Gamification for Product Managers

1. Gamification Course Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm come on, product manager based or UK. And in this course we're going to look at gamification for product managers. As a product manager, why should you be concerned about gamification? Because Moldova companies are increasingly using gamification very subtly as part of their product strategy to improve user engagement, retention, and adoption. For example, India's latest unit concrete is a great example for how gamification can be used successfully as part of your product strategy. More and more companies across sectors are using game elements as part of their product design. For example, to do is for productivity, raise for navigation. And more recently, Google has also jumped into the gamification bandwagon by introducing points, badges, and leaderboards as part of its pleased to her experience as a product manager. Therefore, it's very important for you to understand when to use gamification. And also more importantly, when not to use gamification. Gamification came into the scene way back in 2012. In a big way, many companies have a very simplistic understanding of gamification by thinking simplistically in terms of points, badges, and leaderboards and have tried and failed miserably at gamification. Gamification is much more than that. Companies would fully understand the motivational psychology behind it, have used it very effectively. So in this course we'll be talking about what is gamification, motivational psychology behind gamification, the different frameworks for gamification like the talus, this framework and let's hook framework by mere ALL. And we'll also talk about some real-world examples of how gamification has been used effectively for increasing engagement, retention, and adoption by various product companies. If you're an existing product manager who's tackling one of these problem areas, it will be a very useful course to understand more about gamification, how to use it as part of your product strategy. If you're an aspiring product manager, it'll be a good course to know how products think about design and then level up your product King. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the other class. 2. What is Gamification: Hey everyone, In this last, let's answer the fundamental question. What is gamification? Is gamification about building games as part of your product? Certainly not. Let's start with the popular definition of gamification, which is using game elements in non-game contexts to achieve your business objectives. Let's deconstruct this definition a bit what our game elements. So to do that, let's take a step back and try to look at what makes games interesting. Let's look at some of the popular games that you play in your mobile phone. Every time you play the game, you might likely be getting points. So you try to keep playing the game more so you get more points. But there has to be some meaning for achieving that points, right? So after some time you wonder what's the benefit of actually getting those points. So they introduce another element called badges. So you reach a certain threshold, you level up, you achieve a different batch. So there is motivation for you to get more points. Keep playing the game so that you can climb up the levels and get different patches. And to make it more interesting, what if you were comparing instant different player on a leaderboard? So you might think, hey, I'm at 99th position. What if I played more and up the leaderboard? So these are tropes that games used to make the games more interesting, engaging, and rewarding for the user. So what if you could use the same game elements in non-game contexts? Non-game contexts are our scenarios which are not games. For example, making a credit card payment, that's a non-game contexts. What if you can use game elements for scenarios like making a credit card payment so that you can achieve your business objective of getting more and more users to use your application to make credit card payments. Every time someone makes a payment using your credit card app, you can give them points. Can give them points equaling to the amount they paid. And if they make their payment regularly enough, you can give them badges. And maybe you can allow them to redeem those points for some offers. So these are some game elements that you can use to make your product experience more interesting. Otherwise you're just another, another app in the market which provides a utility for users to make payments. So that's what gamification is to summarize, it is using game elements in non-game contexts to achieve a business objective. But gamification is not just using points, badges, and leaderboards. Many companies have a simplistic understanding of gamification and a tried and failed miserably. But there are smart companies and products in the world who have truly understood the concepts behind gamification and motivation psychology behind gamification, where it has to be applied intelligent here intuitively. So that's what we're going to look at in the coming lectures. We're gonna look at what are, what is the motivation psychology behind gamification? What are the different game elements that you can use in real life examples where this has been successfully applied. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 3. 5 Real examples of effective use of gamification: Hi everyone in this class, Let's look at file quick examples of effective use of gamification in real-world. Know gamification has existed for a long time before the term gamification was even coined. For example, frequent airmiles is a very good example of how gamification was. Yes, it's effectively, every time you take a flight to you awarded MIs and if you get enough air miles, you can level up paying, become a premium member. And based on the status, you get more benefits and pokes. It works so well that there is even a funny story around it where someone was running short of the AMI is required in order to maintain status for the year and therefore booked a flight to Mexico to get that air my with a plan of coming back on the same day. But unfortunately, once it reached Mexico, he lost his passport and therefore was jailed and had a horrifying experience. That's the extent to which these points, these levels and perks and rewards motivate people into doing something that they really didn't have to. Another good example is that of a social experiment where there was a staircase on