Gamification - The 6D Framework

The last two months I have been participated on the Gamification Training at Coursera, from the University of Pennsylvania (Kevin Werbach), I will try in this post to share with you some of the  principal aspects of this "point of view" of the design.

You could also check the website of the book made by Kevin Werbach "For the Win"

First of all let me share with you my general conclusions. To be honest, maybe is one of the best trainings in which I have participated, I feel very confortable with the structure of the course, the content, and the possibilities that it gives me to be applied on my daily responsibility.

I evaluated and applied before some other design methods, for example Design Thinking, Lean Startup, etcetera. In my opinion, Gamification is another strategy to design a product, or a marketing strategy, or an human resources strategy... But unlike other more philosophical ways, Gamification gives you some detailed and structured frameworks to drive you on the design process. So, the perfect match with my square brain.

On the first part of the course, Kevin Werbach, introduce us new concepts like behaviorism, the motivational design, the fun (and their categories), the rewarding, the emocional, the engagement, the dynamics, components and design elements, and of course the dangers of the different technics.

Will be imposible summarize in this post all the concepts described during the course, so I will be focus for the moment on the 6D Framework.

The 6D Framework

The 6D framework is a design process with the next six elements, steps or premises:

• Define Business Objectives
• Delineate target behavior
• Describe yours players
• Devise activity loops
• Don't forget the fun
• Deploy appropriate tools

Define Business Objectives

Which are the achievements of the project, of the system, of the campaign? 

Process:

1. Make a list as concrete as possible and rank them
2. Eliminate the things is not a final business objective
3. Justify objectives … why is that something to achieve?

For example for bliquo (leisure aggregator) the main goal was to encourage the people to book restaurants, the secondary ones was:

• Collect a huge number of users
• Have a healthy database content of places
• ...  

Delineate target behavior

Things you want users to do. Process:

1. Specify the tasks
2. Define the success metrics, the win states for every tasks
3. Define the ways to measuring this win states:
• DAU/MAU - Ratio between daily and monthly active users, 100% shows a high engage application
• Virality - Sharing activity
• Activity volume

According again to bliquo (leisure aggregator) the things we want users to do was:

• Encourage people to book (KPI #Books/User #Books/Week #Books/Weekday ...)
• Encourage people to rate and review places (KPI #Rates/User #Rate/Week #Rate/Weekday ...)
• Encourage people to share this activity  (KPI #FBShare/User #TWShare/User ...)
• Encourage people to invite friends (KPI #NewsUser/Invitation/Channel ...)
• ...  

Describe yours players

What do you know about the players? (Demographics, Age groups, Psychographics, Kind of Behavior… ) Knowing this players, the kind of players, make a big different … in order to know how to motivate them. 

The most common model is the Bartle model, this model define four categories, is a good starting point:

• Achievers. People who prefer acting and explore the world. So, people interested on rewards
• Explorers. People who prefer interact and explore the world. So, people who wants to learn and discover
• Socializers. People who prefer to interact and play
• Killers. People who wants to fight, compete, vanquish 

There're some iterations of this Bartle model, based on verbs. Could be an easy way to identify our kind of users.

Your system could be addressed to some of these groups, so you should define different elements, different mechanism for each one, in order to motivate them.

Devise activity loops

We must identify and evaluate carefully the repetitives, recoursives structures, specifically our analysis must focus on the next two kinds of tasks:

• Engagement loops
• Progressive loops

Engagement loops. Based on the Motivational Design rules, we should identify the task we want the users to repeat, and motivate them to do it, and give them feedback to learn it

• Motivation, motivate the users to do something we expect
• Action, the user do the task
• Feedback. we give to the user an immediate feedback to become them motivated and iterate the loop 

Progressive loops. Loops we will include on the design to drive them from a newbie to a master of our product.

• From start to finish and a set of intermediate steps
• Provide small challenges to the user to arriva to a final goal. 

A well design must provide engagement and progressive loops as the natural way to help the user to learn and to become a master of the product.

Don't forget the fun

Personally, maybe is the most difficult part of the framework, because, also in my opinion, is more philosophical against the others ones.

When people are in the path to design a gamified design, sometimes lose the focus, in easy to forget that the point is create something FUN.

Because the FUN is also an intrisic motivation.

Deploy appropriate tools

Use the right tools. Apply the dynamics, the mechanics, the components based on the previous premises, which verbs are aligned with our kind players, how we provide scaffolding to our users to become masters, who we want to provide FUN to them, and obviously to align the user behavior with the product objectives

As I share with all of you at the beginning of this post, I enjoyed a lot this course and I'll go deep on some of the concepts of the course like the self-determination theory, etc.

I'll let you know.

Next step the 42 rules of product manager book review.

Regards,