Originally posted 10/09/2012 on the Bunchball blog:

“Execution is the ability to mesh strategy with reality, align people with goals, and achieve the promised results.”
— Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

I often turn to this quote when I’m asked to explain what we do.  One of the most important functions of the Digital Strategy Team here at Bunchball is to help our clients put a plan together on which they can execute.  We help our clients take the broad promise of gamification and apply that toolset in the service of a specific goal, within a particular environment.  There’s never a lack of great ideas going into a project and we’re here to help our clients take those inspired concepts and turn them into actionable plans.  So at the start of an engagement, we move swiftly from theory and strategy to the component tactics which serve the project vision.

In the transition from idea to action, the following recommendations will help you lay a foundation to successfully execute on your gamification project.

State your objectives. Put your goals front-and-center.  For what purpose are you employing gamification?  List what you’re trying to accomplish and whenever there’s a question about whether or not you should do this or that, come back to this list.  If the idea in question doesn’t further your objective and/or doesn’t provide a significant benefit to the user experience it is likely a distraction that you can do without.  This can be a helpful exercise at many points in the project and is especially handy if reality dictates the need to reduce scope or make choices about what to move to a different phase.  I’ll often recommend posting the stated objectives somewhere highly visible so everyone has a clear point of reference and is rowing in the same direction.

Define it. Summarize clearly what the project includes.  This can be an extension of the objectives, but provides more detail about who will be interacting with the gamified experience, where & how they’ll do so, and other details to help communicate the scope.  You might think of this as the project elevator pitch to help the core team (and others within the organization who might be peripherally involved) remain in alignment.

Assign Roles & Responsibilities.  Make sure it’s clear who-does-what.  Assign a Project Manager.  Provide ownership opportunities, accountability, clear goals and status reports.  Your team will thank you. 

Include your tech stakeholders from the start.  Your tech team has a wealth of great ideas - so welcome them into the planning conversation.  Since an idea is only as good as its technical feasibility, run your creative concepts by your tech team to ensure you’re working on project components that are both compelling and realistic.    (More on the creative soul of the engineer:  http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/06/12/the-care-and-feeding-of-software-engineers-or-why-engineers-are-grumpy/ )

Use visuals.  A picture is worth… you know the saying.  Make sure you’re clear about the gamification components you’ll use, their layout and how/where people will access them.   Wireframes?  Mock-ups? A user experience flow document?  Do you have an architecture diagram you can point to?  If not - draw the systems involved and how information will flow between them.  These tools quickly get everyone on the same page and act as an ongoing reference point during deployment.  Here are a few resources that might help:

Balsamiq

Omnigraffle

Visio

Organize & collaborate! Make sure all this good work is easily accessible.  Our clients commonly use products such as Basecamp.  Here are some additional options http://pm-sherpa.com/features/basecamp-alternatives/

You’ll notice these suggestions aren’t exclusive to gamification.  The same rules of preparedness can apply to any web project.  So whatever it is you’re working on, make sure you take the time on the front-end to reconcile your theory with reality, get people rowing in the same direction and focused on results.  Here’s to making it happen!

Originally posted 8/21/2012 on the Bunchball blog:

It exists in every aspect of our society: sports, gambling, personal relationships, video games, board games, education/academia, the healthcare system, taxes, dieting, politics, environmental regulation, online communities, driving…  It seems that wherever there’s a system designed to reward people for success/good behavior, people will try to find a way to manipulate it for personal gain.

The spectrum of language we use to describe various types of ‘cheating’ shows our collective moral ambiguity on the subject.  Breaking the speed limit is against the law, but we’re all guilty of trying to get to our destination faster than the law permits.  Cheating may be excusable when it comes to our diet, but not when it comes to our spouse.  If you already have tickets to an event, it might be ok to jump in line with a friend, but cutting to the front of a line that is giving away a finite number of entries means that someone else who waited in line won’t get in - so that’s not ok.  Whether we’re bending the rules, taking a short-cut, creating our own solution, finding a loop-hole… the theme here seems to be that when the impact of our actions is self contained, there’s this moral wiggle-room and we can ‘get away with it’ but as soon as our actions have a negative impact on others, we’ve gone too far. 