the 11 side and escalate on the other side. And they wanted to motivate people into using staircases, installed the escalators. So what they did was they made the staircases in the form of a piano. So every time someone climbing up the stairs, they made music, and therefore they found that a lot more people were inclined to use the staircases. And in fact, this also showed how people enjoy climbing up the stairs and try and make music out of it even so that was a good interesting social experiment which motivates people are inferences people into acting in a certain way which they normally wouldn't have. Coming back to more real-life examples, more modern day examples of use of gamification and product. Let's first look at my favorite example, which is that off the app called CREB. What is a unicorn based out of India, which has ruined gamification effectively as part of their product strategy. What their uses, they use all the familiar tropes, for example, exclusive teeth. So getting into the app is not easy. You need to be invited in. You need to have a certain level of credit worthiness for to be even be able to invite it into the app. So that brings exclusively a sense of, a sense of achievement and power in the minds of users. The app is essentially meant to make credit card payments, so provides a utility. So the game elements they add on top of it as every time you make a payment, you get coins and you can redeem that coins for benefits and rewards. If you refer a friend again, gems and the dad James ago again, you can redeem and rewards so many ways, interesting ways in which they are. And it's not just this, they also time variable rewards and so on and so forth. Let's look at credit in a detail way in further down the lecture. But it's one of my favorite examples of how gamification can be used effectively as powerful product. The fourth example I want to talk about is Duolingo, which is again a wonderful example of gamification. Duolingo is an app through which you can learn multiple different languages. Learning language often can be very slow and tires and process. So Duolingo made it more fun by including game elements as part of it. For example, providing experienced points every time you complete a lesson, you gain more experience points and then you level up once you reach a certain level of experience points. And it also ranked against a set of other people against the leader board. So you'll always want to complete one more lesson so that you match up the leaderboard. And what they also provide is streaks, because you're not going to want to learn Duolingo one day. You want to keep accessing Duolingo more often so that they also show how continuous use fixer VGA if you've been accessing Duolingo five times and you have a continuous stream of five days. So all of these are tropes that dueling effectively uses to increase engagement adoption of the product. Now the final example I want to talk about is Google. Google is also a big way into gamification. For example, the app in India, which is Google Pay. The Google Pay in India is slightly different to the googly Paley offered interested world. So every time you make payment using Google Pay, you get an award. The rod is variable. Sometimes you get, let's say you make a payment for 50 rupees. Sometimes you get five rupees as cashback. Sometimes you get ten rupees as cashback. Sometimes you don't know what you're going to be winning any cash or not. So those are ways in which they made the usage of the app more interesting. More recently, we, we pay is introduced gamification and loyalty programs as part of their place your application. So every time you do a transaction in place to you're going to get points. And the more points you get you can level up. And that will open additional benefits. And you can also trade those points for some rewards as well. So these are some of the examples of how gamification is been applied in real life, how it is continually being applied. And y, as product managers, you need to be aware of the tips and tricks and on gamification so that you can apply them as part of your products as well. Thank you for listening. 4. Motivational Psychology behind gamification: So hi everyone. In this class we're going to look at the motivation psychology behind gamification. Gamification is not just about using badges, points, and leaderboards. Many companies start in the simplistic terms and tried to implement gamification and failing miserably. What separates those that fail and those that have successfully used gamification is that the successful ones truly understand the psychology behind gamification. What is that psychology? In psychology broadly, there are two different traditions. It's behaviorism and column doesn't. What is behaviorism mean? Behaviorism is the study of how people behave in response to an external stimuli. For example, if I came and shared at a year, you might instinctively close your ears so there isn't a stimuli and that is a behavior based on that. Communism is about the study of how you think and feel based on a certain context. Gamification is more concerned about the behavioral aspect of it. How do people behave based on certain stimuli? This is a very popular experiment called the Skinner's experiments, where a mouse was kept inside cage. And every time the mouse was hungry, the mouse press the lever and food came out of it. The feedback was to the mouse was that if it presses the lever, food coming out of it. So the motivation for pressing the lever was hunger for the mouse. So every time it felt hungry, they press the lever and food came out of it. Now the experimental slightly modified by changing the feed back into that. Every time you press the lever, the food was not coming on. Sometimes the food came, sometimes it didn't. The reward was now variable. Therefore, the mouse's behavior based on this new feedback didn't change. The mouse earlier. Press the lever whenever it felt hungry. Now though the most kept pressing the lever toward the day because it didn't know whether the fool was going to come or not. There was variable reward aspect of a surprise element, the unknown. So what this shows is that when you observe behavior of animals or human beings, you tend to find that feedback loops are very powerful in changing their behavior. And that's what, that's one of the key drivers behind gamification. In the next class, we look at intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and how that ties into gamification as well. 5. