Scary gamification

Some digital product owners just get it.

Others need a little warming up.

“Gamification”, for those others, sounds like a risky divergence into turning their product into a video game and alienating new and existing customers.

That’s not it.

The act of incentivising people with an itch to keep returning and deriving maximum advantage from your work, is not the same as wrecking your product. Quite the opposite.

The best thing to do is start small.

Start building incentives that make people want to come back again tomorrow, and be rewarded for it. Let people compete with each other. Let people wonder what will happen if they use your product more. Surprise and delight them.

But start small.

It’s not so scary that way.