive to engage and encourage learners to continue the learning process and are built around the nature of content in content gamification.

Gamified content is being used by a variety of different types of companies, specifically as it relates to e-learning experiences.

One of the most popular uses of gamification across the board is with training strategies. For business trainers, it’s all about adding elements of gaming into instructional strategies--making for more effective training and learning.

Conclusion

Knowing the above two types of gamification will help you think about how you want to apply gamification to own content that you design.

Gamification delivers proven and tangible results, which can be measured with analytics tools. Businesses have experienced an increase in engagement across social media, both internally and externally. This includes things like more website traffic, lower times for adoption and conversions from free trial to purchase, and a reduction in onboarding time.

Remember, Gamification is not a panacea that will magically make everything better. However, it has proven tools for improving the engagement level of employees and customers can also be fun and engaging.

If you have any other thoughts or questions about gamification for business or how some of this may apply to something you’re considering for your company, feel free to drop us a line.

Partner with us to handle your gamification needs!

Gamification might sound like a straightforward tactic to engage your users, but the strategy might backfire severely without proper planning and implementation.

A successful gamified solution may require extensive knowledge of gaming principles, powerful UI/UX skills, and sound development experience. While your in-house development team may have the skills to gamify apps, you'll need more specific skill sets to integrate a creative gamification strategy into your product successfully.

With the help of upshot.ai, unlock all the benefits of world-class talents and technology capabilities to develop a gamified product.

Which types of gamification is best for your business?

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