As opposed to the previous real-world examples, in the context of gamification, some consider attempts at gaming a system to be (dare I say) a positive indicator of extremely high engagement.  After all, it is a sign that people have a high level of affinity with an experience and are willing to go to great lengths to come out on top.  This, of course, ignores the moral implications of cheating and the erosion of trust that successful cheating creates.  The key is to make sure the experience anticipates the ways in which people are likely to try to bend the rules and put measures in place to prevent those attempts from impacting other people’s experience.  Rules make a game fair.  Enforcement of those rules provides comfort and makes it worth playing. Violation of rules erodes the validity of the system you’ve created - and once people can’t trust that a game is fair, they don’t want to play.

It’s a concern I hear often:  “What if people try to game the system?”  It’s my job to help people understand that the question isn’t will they, it’s how will they, and then figure out how to take that reality into consideration as we make a plan.  Because while we can’t change the human tendency to find creative, morally questionable ways to manipulate systems for personal gain, we can mitigate the impact of their actions on others.  For the remainder of this post - let’s take the focus off of how we feel about cheating and put the focus on what we can do about it.

Choose rewards that resonate with your core audience.  Make the reward something that people who don’t care about your brand won’t bother cheating for.  If you’re a media company using a contest to rally your audience, make sure the reward is something that your fans intrinsically value (an on-air call-out), rather than a reward that’s extrinsically motivating to a broad audience (money).  If you’re a company onboarding new sales reps, put the focus on a reward that ties into corporate culture and career – a lunch with the CEO, the opportunity for mentorship with a respected leader.

Put controls in place.  Look at the natural activity of your audience over time.  How often are they naturally doing the things you want them to do more of?  Once you have that baseline, then think about how much of an increase you’d like to see and set reward frequency limits accordingly.

Shake things up!  Make sure you’re creating a system that has a variety of different earning opportunities.  Rather than rewarding people for every video they watch, reward them for watching a specific video on a certain day.

Make them jump through hoops.  Create pre-requisites that require someone to satisfy a variety of different criteria within a certain timeframe.

Focus on what matters – value vs. volume.  Reward for quality rather than quantity, e.g. the achievement happens for them when others rate their comment as helpful, not when they submit the comment.

Incorporate surprise and delight.  Rewards that are discovered rather than announced are an important part of the puzzle, so is randomization or jackpot type rewards.  You can create a pattern in delivering these rewards that can be figured out – creating a feeling of satisfaction for highly engaged participants – make sure to cap the reward opportunity for that activity at a certain threshold.

Let them think they have the upper hand.  If you have a highly engaged audience, give them opportunities to feel like they’ve taken a shortcut or have received a benefit that no one else has.  You can do this via messaging and real time feedback, creating a special level or group for the top x% (based on non-cheat-able criteria such as a purchase amount)  - with exclusive rewards and/or recognition.

Ask for help.  Run your final thinking by your legal department - they likely have experience and perspective that can help.

Choose the right tools.  Make sure you have the ability to modify your initial gamification solution, as needed, on an ongoing basis, as the behavior and needs of your community shifts over time.

Do your due diligence.  Implement A/B testing to see which tactics resonate best with your audience and your goals.

In a nutshell:

-People will try to find creative ways to win - so solve for that reality
-Anticipate the ways in which they’ll be crafty
-Put safeguards in place for those scenarios to prevent the cheating from having a negative impact on others
-Maintain the integrity of the experience for everyone.

If you’re interested in other info about why people do what they do I always enjoy reading Dan Arielly’s blog.

  “…Gamification isn’t about turning the office into a circus.”

  I always enjoy talking with Kyle Lagunas.  Check out his post!

Methinks your vocabulary could use boost - thou craven, folly-fallen, malt-worm!