A gamification program based on the familiar combination of points, badges, and a leaderboard will typically go nowhere after a few months of launch. The one built on the basis of an outcome – an onboarding completion rate, a repeat visit behavior, a funnel that has gone stale – will stick around, because there is something measurable that moved.

That’s why the distinction between those two cases, rather than the mechanics themselves, is the thing that differentiates products that manage to engage a user base for years from those that quietly fade away after the first budget cut.

Gamification as a Feature, Not a Fix

“Gamification” is such a broad term that it helps to narrow it down: we refer to it as using game mechanics (points, levels, challenges, progression) in a process that is not a game, in order to influence a certain behavior. Game mechanics themselves are relatively simple to implement. What a lot of gamification programs lack is figuring out, in advance, what exactly the desired behavior is and how to measure the change in it.

When used as decoration, gamification becomes an extra layer added at the end – an additional progress bar, a badge for a five-day streak, an unsolicited leaderboard – and features like these can help to boost a click-through rate for a couple of weeks, but very little else. That is because they do nothing to the behavior in question: they weren’t designed to.

The Questions That Come Before the Mechanics

The people who have successful experience with gamification have answered several key questions before designing a badge or assigning a point value to something:

• What behavior are you trying to influence – not the general idea of engagement, but a specific action: completing the onboarding process, going to a booth, completing a training module.
• How much does it cost the company if that behavior doesn’t take place – be it a support request, a lapsed subscription, or an empty sales lead.
• Who’s responsible for the gamification mechanics after launch, as refreshing challenges, moderating a leaderboard, and sending prizes all require constant maintenance, and unmaintained gamification decays faster than any other feature.
• What happens to the behavior in question if the gamification system gets turned off – if the behavior collapses, the gamification mechanics were doing all the work, and nothing was done underneath it.

None of the above requires deep technical expertise. All it needs is someone in the room able to say no to the gamification mechanics that would be fun to build but won’t affect the number the company really cares about.

What It Looks Like in Real Life

For example, the organizers of a multi-day industry conference needed to make sure that attendees would stay engaged for all three days, rather than treat it as a series of boring presentations. The goals were narrow: direct foot traffic to the sponsor booths, as that traffic is what the sponsorship packages pay for in the year to come, and collect the data on the movement pattern of the attendees throughout the event venue.

Nomium’s Gamification team helped the conference to implement the gamification quest system within their official conference app. The QR code at partner booths awarded points, a set of trivia related to the themes of the conference offered some additional points, while the individual sponsors could create the tasks of their own. The whole process was tracked in real time with the leaderboard and prizes awarded for the winners.

The gamification mechanics worked, as they targeted the measurable behavior from the start. The most completed tasks were the booth QR code scans, which is exactly what the sponsors paid for, and the project team claimed that the attendees tended to complete the whole quest chain after they saw the leaderboard. None of that required a massive build or months of preparation. It only required a clear definition of what success would look like for both the sponsors and the attendees.

The Same Approach Works Elsewhere

The example above is a rather clean demonstration, as the business case is easily identified in this case, but the discipline shows up elsewhere in the economy:

• The tiered status system in airlines and hotel chains is not there to make something fun. It is there to make the decision of the already loyal customer easier and harder to change.
• Corporate training platforms use completion tracking and skill badges to deal with the high drop-off rate that plagues any self-paced learning process. Courses without a certain push tend to lose participants well before the final module.
• Loyalty programs in retail and e-commerce use point balance systems to shorten the time between the purchases.

Each of the examples above features the gamification mechanics being applied after the business case was defined.

Where Gamification Can Go Wrong

The pitfalls described below are proven by scientific research, not an anecdote. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, whose research on motivation defined the current understanding of rewards, have shown that adding an external reward to the activity that someone is already doing because they enjoy it can silently replace the original motivation – the moment the badge is removed, the behavior stops along with it.

Leaderboards carry a similar pitfall, too. They motivate the people close to the top, and demotivate everyone else, as the leaderboard is likely to drive them out of the activity rather than into it. And any gamification mechanics lose power through repetitions – a badge is fun the first time it’s earned, and forgettable the fifth. That is why gamification programs that never update their mechanics typically have a spike in activity at the launch and then a long and flat decay period.

The Discipline Is the Only Product

The technical part of the gamification program – points engine, leaderboard, and badge system – is fairly easy to build and fairly easy to buy. The difficult part is to have someone in the room willing to say no to the gamification mechanics that have no clear owner, no clear behavior behind them, and no plan for the day after launch when novelty wears off. As the number of products using game mechanics increases, this willingness to say no sooner becomes more important than any leaderboard design.