As promised in my last blog article about Gamification, I would this time focus more on how Gamification could be used in practice in the example of a Gamified Intranet based on SharePoint 2013. As you may have figured, in my daily work, I currently have a lot to do with SharePoint, I find it natural to figure out ways how SharePoint Intranets could be made more engaging, social driven and even more exciting. Because of that, my good fellow Knight Sir Chris Müller (@Scolab) and I sat down and figured out some ways how to do that.
We’d be happy to hear your comments and thoughts about our way to tackle this challenge.

May the force be with you!

As already mentioned in my last post, Badgeville claims that 80% of all Gamification implementations are doomed to fail, due to poor design. I unfortunately believe in this number, because Gamification is not yet fully understood. Usually Gamification is used as a “topping” to an existing Information architecture. And the topping used, are Points, Badges and Leaderboards (PBLs). These are the easiest to use and understandable Gamification elements. So it’s easy to give every activity points, collect them and add leaderboards and badges. But this is only the beginning and by far the full potential of Gamification has not been reached. Therefore I sat down and thought about, what’s the next step after PBL or how could I use them more valuable or in more smart ways. And the outcome was as follows…

– Make your progress and status hyper transparent. Everywhere!
– Show always how to beat number one
– Show the value of progression context based
– Make the rewards visible. Everywhere!
– Show how to proceed. On the right time on the right context. Show the rewards. Everywhere!

Well you can figure out where I am heading to. Focus on value, show progress all the time and last but not least don’t use Gamification solely as a “topping”. Weave it into your information architecture.
Let’s have a look at this with help of some screenshots!

MySite progress bar

Here on this screenshot, we have the immediate feedback to the user about the completion of the MySite profile. You can also see this same feature in LinkedIn. Additionally here we also show how many additional percents you will get when you add more information to your profile. This will motivate the End User to most likely complete the MySite profile.

Now let’s look at the next screenshot. There we transformed the MySite to a hub of Intranet activities explaining that on an e-learning use case.

So what Gamification elements do we have here:

> My current level “Level 15 SharePoint Knight”. Cool huh? But next to it we also see what are the active and completed “quests”. Additionally we also show what are the rewards after reaching the next level. Plus how I could level up right now! As a reward to reach level 16 (Status) give give exclusive Access to training content (Remember SAPS principle from last article), give the user forum moderation (Power) and Access to new SharePoint 2013 test sites (Stuff).
> We here also show my progress indicated by badges which are visible for everyone visiting my MySite.
> Also all the active courses are shared and visible for everyone. That might also motivate other users to do the same courses
> We not only show learning related “quests” but also other quests like project tasks. By clicking on them I would directly jump to the right view

Therefore let’s look at the project management use case:

> We show past, current and future progress in fancy graphs. Yes, we all love fancy graphs and especially managers! 🙂
> We show a micro leaderboard which indicates my rank, the rank of the front runner and more important what I need to do to become number one!
> Also in the task list we show how much points you get when finishing a task and more important showing how much extra points you will get when you finish tasks earlier than the deadline. Sneaky isn’t it? 🙂

Last but not least Metadata Gamification:

Here we embrace the same principles as above:
> Show the points you get when you fill in metadata. Show how much points you get when you do more than what is expected from you
> Real time feedback of performance though fancy graphics. Yes we looooove fancy graphics! 🙂
> Mini leaderboard with my rank and the frontrunners rank and how much metadata I need to fill to become leader.

So, as you can see the use of PBLs might not be boring at all. It really depends how you make the design of it. I truly believe, Gamification used in that described way above would rock current Intranets on SharePoint 2013 and would solve many current issues with SharePoint of low End User adoption, difficulties using SharePoint in the right way and the lack of motivation in filling in document metadata and updating project tasks. Think about it…

I’d be happy to receieve comments, criticism or any type of reaction from you guys.

May the force of games be with you…

Count Jussi

If you have any questions or feedback on Jussi’s article please leave a comment below. We would love to hear from you.

See Jussi speak on Raising End-User Productivity with Social Enterprise and Gamification in SharePoint at ESPC14 for only €1150.

Jussi Mori is a SharePoint server MVP for 2014 and is co-founder and managing partner of Peaches Industries Finland. After having studied IT in Zurich Switzerland, Jussi started to work as Notes Developer and Application Manager for Swisscom Ltd. in Zurich. After having worked there for several years Jussi changed to a smaller Company named Interact Consulting AG creating complex OCR and Scanning solutions for many organizations in the central european region. In Spring 2008 Jussi decided to found a company together with his friend and business partner Christoph MÃller, with whom together he runs the Portal Company Peaches Industries GmbH. Jussi’s speciality are SharePoint End-User productivity, Change-, Projectmanagement and Training.