What's my motivation? A challenge to gamification in the enterprise

Just to be clear, I am a major advocate of gamification and consider myself somewhat as the gamification evangelist at my company. But to quote the sage musings of Ben Parker, "With great power comes great responsibility," and as I gallantly wield my gamification sword through our cube farm corridors, I have learned that I must restrain myself from jumping to the rescue of every engagementally challenged product in our portfolio crying out for assistance. Why? Because gamification is not the magical elixir of engagement and can't always save the day. Every hero has a weakness, and the kryptonite of gamification comes in the form of... Obligation. Yes I will explain my theory and yes, I'll stop with the disjointed superhero metaphors.

Option vs Obligation

Gamification has a basic purpose, and that purpose, when stripped to its bare bones, is to get people to do what they don't want to do, or do more of what they don't do enough of. (I'll wait while you process...) For online retailers and communities, gamification is indisputable in its effectiveness to motivate people to return visit. But here lies the crux - these are circumstances where users have an option. Why is this important? It all boils down to motivation: you are either intrinsically motivated to perform an action (I am doing X because I want to do it), or extrinsically motivated to perform an action (I am doing Y because you want me to do it). When I have the option to complete an action and I do so willingly, I have responded to intrinsic motivators. I did not need an incentive or a reward, I did it because I wanted to.

Why did I want to? You could argue that there are extrinsic motivating factors here. For example, I was offered an incentive to complete that action. Enticement can be triggered both intrinsically and extrinsically. But enticement is always short lived. If you offer me a discount to purchase a shirt on your site, once I complete that purchase, that extrinsic motivator is gone. But hopefully, because of the fantastic user experience I had on your site (!), I voluntarily become a loyal, long-term customer (intrinsic).  

Now let’s flip this and look at your company’s CRM client, where users are obliged to use this application as part of their everyday job. In this case, there is no initial enticement – no coupon, no reward. There is only one primary motivating factor here, and that is job preservation. But because we are human, motivation is going to gradually wane. So the focus turns to sustainability and your company looks to gamification for an answer, utilizing extrinsic motivators such as badges, leader boards, points and tangible incentives to create enticement. But there’s a problem. As we know, extrinsic enticement is short lived. Once badges are achieved, points are earned and the incentive bestowed, we are back to square one. So we do it again. And again. And each time the incentive needs to be greater than or equal to the one previous. This is not a sustainable business model, and the longer it persists, the ROI of gamifying the application decreases.

It’s not all gloom and doom

Am I saying that there is no place for gamification in the enterprise? Hell no. As long as we can identify short-term business applications with the function of getting people to do what they don't want to do (or do more of what they don't do enough of), then we have ourselves a winning use case.  And the perfect application of gamification here is in product training. 

I work in the IT security space on a web-based application used by security professionals to monitor log events. When I polled our customers to gauge how much of our product, in their estimation, did they know how to use, their overwhelming response was between 25-30%. Now our product happens to have known UI issues, so that deserves much of the blame, but the majority of our fault (and it is OUR fault), is lack of effective training. Nobody likes to read a help section, and once users are initially trained on a product, going back for additional training is time consuming and costly. Needless to say, self-motivation to increase product knowledge at this point is low, and as a result, productivity declines. Here is the perfect opportunity to create a short-term, extrinsically-motivated, gamified tutorial that motivates users to complete tasks, gain product knowledge, earn incentives and walk away. Everybody wins. (For proof of how gamifying the training process can improve product knowledge and productivity, I suggest you look at Microsoft's Ribbon Hero project.)

In Summary

Extrinsic rewards become less effective over time. At a certain point, users either need to have found a personal connection to an application they are obliged to be engaged in or they are going to walk away. Now this can be a good thing, depending upon the business goal of the application. Is the application designed for short term use? Great. But if long term engagement is the objective, offering extrinsic rewards are not a sustainable business model. The reward is either going to have to continually increase, or extrinsic motivation must be converted to intrinsic motivation. How? Well, that’s the $100,000 question isn’t it. At the basis, it must start with understanding what your user considers to be fun, and creating an experience from there.

 As designers, we are playing with people's emotions, identifying what motivates them, inspires them and makes them feel a sense of worth, then crafting an experience around that. To date, I have yet to see a real-life example of converting an extrinsic experience to an intrinsic experience, and until I see otherwise, I will continue to believe that there is no ROI in gamifying an application that users are obliged to engage in over an indefinite time span. Sorry. Please prove me wrong.

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions.Content published here is not read or approved in advance by RSA and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of RSA nor does it constitute an official communication of RSA.