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation: Hi everyone. In this class, let's understand the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and how they influence people. So what is intrinsic motivation if you're doing certain activity because it comes from within yourself that computing is if satisfaction because you create, truly need to do it, that's called intrinsic motivation. For example, I love reading books and therefore I read books is something that is intrinsic to you. There is no need for an external trigger to make you read that book. For example, many people say that, but I, driving cars is an intrinsic motivator. You are motivated to drive cars no matter what, nobody has to force you, are influenced into driving it. So research shows that intrinsic motivators are when the most powerful motivators. Now, there is another type of motivation, extrinsic motivation, where you do as an activity because there is a reward at the end of it. So you do something based on an expectation that there will be a reward at the end of it. For example, if you've got, if someone says that if you make a payment using Google Pay, you're going to get cashback. Are you more inclined to make a payment using Google Pay? But this kind of motivation is not as strong as intrinsic motivation. This could be easily bought out. For example, if there is a competing app which offers a higher cashback, you might actually be inclined to move to that other end because your motivation is driven by that external factor, which is that reward. Now, in the coming classes, we'll look at how some of the frameworks by Zika man or Hook Framework by Nir Eyal, use intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as part of that frameworks and explanations for how you can build habits or create intuitive, gamefied experiences. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 6. Can gamification work for you: So we have so far understood the psychology anterior behind him. If Qishan, Now let's come to the frameworks for gamification. But before that, let's try to answer the key question. Can gamification work for you? And how do you decide if gamification is that I agree to go. Now, if you go into this with a mindset that I want to build a game, I'm going to middle my application using gamification is definitely not going to work. That's a really wrong way of looking at it and it's built for failure. How you should be starting instead is the traditional product management, which is trying to understand users. What is it that my users one, what are their pain points? What are their needs, and what does my business object? Now, once you kind of figure that out, you tried to ideate ways you can solve the user's pain points. Now, gamification is one way of solving the user's needs. For example, if you find that your business objectives at tied to users lack of motivation and improving uses motivation would help not just the user but also your business, then that is a good candidate for gamification. So whenever there is a question of moderation and if you want to improve the motivation, then gamification can be considered. Now how do you determine what game elements to use and how do you determine what elements to use, what tropes to use, how do you design to design your game gamification system? That's what we're going to look at in the coming classes by looking at fuel gamification frameworks. 7. Where to start: Okay, Now that you've understood what is gamification and the psychological aspects of it. Where do you start? Now? You don't start by thinking about gamification first. You don't go into a product and think, Hey, I'm going to build a gamified product. That doesn't work that way. If you go with that mindset you built for failure. As always, with any product feature that you're looking to build, you should always start with the customer, what the customer, and understand your customer well defined the personas. Understand your user, understand the pain points, and then also understand your business objectives. And when to have a clear understanding of this, you might find that some of the pain points are related to motivation or user behavior. Under these circumstances, there are many ways you can solve these pain points, one of which could be through gamification. So your entry into there should always be with an hypothesis that you could solve this through gamification. And that's how you start. 8. Frameworks for Gamification: All right, Now that you found that your user pain points are related to either modification or user behavior. New thing gamification could be an effective way of solving it. The next step is to use one of the existing gamification frameworks and see how you can apply instead of reinventing the wheel. So in this class, we're going to talk about three popular frameworks for gamification. The first one is by Gabe, a command called saps. The next one is by Yochai Chao called talus, this framework. And finally, we'll look at the hooked framework by AL. Now Hook Framework is not necessarily look as a gamification framework. However, it's a habit forming framework where Nir Eyal discusses and proposes a framework through which you can build habits for users. And I think some of the principles that are talked about in their very relevant for gamification. And therefore, it is important as a product manager to understand Hook Framework well as well. So we're going to talk about all these three different frameworks and we're going to see how these can be applied as part of your product's lifecycle by taking examples and analyzing which elements of this framework actually fit into some of the existing products. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 9. SAPS Framework: Hey everyone in this class, Let's look at a saps framework by Gibbs. The command gives a command is a thought leader in gamification. And he came up with this framework for saps, which is an acronym for Status, Access, Power, and Stuff. He says that these are the elements which drive motivation. So these are effectively extrinsic motivations. So let's look at them one by one and we will also look at it through an example. Now the first one is stuff which you might have seen everywhere. So people are motivated if they receive stuff which are valuable to them. For example, cred uses this. So you make a credit card payments was app, you get points. So it gets tough, and therefore you are motivated to use SAM, same with Google Play. The more you use the Play Store, more absolute downloading pay store, you get points. So the assumption is you're motivated by that. But gave cecum and also thinks of this in terms of hierarchy. He says that similar to the Maslow's hierarchy, these motivations also have levels. So people doing something because they receive something is one of the least powerful method of motivation. For example, if there is a competing app that gives better rewards, they might very easily move there. So that's one of the least powerful ways of keeping people motivated in English in your application. But nonetheless, that's an effective way of using gamification. The next one is power. So when you give someone the power to do something, they become advocates of your platform. For example, you make someone a moderator. They feel a sense of power. So they feel happy and they feel more engaged and probably will be more engaged in your application. Facebook uses this by giving a superfan badge to people who are very active in the common section. And many applications use this as well. For example, they give the power to use it to invite their friends and family. So they have a sense of, hey, I have this power, I can use this. I tell, Hey, do you want an invitation for Gmail? Gmail when it was launched way back then, wasn't invite only application. Similarly, credit also is invite only. You can invite your friends to be part of trend. So power is another useful way of keeping people motivated and invested in your product. The third thing he talks about is access. People love getting access to something that was previously not available to them. The more points you get, you move up the level and you get more privileges. So you try to get access to that level. Companies, companies and use this as part of the product launch strategy where they make IT invite only, right? You can only get access to hay.com if you know someone who's part of here ready and they can invite you. So you are, you are constantly asking people for access to that. So Facebook, when it was launched initially was only available for select universities and therefore, excitement when you get into Facebook. So that is also another motivation factor. Finally, the last motivation factor is status. For example, many of the credit cards offer a premium credit card, which is a symbol of status. So they want to be associated with it and they force, they start using it and are more engaged with it, invested in him. Credit also uses this as part of its strategy where you can use credit application only you if you have a certain level of credit score. And therefore, not only you get access to it, only if you have a credit score, it's also a status symbol because you've thought of as a credit worthy person. And that's how some of these game elements can be effectively 01 into your product strategy. And you might start thinking about it if you want to engage users more. In the next class, we'll look at the top tells us frame will buy you a child who talks about eight elements, who talks about eight elements that influence user behavior. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next class. 10. Hooked Framework: That brings us to the last frame of that we're going to talk about, which is hooked framework by near EL, near a. A is a thought leader whose focus area is on how to build habit forming applications. To do that, Here's come up with a framework called hooked framework, which starts with internal trigger, action, variable rewards, and then investment. Let's look at what each of these are. And we'll also look at the example using cred, which is my favorite example. We'll also look at Credit Karma and see how they also use some of these examples. The first one is trigger, a trigger then be split into two different sections, which is internal trigger, an external trigger. And they are equaling to the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that we saw earlier. So internal trigger is the trigger that makes you use an application, so you have a need and therefore you are using that application. For example, when it comes to cred, I want to make credit card payments and they were used credit. So what this says is unique to have a strong use case, a utility as the first starting point. Without that, none of the gamification or none of the, you know, habit forming frameworks are really going to help your project succeed. So let's give that away with. So you need to come up with a really solid use case. Also uses internal trigger. So now I have used cred once. How can cred make me come back and again and again, that's where external triggers are going to be really useful. These are actions, these are triggers that force the user to use the application once more. So credit does that by notifying me of upcoming credit card those so that I will login to the application to check what are my payments which are upcoming. All of the applications were lower used this for example, Facebook uses notification to make you keep coming back if you don't log into Facebook a lot of the time you might even get an email from them saying you have two messages, so you'll have ten notifications spending for you. You have Credit Karma, for example, notifies me whenever there is a new credit score available for me. So many applications use notifications as an external trigger. So now I have logged into the application because there is an external trigger and how can I make them keep coming back more and more. So I can't keep notifying them of the same notification every time. Right. So that's going to be boring beyond a certain point. They're not going to care. So the third one is what is it? Simple action that you can make them do in your application so that they can get some kind of reward. Now, credit does that by enabling you to make payments. So you make payment and you get rewards, any form of coins. So you're more inclined to use credit now because every time you make an action that is a reward associated with it, just points. Now, simply giving points is not going to be really beneficial because it's going to be boring after some time. So you need to make it into a variable. So how do you make it variable? The amount of points that you're going to get is going to be unknown to you. So sometimes you might get 1000 points, sometimes you might get five points, and so on. So making it variable is a critical aspect of building habits that creates excitement, that makes users want to know, okay, if I make a payment, what is that? Remember that I'm going to get now. The last bit is