Coursera Gamification MOOC and the 6D Framework

Hi guys! It has been 7 months after I’ve completed my first MOOC. This first MOOC was about Gamification, from the University of Pennsylvania and our teacher was Professor Kevin Werbach.

I’ve proudly scored 97,2% 🙂 and I have been using at least some parts of the presented 6D Gamification Design Framework since then.

With this knowledge I’ve made several improvements in a gamification project called “Orient Expedition“. We still have a lot of work to do as the expedition advances through it’s course though, specially in the game mechanics because the expedition will last for 2 years (at least)! With this in mind we already planned several activity loops improvements to keep our users / players engaged, but the main engagement factor is happening as we have planned: They are enjoying the expedition and the experience and not the extrinsic motivators, they’re travelling around the world with us and this is the intrinsic motivator that we expected to achieve, so it’s been a great experience, with great results so far.

I’ve already talked here about Gamification and what it is not. So now let me talk about the MOOC Gamification course and the 6D Gamification Design Framwork that I’ve leard there:

The 6D Gamification Design Framework:

(credits to Prof. Werbach https://twitter.com/kwerb and Coursera Gamification Course)

Professor Werbach’s six-step gamification design framework is described in lecture unit 7. To help with your final written assignment, below is a summary of each element.

Your submission should be organized around these six tasks. However, this is not a precise template. You could start with an overview of your system, for example. And you don’t need to address every specific question below; they are just offered to illustrate the design steps.

1. Define business objectives. Why are you gamifying? How do you hope to benefit your business, or achieve some other goal such as motivating people to change their behavior? The first written assignment focused on this step of the process, so you may wish to look back on your earlier submission and the peer assessments for guidance. As you state your objectives, emphasize the end goal or goals of your gamified design rather than detailing the means through which you’ll achieve this goal. Basically, if your gamified system does what you intend, what specific positive results will it generate for your organization?
2. Delineate target behaviors. What do you want your players to do? And what are the metrics that will allow you to measure them? These behaviors should promote your business objectives, although the relationship may be indirect. For example, your business goal might be to increase sales, but your target behavior could be for visitors to spend more time on your website. As you describe the behaviors, be sure to explain how they will help your system achieve its objectives. The metrics should in some fashion provide feedback to the players, letting them know when they are successfully engaging in the intended behaviors.
3. Describe your players. Who are the people who will be participating in your gamified activity? What is their relationship to you? For example, are they prospective customers, employees at your organization, or some other community? And what are they like? You can describe your players using demographics (such as age and gender), psychographics (such as their values and personalities), Bartle’s player types, or some other framework. You should show that you understand what sorts of game elements and other structures are likely to be effective for this population. For example, you might discuss whether a more competitive or cooperative system would be better for this player community.
4. Devise your activity loops. Explore in greater detail how you will motivate your players using engagement and progression loops. First, describe the kinds of feedback your system will offer the players to encourage further action, and explain how this feedback will work to motivate the players. (Remember: rewards are only one kind of feedback.) Second, how if at all will players progress in your system? This includes how the system will get new players engaged, and how it will remain interesting for more experienced players.
5. Don’t forget the fun. Although more abstract than some of the other elements, ensuring that your gamified system is fun remains as important as the other aspects. In order to fully explore this aspect of the design process, consider how your game would function without any extrinsic rewards. Would you say it was fun? Identify which aspects of the game could continue to motivate players to participate even without rewards.
6. Deploy the appropriate tools. By this point, you’ve probably identified several of the game elements and other specifics of your gamified system. If you haven’t already, you should explain in detail what your system would look like. What are some of the game elements involved and what will the experience be like for the players? What specific choices would you make in deploying your system? For example, you might discuss whether the gamified system is to be experienced primarily on personal computers, mobile devices, or some other platform. You might also describe what feedback, rewards, and other reinforcements the players could receive. Finally, think about whether you’ve tied your decisions back to the other five steps in the process, especially the business objectives.

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I’ve pasted bellow the course final exam briefing and my proposal, which received a 10 effective grade after peer evaluation.

If you’re attending the course  – do not copy my proposal example, obviously.

