Sessions at Interaction12 about Gamification on Friday 3rd February

Gamification is the process of applying game design elements to non-game contexts in order to drive user engagement, influence behavior and improve the user experience associated with digital products and services. Over the past year, the practice of gamification has exploded, fueled by marketing hype, media curiosity and spirited debate. While much of the discussion has revolved around extrinsic reward mechanisms as a panacea for customer loyalty and engagement, the most important and effective motivational dynamics of games have been left on the table.

In this presentation I’ll cut through the hype and draw from the fundamentals of game psychology, double-tapping into the techniques game designers use to motivate, engage and guide players through a game’s lifecycle. In doing so, I’ll lay out a model for architecting user engagement, directing behavior and satisfying the needs of both users and business alike.

In our role as consumers of services, as information bleeds into the physical world we face an increasing multitude of different environments, interfaces, and procedures which, from our perspective, all participate in one single activity: completing the goal at hand.

This is nowhere more visible than in complex activities requiring multiple, consecutive, or prolonged interactions: for example in dealing with the healthcare system, or when using any combination of public and private means of transport. These complex tasks have a potential to confuse, frustrate, and provide inconsistent user experiences as we try to make sense of things while using different combinations of websites, smartphones, real-time displays, street or shop signage, and traditional paper-based materials such as maps and timetables. This talk details the early stages in the design of a systemic, cross-channel approach to public transportation for the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, how gamification has been applied to the process to make co-modal travel strategies an enticing prospect for passengers and a key element in the city's vision for a sustainable future, and how bus stops have been refitted as active touchpoints in a larger, seamless cross-channel customer journey.

Questions the talk will try to answer are: What pieces of information are needed? What artifacts are necessary for a base system to work? How do cross-channel guidelines become effective (by providing third-parties with a competitive edge, a business advantage, a reduced time-to market)? What deliverables for cross-channel experiences? What benefits from gamification?