investment. What does that investment that you can make the user do in your product? So that you can learn more about the user. And also the user becomes sticky. Because if you notice applications where we spend time providing more information about us or the applications where we might actually tend to stay longer thread does that by getting the user to provide their credit score, getting the user to provide their utility payments, and so on. So that now cred knows more about the user. Now. Now cred can offer loans to users as notifications. And now I'm more inclined to stay with cred because I'm getting more value. Because credit also knows more about me because I'll also spend some time investing in credit, some more invested Credit. Karma is another application is does this really well, so it knows more about me through my credit score and therefore it offers me newer credit card offers are newer loan offers. And in order to get an investment from me in terms of data task for me to update my address and my loan requirement and so on, so that it can now use that information to provide meaningful external triggers. So that's how this loop works and issued design it well, you can build habit forming applications quite soon because you will be more inclined to keep coming back to the application and keep using the application more and more. And your first thought when you want to use an application would most likely be the application which is typically followed all of this. So that's the hope frame book. And in the link below, I will also link how Google has used WHO framework very effectively in a product that they launched in India. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 11. Hooked Vs Other Frameworks: All right, Now that we've looked at all the different frameworks, which framework is my favorite? It's undoubtedly hope framework. It's because they are subtle differences between how some of the other frameworks approach influencing human behavior and how Hook Framework approaches human behavior. This can be very clearly understood by this graph that I'll use as often. So it has three elements. One is the trigger, and then on the y-axis we have motivation. On the x-axis we have ability. While most of the gamification frameworks focus on motivation and how to influence motivation near yards is that if you want to truly in influenza behavior, then all these three different elements need to work together. This is explained through very good example that he often uses, which is that of a phone. Let's say you have a form that is placed right next to you and you have a form called, Why would you not pick up that phone call? So one reason could be there is a private number, therefore, picking, answering that call. So here if we look at it, that was a trigger which is the phone ringing and ability was high. The phone was right next to you. But you didn't have the motivation to actually answer the call because you weren't sure who was at the end of the call. The other reason that you could not be answering this call could be that it is you're in a meeting and therefore, you don't do canines the call. So in this case, you have the trigger which is the phone call. You have high motivation, you want to answer that call. But the ability is less because you can't answer the call when so many people are there, so you have very low solubility. Now another reason why you may not be answering this call is if you form wasn't silent, so you didn't even know a phone call came. So in this case, you have high ability. That phone was right next to you. You're at high motivation. You want to answer a call, but he just didn't have that trigger and therefore you don't answer it. So if either of these three elements falls through, then your ability to influence user behavior also falls flat. I think that's a very powerful message and that's a very useful way, very good framework for looking at user behavior and approaching your product design. So I really like the hook framework. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Thank you. 12. Gamification for Acquisition: Hey everyone, welcome to this class. In this class we're going to look at how acquisition can be enabled to gamification. We're going to look at a few case studies by understanding how different products have used gamification to drive to increase their acquisition. So before doing that, let's first understand what is acquisition. Acquisition is the process of converting your lead into not just assigned abuser, but also an active user. So to put it simply, it's the process of a lead signing up and getting activated. Now what do we mean by activation? So let's say LinkedIn. Let's say your product is LinkedIn. You have 1000 users who actually signed up. You know, you've done variously generation mechanisms. For example, you've ran Google ads, Facebook ads, or even personal outreach. And now the user has decided to sign up into your service. But there is no real value of having 1000 users who are signed up, but don't do anything beyond that. So what is that first action that the user has to do in order to provide some amount of value to not just your business, but also to themselves. So when it comes to LinkedIn, that activity is creating a profile and adding the information that is relevant for the profile. So once the user does that, the user can be considered activated for different products. Could be different. For example, some products. It could be when someone purchases a specific feature or functionality as part of your product. So acquisition is not just signing up, but also getting activated. So let's now look at some of the examples where product companies have used gamification is to acquire users. First, let's look at, hey, hey came in a big way. Hey captured public imagination in the year 2020 when they launched and promised to re-imagine how emails it's done. So when they launch, they were launched as an invite only application until July. So invitation only is a favorite tool many product companies use In drive up curiosity and adoption. So what does this do? For one thing, this drives curiosity. If you look at the frameworks that we discussed earlier, the saps framework talks about status, access, power, and stuff. So in this, this process of Invite Only ketose to the element of access. So people want to have access, especially to something for which there is some gate involved. So there is an element of curiosity. So this appeals to that motivation of axis. Now if we look at the octal, is