Measuring the Effectiveness of Gamification
Have you ever been gamified? My guess is that it’s happened on many occasions without you ever even knowing it. Allow me prove my point. If you are a member of LinkedIn and have strived to achieve a level of completeness on your profile… you have been gamified! If you are a member of a Frequent Flyer Program (FFP)… you have been gamified! If you are a cardholder to a grocery rewards program…you have been gamified! These are just a few of many examples that come to mind that prove that gamification is all around us in a vast majority of things we do and see on a daily basis. By definition gamified elements take advantage of our human psychological predisposition to engage and strive to attain a higher level (or compete against one another). But how are we actually able to measure the effectiveness of gamification?
According to Gabe Zicherman on a recent Huffington Post entry he wrote “Since the beginning of the gamification industry in 2010, over 350 companies have launched major gamification projects. These include consumer brands like MLB, Adobe, NBC, Walgreens, Ford, Southwest, eBay, Panera and Threadless among others. For B2B companies Oracle, SAP, Jive, Cisco, Pearson and Salesforce, gamification has emerged as a key element in their consumerization of the enterprise strategy. And in 2012-2013 alone, consulting behemoths Deloitte, Accenture, NTTData and Capgemini began practices targeting gamification of Fortune 500 companies.”
Furthermore, “One global community site, for example, raised Facebook engagement by 92 percent, discussions/comments by nearly 300 percent and social network traffic by 90 percent through a badge and challenge-centric gamified system. And it’s not just engagement — gamification’s revenue effects are equally astounding. Autodesk raised its trial usage by 40 percent and conversion rates by 15 percent while Extraco Bank raised their customer acquisitions by 700 percent, and IBM’s gamified Innov8 platform has become the company’s biggest lead generator.”
As you can see by the above examples, turning applications into games is a trend that is here to stay and one that is being widely accepted by big brand names and proving the concept of gamification extremely effective. Compelling and addictive gamification generates excitement that only adds to the player’s experience.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Gamification | Your Training Edge ®