*You can also view this proposal on my Google Drive here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GCHu4UpQ0WIEoLMd9HbxrfHQ-Yo4xkrMkGaYNgqGq4E/edit?usp=sharing

Course final exam:

BRIEFING

You are approached by Rashmi Horenstein, the CEO of ShareAll, a prominent company in the hot collaborative consumption space. (If you aren’t familiar with the concept, some good resources are CollaborativeConsumption.com and the March 9, 2013 cover story in the Economist.) She knows you are one of the top experts on gamification, which she has heard can revolutionize business.  She asks you to present a proposal for a gamified system to take her business to the next level.

ShareAll’s mission is to make shared use of products and services as common as individual purchases.  It follows the path of companies such as AirBnB, Buzzcar, and Uber, which allow sharing of particular products (cars, housing, etc).  ShareAll’s patented technology makes it easy for consumers and business to share any product or service.  ShareAll has also developed a global virtual currency, called Shares, which can be used to purchase access to any asset in the system. Shares can be exchanged for real money, and users can generate more Shares by sharing items or volunteering their time to complete tasks for others.

ShareAll charges a small transaction fee whenever Shares are generated, traded, or spent. Therefore, the more activity, the more money ShareAll makes. Horenstein tells you that she cares about the social benefits of sustainability.  However, ShareAll is a for-profit company, with investments and partnerships from some of the world’s largest corporations, so profits matter. Horenstein believes gamification could significantly help ShareAll’s business. She is eager to read your ideas.

MY PROPOSAL

Based on Prof. Kevin Werbach 6D Gamification Design Framework.

1. Define business objectives

• ShareAll wants to get it’s core business to the next level: make collaborative sharing of products and services as common as normal day by day purchases.
• Increase the company’s profit by engaging more people to use, share, volunteering etc (Behavior changes that which will be described in the next section).
• Create and promote real social benefits through the collaborative sharing services.
• Increase ShareAll’s brand awareness and fortify market share.

Why these objectives and why Gamification to achieve them?

By making collaborative sharing of virtually anything (through ShareAll’s patented technology) as common as normal/day-by-day purchases ShareAll will create a behavior change that will not only benefit the company by increasing its profit, but the community/users too. ShareAll’s services will make people’s lives easier and better by improving/creating social relationships among them, by improving their income, by making products and services more accessible and, of course, more fun.

We also need to increase brand awareness and fortify our actual market share because we will have competitors as soon as ShareAll’s services starts to expand and revolutionize the collaborative sharing market.

2. Delineate target behaviors

• Making collaborative sharing activities a common and natural habit (as the regular individual purchases are) by interacting with the platform.
• Minimizing trust concerns. (among peers and among peers and the service itself)
• Making users to Influence and recommend ShareAll’s services to others. (basically mouth-to-mouth marketing, leadership formation, influencer habits)
• Interacting with the online platform in many ways as possible (through the online platform / website and a mobile app).
• Volunteering and helping others to complete

Analytics, validating behaviors / alignment to business objectives and creating feedbacks for users:

By using an analytics tool (like Google Analytics or similar) we will be able to track down all those behaviors and interactions to confirm if they are aligned with our objectives and make the necessary adjustments during the process.

The same analytics tool can be used to monitor the mobile app usage, we can also validate the entire onboarding process using Google Analytics (or similar tool) Events (which save a specific custom data to the database) and Funnels (which we can setup us a linear chain of Events). So, for example, If the users are not completing the onboarding process we will be able to identify exactly where and make the necessary adjustments. This iterations (testing, implementing, monitoring, checking possible improvements and back to testing) will be present during all the development, testing and production phases.

This tool can also give us statistics like DAU/MAU, we can customize Events to get a average value for reviews on assets, products and services and cross that with other data like demographic or geographic data.

With this we will be able to give users realtime feedback about their assets, their position in the platform and how they can improve, clear information about the “market” in a Market Analysis Tool showing what kind of assets are more demanded and offered so users will be able to make more strategic or successful decisions.

3. Describe your players

ShareAll’s collaborative sharing services obviously requires a more collaborative approach so this will be our main focus but we will have a competitive aspect too but always focused on positive results for users and for ShareAll (like described below).

Amy Jo Kim’s Social Engagement Verbs & Actions :

– Express:

– Customize a personal Share Store (where users can share their assets)

– Promote a Share Store or a specific asset through a promoting tool, inside the platform. Users will be able to choose demographics and psychographics profiles and they will be able to pay using shares or real money (credit card, paypal). This is a strong way to increase profit for ShareAll.