this framework, we have something called curiosity. So this, again, people are curious about what's at the other end of this, you know, invite only gait. So that drives up curiosity and further engagement. So this is the trope that hey, followed and it had a lot of traction and so on. And this is not something new invited by, hey, if you look at Gmail, Gmail was launched in the year 2004 and initially until about 2007 it was only an invite only product. So it goes again, having a Google invitation was a matter of pride and a privilege, and therefore, you send invitations to other people. So from the perspective of someone who's waiting for an invitation, this appeals to the this act of invitation. We're mainly focusing on elements of access as well as curiosity. However, if you look from the perspective of the user who's sending the invitation, we are now catering to a different emotion, which is that of power when it comes to this app framework. So I have the power of sending an invitation. So I want to exercise this power and send it to as many friends as possible. The other thing is epic meaning and calling that we saw in the octal is this framework. You want to do greater good to your friends. You have discovered a great service, which is Gmail. Now you want to spread the goodwill. So you now you want to send out as many images as possible. Both ways that is engagement and this will drive up acquisition and new users coming on to your service. So COD is another recent example. So this is a chord is a job search service that was recently launched in the UK. And this is also an invite only tool where the USP is you can directly message the hiring teams and discuss about job prospects. Now, many users who are in Codd who have experienced the product and are really happy with it, now want to spread the message and help some of those friends also get that job. So again, this appeals to that element of epic meaning and calling that we saw in the octal is this framework. Current is another good example of how it uses gamification for its acquisition strategies. So crit follows a slightly different strategy when it comes to credit. I think cred believes that they don't have the epic calling which might incentivize users to actually invite some of their friends so they offer rewards. So if I invite one of my friends, I'm gonna get rewarded with gems. And these rewards and not just fixed awards, they are variable rewards. I can redeem this gems for different gifts, but what gift I will get is something that is unknown. So they use a mixture of variable rewards and invitations to actually drive acquisition. 13. Gamification for Activation: So now let's look at activation. So we just talked about, it's not just important for you to get users to sign up for your service, but it's also important for them to get activated. So that's where credit is another good example. So what they do is once you get the invitation and you start on-boarding into the application, the first message that they actually give you is be part of a select few. So they bring in a sense of exclusivity, which is a great message to send to a news assigning am saying that you are going to be part of an elite club. So this appeals to that element of status in these apps frameworks. So if I'm part of cred, I am part of an elite club. There's a level of search state is involved. So that's a great way of ensuring that the user is also activated as well. Let's look another example of dropbox, how they used gamification to drive activation. So once a user is logged in, they want the user to go through the step of installing the application in their desktop, creating files and folders in it and thinking it with Dropbox application. So what do you do is, as the user is starting up, they are creating a quest saying that, you know, once you complete this quiz, you'll become a Dropbox grew. Like we said, this is appealing to the users need for achievement. This is a neat little way of activating users through gamification. We didn't have that. It's going to be just a set of steps which uses without the fall. So they need that intrinsic motivation to actually install Dropbox. Now here though it's more about extrinsic motivation, Dropbox is using game elements to motivate users into doing things that Dropbox really wants. Now, another good example of activation is LinkedIn. So LinkedIn has this profile strength indicator, which neatly tells you how strong is your profile. Now, by visually looking at it, you want to improve your profile strength. So how can you improve your profile strength? You need to provide additional information. So this goes into new areas remote, where this is an external trigger that is making user do a simple action. And the reward is an improvement in the profile strength. And the action also leads to use as providing more information in the form of data investment. So using the data we can further provide meaningful triggers for the user. So this is a great, simple, but great example of how the hook framework can be used as part of your product design. So those were all the examples that, those were all the examples and case studies that I want to talk about. How different companies are using game elements as part of their acquisition and activation strategies. So as you saw, these products are across domains, across various business, having various business models. Once you understand the motivation psychology behind users, you can apply game gamification for any kind of uses. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 14. Gamification for Engagement: This class. In this class, Let's look at how gamification can be used to increase engagement within your product. By looking at a few case studies. Let's say, let's go back to LinkedIn again. So you have acquired new users, you are activated them, they've created their profile and they're available on LinkedIn. But that isn't just enough. You want them to search for jobs, apply for jobs, you know, start learning in the LinkedIn University and so on. So there needs to be engagement by the user in your platform. That's when it's going to be meaningful. So that's when it's going to be meaningful. So how do we get users to experience the core value of the product as often as possible. That's the problem companies are trying to solve when it comes to increasing engagement of users. Now, before we get into the details, let's try and understand the levels of engagement. So there are so many different ways in which you can classify