Following the boom of video arcades and the emergence of home computers, many Millennials like myself were playing computer games not long after we could crawl. I remember playing games like Chuckie Egg on my dad’s ZX Spectrum from the age of five or six and later a whole host of DOS games on floppy disk. This early exposure to technology and confidence that we can figure things out for ourselves has led to a certain amount of resistance to using help if we think we don’t need it.

Similarly, while my generation consider themselves tech-savvy, we aren’t a patch on our younger and counter-parts from Generation Z; the kids born with a smartphone in one hand and an iPads in the other. The bad news is this so-called iGeneration only has an 8-second attention span (at least according to market research) which makes them a slightly problematic audience. However, there is a perfect solution for appealing to the younger generations, the game-loving tech know-it-alls with short attention spans, and the answer is gamification (apologies to any haters of jargon if that word made you shudder!).

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, gamification essentially means adding the typical elements of game playing such a point scoring or a reward scheme to a non-gaming application (typically social media and e-learning sites but occasionally help service desk sites) to encourage user engagement. To be more scientific than that, researchers discovered that playing games and scoring points causes the human brain to release the neurotransmitter dopamine which in turn leads to brain stimulation reward (BSR). This is the phenomenon in which the regions of the brain are stimulated following a reward-based outcome such as eating food when the body is hungry or drinking when the body is thirsty. The same reward pathway has a key role in behaviour such as drug addiction where the person compulsively seeks the reward of using a particular drug. So in layman’s terms, gamification is a way of getting your users addicted to your application, whether that be an e-learning site or even a help system.

Gamification Examples

One of the best known examples of gamification is Tripadvisor where users are rewarded for engagement the marketing team. Travellers become hooked by the reward scheme, which sees posting reviews and photos rewarded in the form of points and badges. It’s clever really, Tripadvisor gain free content which boosts their revenue (which was $1.246 Billion in 2014!) by giving out points and badges that are about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I developed something of an unhealthy addiction to Tripadvisor myself. I receive emails prompting and encouraging me to post,

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A great example of an e-learning app with gamification applied is Duolingo. The site was launched in 2011 by university computer science professor Luis von Ahn, who is also the creator of crowd-sourcing bot-tester CAPTCHA, and has grown exponentially to the extent that it now has 120 million users worldwide, with gamification being a large driving force behind its success. User engagement is predominantly led through rewards such “lingots”, given for completing a language lesson, that can be used as a form of virtual currency to buy power-ups, practice and bonus skills within the app:

Users are also encouraged to take a lesson each day to continue their “day streak”, consecutive days in which they’ve used the app and gain experience or “xp”, which again is a common aspect of gaming; a character gains experience for time played and missions completed. When lessons are completed for a particular subject, it turns gold, which again is a form or reward, and when the user completes a level or language they also receive an award (as shown below):

Further user engagement is encouraged through a user forum called a discussion stream where users can post comments and earn up-votes in a similar format to Reddit. Interestingly, when a user posts, the languages they are studying in Duolingo, their level for each language and their day streak is also displayed alongside their name. This gives each user a certain status within Duolingo and encourages user participation by targeting the competitive nature of each user. E.g. By taking more lessons, they increase their status/stature in the user forum.

Another example of gamification where users are rewarded for input and participation is the web’s largest programming community, Stack Overflow. Users receive different badges for posting questions and answers which fall into three categories: gold, silver and bronze depending on how well-received it is by other users.

As a user acquires more badges, their reputation on the Stack Overflow also improves. The user profile below is the top-ranking programmer on the site, having provided an impressive 3,555 answers and reaching more than 600,000 people. This user’s ranking make him more credible and trustworthy in the eyes of other users.

Skype, which I looked at it in my first help review blog, have used a similar but more basic gamification model in their Skype Community where users are encouraged to gain ‘Kudos’ and top the ‘Most helpful’ board:

The most helpful and active Skype Community users are also recognised or rewarded by being made ‘community ambassadors’, denoted by the star shown next to “techfreak” in the screenshot above. As well as having status in the community, these ambassadors also get to attend monthly meetings withe a representative from Skype, again taking user interaction and engagement to another level.

Applying Gamification to Help

Although gamification clearly works for e-learning and other social media applications, in terms of driving user engagement it’s not so easy with help and documentation. Aside from the obvious cost implications involved with designing and developing your own points or rewards scheme or paying for an external gamification platform, it’s not particularly easy to apply it to standalone documentation. Yes, I suppose you could divide it up into sections or lessons with points or levels awarded for each completed but sometimes people only refer to documentation for one particular answer so I’m not convinced gamification is the answer here.

The best working model I have seen is in the examples above, in which user forums and communities are created and essentially crowd-source the answers to questions that might otherwise be covered by your documentation, help desk or support staff. That’s probably the best way forward in terms of encouraging users to interact with your documentation: run a user forum, encourage engagement through up-voting, offer good question and answer rewards, and promote user status or level upgrades to produce content that is time saving, good quality and most importantly, fun!