A question I get asked a lot is, “Why does gamification fail?”. Gartner said that by 2014, 80% of gamified systems will fail due to poor design. My question is, what is poor design? I had thought that it was really just implementing “thin layer” points, badges and leader boards to a system that was already not working. Whilst that is true, it actually misses out on some important extra factors.
So, with that in mind, here are some reasons that I feel will contribute to gamification not Read more [...] Why does Gamification Fail?
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A question I get asked a lot is, “Why does gamification fail?”. Gartner said that by 2014, 80% of gamified systems will fail due to poor design. My question is, what is poor design? I had thought that it was really just implementing “thin layer” points, badges and leader boards to a system that was already not working. Whilst that is true, it actually misses out on some important extra factors.
So, with that in mind, here are some reasons that I feel will contribute to gamification not Read more [...] 
Extrinsic Rewards and the User Journey
A couple of small bits this week whilst I pull together more substantial work (I'm not a machine!!) First a small revisit of my Flow and User Journey work. In various conversations I have had about the use of rewards in a gamified systems the general question is always "do you need rewards at all". My answer is that it can't hurt if it is done properly. One thing that occurred is that during the on-boarding phase and into the habit forming phase of a user 
A fair few of my recent posts have revolved around how we can use ideas from games / gamification to improve certain aspects of an employee’s “journey” through their career. I thought it may be time to pull it all together in a single coherent (I hope) post!
It makes sense to start with an employee’s first days, usually an induction process of some type. Rather than the standard two or three days of death by PowerPoint, how about this;
They start with a simple half day induction, preferably 
To anyone involved in game design, feedback loops will be a well known concept. To those in gamification, they are often talked about, but not everyone will know what they actually are and how they can be used.
Feedback loops come in two main flavors; positive feedback loops and negative feedback loops. Which ever you are looking at they are constructed in a similar way, with two or more phases.
User performs an action
Something happens
User experience is modified
Repeat
Basic Feedback 
When you consider your career, unless you are a games developer, I am pretty sure Mario does not enter your thoughts all that much. However, this game (as with almost all other games really) can teach us a lot about how we can plan our careers and how businesses really need to reconsider how they handle the careers of its employees. This is not so much gamification as it is learning from games.
Games offer players a lot fo different mechanisms to understand where they are in the game, where 
What follows is an exploration of what happens when you start to map player journeys in games onto Flow theory and then try to bring that into the workplace. Just for fun! It was inspired by Mr Scott Golas after seeing last weeks post on relatedness. It may or may not have any worth, but it has been fun to develop. Click images to see the bigger versions or you can see the presentation at SlideShare
What is Flow and what is the Player Journey?
Mihayi Csikszentmihalyi suggested the concept after