levels of engagement. But what I like to do is keep it simple in terms of power user, normal user, at-risk user. So over the power uses, power users are those users who really like your platform are very engaged with the platform already and are quite experts themselves, so they don't need a lot more Nanjing Then what is the learning necessary? Normally uses are those who use the product or service as and when they need, they're quite normally in the usage. At risk uses are those who are not as engaged as you would like. And they may drop in and drop out of the product or service if you're not too careful. So the goal is to ensure that the normal users don't fall into the at-risk category and the address users don't eventually fall out of your product. Now how did you do that? So in order to increase engagement and you can do a few things. One is I can add more features that makes the product more interesting and useful for all of the users. Or you can make existing features and try to increase them and improve them and see what didn't work for the existing users and try to improve them. Or you can increase the number of sessions. What do we mean by that? Let's say you are a user of Facebook and you only log into Facebook once a month. That is beneficial for Facebook, is it? So that's why you want to increase the number of sessions that you actually, number of times that you actually log into Facebook. The next one is increased duration of sessions. Let's say you log into Facebook 10 times in a day, but you just spend a couple of minutes. Again, that isn't really useful for Facebook. Facebook wants you to spend as many hours and minutes in your site as possible. So you want to increase the number of duration of their sessions. So essentially, you want the growth to be high, but it's shown to be low through by increasing engagement. So there are a few different metrics that companies usually used to track to see engagement. One is daily active users, or monthly active users of weekly active users. So these are frequency-based metrics. The other way other one is revenue-based metrics, which is monthly recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue. The third one is, you know, persona to frequency revenue, for example, when it comes to add B and B, there are two kinds of persona's. One is the host who lets out their property and the other one is the traveler who rents the property. So the frequency of usage of the Airbnb platform, the expectation for a host might be different from the expectation that you have from the traveler. So let's now look at how different companies tackling engagement problem using gamification. First, let's look at cred, which is one of my favorite examples, which you might have understood by now. So cred uses notifications. So whenever you have a payment that is upcoming, it uses notification and prompts. So these are external triggers which cred uses to prompt users to login to the application and start making the payment. So now they don't just stop with that. They also at the end of the payment, they give you rewards. Now why did they give you rewards? That's to increase engagement further because your bill payments or your credit card payments are going to come only once a month. Now what, what, what can use this do inside credit? Rest of the days. So that's what they do to reward. So they give rewards and these rewards can be redeemed at different points in time within that application for different products. So one, you can get cash backs or you can use those coins to purchase some of the products within your platform. So credit uses these different techniques to increase engagement of users in their platform. Let's look at another example. This is box. So box is a file storage application, so they offer free trial for users. Now let's say, you know, they've offered seven day free trial and there is a likelihood of some of the users falling out from the seven-day free trial because they didn't really use it. You want to keep these users as long as service as possible so that they can discover the value proposition of your service. So box does this by telling them, giving them some tasks, by doing which they can increase the free trial that is available to them. So once a user is onboarded into the system, they using gamification to engage users to keep doing one or the other activity, but promising and reward. Let's also look at Airbnb. So Airbnb gives notification telling you, you know, you have six hours left to book the home in Barcelona. So it's a external trigger which Airbnb uses to get users to start CAM use their platform again. And the other one is a reminder that they also send an email. So there are multiple ways Airbnb uses to get users to login to the platform. Again, Facebook is a very, very common example of a new engagements. So they use notifications to ensure that you keep coming back to check how many friends you have, how many likes you actually got that you spend a lot more time in the platform. If you don't log into Facebook for many, many weeks, they do send e-mail notifications as well, but they don't tell you what the notification is about so that you will be curious and be logging into the platform. So what is retention? At the end of the day, you want to not just engage users, but also retain users as long-term customers. So retention is essentially an output of acquisition and engagement. So you need to use acquisition strategies to get more users onto your platform. And then you need to continuously engage them in a meaningful way so that they can discover the value proposition which will end them, end up in them being retained as long-term customers. So these were all the examples of effective use of game elements in order to increase engagement by different companies like Facebook, box, cred, Airbnb and so on. So thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 15. Gamification in a B2B context: Let's look at some of the B2B use cases for gamification. And some of the examples that we've seen so far are primarily in the B2C space, but gamification doesn't necessarily have to restrict itself into the B2C, say space. Many companies are used came elements as part of their B2B business use cases as well. So one example is slack. Slack wants to convert the trial users into full-time paid users. So how does this grassland do it? So slack, slack is offered to many small-time businesses who initially try out Slack by getting into their lowest year plan, which is freemium plan. But slack keeps