– Collaborate:

– Exchanging assets in a Share Market (a virtual place where users will be able to join forces by grouping up their Share Stores)

– Sharing experiences with others through public endorsements / reviews for other share markets, stores, users or just assets. These reviews / endorsements will be converted into Reputation Points, naturally, the more Reputation Points a user have the more respectable he/she will be.

– Gifting amounts of shares or assets to other users

– Helping other users by volunteering in the ShareAll Community Forums to answer questions from new users

– Explore:

– Explore new Share Stores using geolocation in the map on the online platform / mobile app enabling users to find the closest Stores / assets

– Search for specific assets

– Reviewing or curating the experience on share markets, stores, users or just assets

– Compete:

– Challenge a friend to solve a task / problem or to have a higher average of reviews / endorsements.

– Earning badges, prizes from performance related activities like Daily, Weekly and Monthly Quests (for example: Higher amount of new assets, a status/recognition prize for the winners at the Volunteering Leaderboard of the Week, Higher amount of new users helped on the SCF (ShareAll Community Forums))

Demographics, Psychographics and user profiles

ShareAll’s services will be able to impact virtually any person connected to the internet because users will be able to share and rent any kind of product and service but ShareAll will need to be focused on a more specific profile . Because of this we can expect having participants from a wide range of demographic and psychographic profiles but our main target will be the Millennials generation and the latest ones on generation X because of their close relation to technology, active internet behaviors and strong online social presence as you can see on Pew Research Center report, but again, we can expect a wide range of users profiles.

Soft launch and test period

Initially we will setup a test period in a strategic city like New York, San Francisco, Stockholm or any other city where we can find a good concentration of our primary target (described below) test our platform and do a soft launch before going world wide an acting on a larger audience.

target profile (again, Millennials and latest gen X):

• 18 – 35 years
• Influencer, strong social presence
• Tech savvy or enthusiast
• Open mind, early adopters

According to the last report from ESA, the average age of a gamer is 30 years, 68% of the gamers are above 18 years so not only the ShareAll’s services but also the gamified system should be nicely accepted by our target audience.

4. Devise activity loops

Engagement Loops. Motivators, Actions and Feedback:

The platform will inform any changes on status, Reputation Points, Badges, Leaderboard position, new Quests and so forth in realtime through the online platform and through push notifications on the Mobile App.

As stated, the platform will have Daily, Weekly and Monthly Quests, these activities will motivate players to engage in the platform and do, for example, volunteering work for the Volunteering Leaderboard of the Week. The most engaged users will receive not only extrinsic rewards like badges, shares and so forth but also intrinsic rewards like the status of being a great volunteer and helping a lot of other users because collaborative work matters to our target audience (this is also validated by the Pew Research Report). We can also have team based competitions / Quests where the users will need to team up (maybe members of a Shared Market) to achieve a specific goal.

Another example are the challenges between users where they can directly challenge a friend to beat his/her score about reviews average on a specific asset or about the number of assets shared. Competition is a strong motivator and by using this motivator to achieve something really positive we can achieve intrinsic rewards.

Progression Loops

Players will have access to harder Quests, Challenge types, types and values of assets to share according to their Reputation Points so the more Reputation Points the more advanced and experienced the user is. Badges will be used too to serve as a certificate of their achievements.

We will use badge levels: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond badges to reward players according to the complexity of their achievement, initially only bronze badges will be available, after that the silver badges and so forth everything connected to their Reputation Points.

5. Don’t forget the fun!

The game like aspects and the intrinsic motivators presented so far already provide most of the fun (the entire platform is designed with that in mind so even without the extrinsic rewards the system should still work). For example we have team quests, challenges, volunteering, recognition, status (leadership, mentoring), a sense of community, these are all aspects that directly appeals to intrinsic motivation. Another fun aspect will be a ludic interface both on the mobile app and the online platform, appropriate to our target audience.

6. Deploy the appropriate tools

As the system has already been described with details, I will highlight the main features both on web platform and mobile app:

– Onboarding process

– User Profile

– Dashboards / interface for real-time feedbacks

– ShareAll Community Forums

– Share Store and Market pages creation and customization

– Daily, Weekly and Monthly Quests

– Promotion tool

– Advanced search

– Asset Market Analysis Tool