Analyzing Gamification's Impact on User Engagement and Motivation

This report delves into the concept of gamification and its application in enhancing user engagement within organizations. It explores how integrating game mechanics, such as achievement badges, bonus points, and progress bars, can motivate employees and customers, ultimately leading to increased productivity and improved business operations. The report highlights the psychological aspects of gamification, emphasizing the role of positive feedback and rewards in driving user behavior and fostering a sense of accomplishment. It provides examples like Foursquare, illustrating how gamification can create incentives and increase fun and involvement. The report also emphasizes the importance of transparency, fast feedback, and voluntary participation in the successful implementation of gamification strategies. Furthermore, it discusses the importance of understanding game regulations and customer desires for rewards, concluding that gamification is a valuable tool for achieving organizational goals by increasing employee motivation and productivity. The report references several sources to support its claims.

RUNNING HEAD: Gamification
Gamification
Gamification to enhance user engagement

Gamification to enhance user engagement 1
How does the practice of gamification aim to enhance user engagement in the present?
Gamification is the process of integrating game mechanics to motivate or engage employees that
ensure to work better. An organization uses gamification strategy to reward employees if they
perform well or accomplish task better than competitors and the rewards are like providing
achievement badges, bonus points or filling of progress bar and many more.
Gamification is nothing but using game elements for non-game applications that helps to
encourage people focusing on consumer oriented web and mobile sites (Muntean, 2011, Page no.
323). Today, every organization is focused on obtaining their objectives, gamification has helped
them to become more productive by engaging most of the employee in hard work and dedication.
With the help of gamification, employees are engaged more towards their work which ultimately
reflects in the change of their behavior. Businesses today uses gamification as a major technique
to enhance their business operations (Burke, 2013). It is often said that when an employee works
with more fun, an organization gets more and better work as an output. An organization should
reward customers for their engagement in fun activities. Moreover it can also be examined that
most of the Americans are interested in working for those company who uses gamification
techniques to increase productivity. So, in order to understand the gamification technique, one
must understand first how and why it works on employee engagement and motivation as well.
An organization must learn how to implement gamification technique skillfully and successfully.
Gamification provides platforms which are designed for business-to consumer (B2C) purposes
(Herzig, 2012, page no. 219) where the business targets their customers to increase their
involvement.
Gamification has proved as one of the best technique successful to engage customers and
motivate them to change their behaviors and solve difficulties and manage the hurdles. The
business that uses gamification technique uses several designs that are simple and easy to use
and that lead to higher improvements as well. Users are motivated on continues basis and the
psychology behind it is that users gain positive feedback that include increment in progress bar,
badges, status, points and many more (Hamari, 2013). When a business uses this technique, users
are motivated to challenge difficult task with more simplicity and they believe that they can do
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difficulty task in a simplified form. Every individual today wants more and more and if they are
motivated through rewards, they will enhance their interest in working more and for this, a
business should focus on creating better and innovating techniques to increase employees
productivity. Some people are achievement oriented and they want some pay off or prize to keep
them focused on oriented towards their work and they feel rewarded when receives prize and
thus generates better output as a result.
Let’s take an example of foursquare. This application helps the user to gain reward points and
badges when they check in at different location and share their experiences with others. This
provides an opportunity to the employees to discounts on several deals provided by the
company.so this technique helped user to generate interest and motivate them too (Martins, 14th
December, 2013).
Another major aspect of gamification is that it increase fun and the involvement of employees. It
also helps to figure out the new ways to create incentives and motivation because it is believed
that if a business enhance productivity and performance of the employee, you can be success in
attracting higher quality employee with increased technology skills. The basic factors to increase
employee motivation through gamification are transparency, fast feedback, badges, competition,
increase in progress report bar and many more. While using gamification technique, participation
of employees must be voluntary because if the employee won’t be willing to participate, they
will not be able to produce more. So, voluntary participation is must (Morrison, 6th may, 2016).
Similarly, it is also believed that if the employee’s does not participate willingly or voluntarily,
the gamification attempt may backfire and rec=duce the overall productivity as well.
Recognizing and analyzing the game being played and understanding the regulations of the game
are the two major factor that the employee must focus on in the gamification technique.
Customers are always hungry for rewards and achievement and they will search for those
businesses that will provide them those factors and business that are involved in gamification
technique are quite successful in involving those customers (Bunchball, 2017)
Thus, it can be concluded that gamification technique is used in an organization to motivate and
compensate employees without affecting the nature of the task. Gamification technique helps an
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organization to focus on achieving the mission and vision of the company by increasing better
productivity. Gamification is nothing but a factor to add points and badges to employees’
performance (Kumar, 2013, page no. 528).
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References
Bunchball white paper, 2017, An Introduction to the Use of Game Dynamics to Influence
Behavior, viewed on 17th January, 2018. Available on: https://go.bunchball.com/lp-bunchball-
gamification.html?
network=Search&keyword=gamification&campaign=Gamification_Phrase&adgroup=Gamificat
ion_PhraseGamification&region=NA&channel=Bing_Search&offer=Gamification_101&source
=Bing_Search&latestleadsource=PPC
Burke, Brian, 2013, The Gamification of Business, viewed on 17th January, 2018. Available on:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2013/01/21/the-gamification-of-business/
Hamari, J. and Koivisto, J., 2013, June. Social Motivations to Use Gamification: An Empirical
Study of Gamifying Exercise. In ECIS (p. 105).
Herzig, P., Ameling, M. and Schill, A., 2012, August. A generic platform for enterprise
gamification. In Software Architecture (WICSA) and European Conference on Software
Architecture (ECSA), 2012 Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on (pp. 219-223). IEEE.
Kumar, J., 2013, July. Gamification at work: Designing engaging business software. In
International Conference of Design, User Experience, and Usability (pp. 528-537). Springer,
Berlin, Heidelberg.
Martins F, 14th December, 2013, Using Gamification in Business for Customer Engagement,
viewed on 17th January, 2018. Available on: http://winthecustomer.com/gamification-business-
customer-engagement/
Morrison, 6th may, 2016, Gamification to Increase Employee Motivation and Engagement,
viewed on 16th January, 2018. Available on: https://rapidbi.com/gamification-to-increase-
employee-motivation-and-engagement/
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Muntean, C.I., 2011, October. Raising engagement in e-learning through gamification. In Proc.
6th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL (No. 42, pp. 323-329).
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