This gamification research paper offers an amazing way to measure results
by Shane Schick — Mar 31 '14
A lot of the gamification experiments I’ve seen have spent a lot of time figuring out how players earn points, but for the businesses that sign on for such things, there’s often a different, more challenging kind of scorekeeping involved.
I imagine for many firms, the success metrics for gamification come down to: “Did this change behaviour (better than any other way)?” Although that may do the job in principle, it also means that it could be harder to figure out why some gamification projects fail to deliver. What we need are better metrics, and a few days ago I stumbled across a pretty good attempt to define some.
Cognizant, a technology consulting firm based in Teaneck, N.J., published a research paper by Rohan Mahadar, who manages its social business unit, called ‘Optimizing Gamification Design.’ I’ve embedded it in its entirety below, but skip ahead to page four, when it talks about “activity value ratings.”
As you can see, Mahadar is suggesting a breakdown within each gamification activity — perhaps starting a game, reaching a certain level, changing the way they do something — and looking at it from several different angles. These include how important it is to the organization (business criticality), the time it took, the difficulty and costs (either those to the user or what the organization might have saved).
Of course, in some organizations these might be phrased a little differently, and would certainly be weighted differently. The Cognizant paper walks through an example within the financial services sector, but in health-care, for example, time to perform a task and difficulty to the user might be a higher priority than costs (because it could contribute greatly to the cost of care). In other sectors, like retail, cost savings might reign supreme if gamification allows a a company to spend less on other forms of marketing, staff training or boosts the use of an online channel.
Although I’ve seen many researchers discuss these factors to one degree or another, Mahadar’s use of activity value ratings strikes me as an effective way to standardize such measurements in a way many business decision-makers could readily understand. If they are articulated correctly, activity value ratings might mean the difference between a gamification project that gets funded or not. Best of all, activity value ratings might also mean that if a gamfication project isn’t immediately successful, it might be possible to hone on one of the ratings (difficulty to the user, for instance) and adjust something rather than abandon a project entirely. That’s what we really need: a way to ensure gamification is seen as something you work on and develop, not just a win-or-lose proposition.