account and tells them that, Hey, you know what, if you reach another 16 thousand messages, your limits are going to hit. So provides at progress indicator as an external trigger to the decision-makers within Slack. And once that limit is hit, there is a wall that tells that you cannot search for past historical messages. So what element of gamification that this is addresses is the, if you look at the analysis framework, there was an element of loss avoidance. People have loss avoidance as a higher sense of motivation. You fear that when it's needed most you may not be actually be able to find the message that you really need. And therefore, in order to avoid the loss, you upgrade to better plan. So this is a good use case of how, given how game mechanics can be used in a B2B setup as well. The other example is reference, so similar to how we saw in white only in the B2C context. So here, airbnb uses referral rewards to help their hosts invite other hosts into the platform. So hosts are essentially small-time business owners who own a set of property and they use Airbnb to offer the property to prospect to client. Now another one is driving product engagement. So you have a, Let's say you have an API product that you're offering to multiple small-time businesses who can consume that API and build further products out of it. Now, Box uses community platform to drive engagement within the developers so that they can help themselves. So these developers are part of small businesses who want to use Dropbox API to build better products. So how do they drive engagement? They appeal to use a psychology of epic meaning and epic calling that we saw in octal is this framework by identifying the most helpful users. So another good example is how progress kind of quest model is used by Amazon for their consulting partners. So Amazon has multiple tiers for their partners. And as a new partner, you have to do a certain set of activities in order for you to level up and move up the Amazon partner tier. So this is one another simply effective use of gamification as a partner, you know what you need to do. And once you achieved a certain level, there is this drive to achieve and move up a certain level. And the wording of advanced in Premier itself gives you a status symbol. So if you're a premier partner for Amazon, that is something that's going to be a piece to status and power. And it could be a good driving force for ensuring your partners to all of the things that you really want them to do. So and they can move up and become a better partner. So what can gamification do for you? So this is, this is one of the metrics that I got from the box product manager who when presenting some of their achievements in gamifying their product, has shown that gamification as driven product engagement by 22 percent, increased trial conversion by 32 percent, reduce the churn by 5% increase revenue bearing person. So if used smartly, if used effectively, gamification can truly transform B2B products as well. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 16. The Manipulation Matrix Morality Questions: So another thing that Nir Eyal often talks about is about the ethical question behind influencing user behavior. If you look at it, you know all the game design techniques in gamification or the hoop frame of all, talk about how do you influence user behavior. And that's a very powerful trade to have. You want to use that power in a more meaningful ethical way instead of using it for back. For example, if you go to the casino, all of the tropes, all of the tropes about points, Mystery, surprise rewards are all used, but then you end up being addicted and losing a lot of money. Is that really a good habit? So nearly talks about the motivation matrix for checking if the product that you're building is actually a good product is ethically right or not. So it works this way. So you need to ask, as a builder of a product, you need to ask this question yourself. So what does the manipulation matrix look like? It essentially talks about two elements. On one hand, you have the question of does they make or use the product themselves. On the other hand, you have the question of, is it actually improving the user's life in a meaningful way? Based on that, there are four different quadrants in which your product today the fall, You can either be a dealer, a peddler, an entertainer, or a, or a facilitator. Ideally, you'd want to be in the facilitated area. You don't want to be any of those grade? Yes. Because think of a drug data, some a someone who doesn't use the product themselves and whoever uses a product are also not improving their life in any way. So if you want to truly make meaningful, in fact, in life, you want to be on the facilitator quadrant. This framework could act as a good check for you to see if the habits that you're building, the behaviors that you're influencing as part of your product and service is actually morally or ethically right eye you, treading a fine line. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class. 17. When to stop: Hey everyone in this class, Let's look at when do we stop. So we should look at gamification as another hypothesis. So you have a hypothesis that the success of your product or your business strategy is dependent on user's motivations and influencing their behavior. And therefore, one means of influencing that is through gamification and therefore you're building it. Now. Therefore, it is important for you to constantly measure if your, if your metrics, if your objectives are met by meaningfully tracking the metrics. For example, if our objective was to increase user engagement, we need to track, after introduction of gamification, has a user engagement increased if our objective was to increase use of adoption after introducing introduction of gamification, has the number of people who have adopted AI platform increased. So when we find that none of the metrics are actually influenced by these game elements, we should be courageous enough to agree that gamification probably was not the right way and be ready to pivot taking with game elements when it's clearly not, the user behavior would be, would actually be far more detrimental. So when do you stop? When your metrics show that gamification is not really achieving your objective, you need to stop, which isn't radically different from what you might otherwise do for other features. But I just wanted to put that out in anyway. Thank you for listening and hope to see you in the next class.