Author: Alex Masters 9th March 2016
Reposted from Sylvester Arnab’s personal blog
I have recently been thinking about responsible design, development and practice of gamification. As gamification rises in popularity within the business community, companies may feel pressured to start applying it to their websites and business processes (both customer and employee facing) and may do this without a thorough understanding of what it entails or how to proceed. Gamification can be used/misused as a tool to modulate certain behaviour, which may be desirable from the commercial perspective or even for increasing productivity when it comes to employee-facing applications.
When used for designing user experience for commercial/customer-facing purposes for instance, we should not focus on short-term gratification and immediate commercial gain. A more thoughtful, affective and humane experience design will ensure repeat business/customers in the long run. Based on a small-scale study on gamification for business purposes (see Arnab, Nalla, Harteveld and Lameras, 2015), we found that the companies we approached were using their own design framework to help map player types and behaviours, which influence the development of gamified solutions specific to their clients’ needs…
Continue reading Sylvester’s post…