Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things

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Common Design Pitfalls

I recently had a conversation with a software vendor client who wanted to gamify the company’s software offering. His opening statement was, “we just need to add some points and badges, which seems easy.” His perspective is quite typical of many people—that gamification is technically a very easy problem to solve—and they are right. But as you now understand, the challenge of gamification is designing the player experience, not the technology. Many organizations proceed without clearly understanding the nature of the challenge, and many of them will fail. Gamified solutions fail for three primary reasons:

1. The business outcomes haven’t been clearly defined.
2. The gamified solution has been designed to achieve the organizational ...