In a rising flood of apps, how should you make your app stand out? What makes users come back to app? What changes the curious user to a loyal fan? As marketers, should we redefine what makes meaningful and immersive engagement on a mobile screen? How does gamification give you an edge?

The Chief Consulting Officer of 2359 Media, Mr. Chen Kai Wei, will give a talk on mobile marketing strategies. He will share about industry insights as well as his personal experience.  Join Kaiwei as he discusses the challenges of creating mobile products and the potential pitfalls that you can apply to your own experience. Gain a deeper understanding of the principles and concepts that make good mobile design with insight from 2359 Media’s studio. Things will be discussed in the event are:

A million dollar lesson:

Lessons to help you avoid major pitfalls in developing your mobile strategy

Rethink the purpose – Incentivising behaviour

Case studies: Retail and Tourism
Case studies: Education and Animation

Rethink your idea – Simplicity is key

Case Studies: SGMalls and DatingGoWhere app

Rethink the phone – The evolution from a tool to an extension of oneself.

Case Studies: Media Content

Event Details:

Date: Thursday, 31th May 2012

Time: 7:30PM – 9:00PM

Venue: 13, 111 Somerset Road #01-02 Singapore 238164

Pricing: SGD15 (or SGD20 at the door). Your ticket includes 1 free drink of your choice.

Chen Kai Wei,
Chief Consulting Officer at 2359 Media Pte Ltd

Kaiwei set up the mobile consultancy arm 2359 Media and is responsible for driving the engineering and sales prowess of the company. His portfolio of clients includes large organisations like CapitaLand, Singtel, Sentosa, ESPN, FarEast, Ministry of Manpower, Ministry of Health, among others.

Kaiwei was honoured First Class Honors in the Bachelors of Computer Engineering by the National University of Singapore. Versatile and entrepreneurial throughout his experiences, he began as a user experience designer and developer in Silicon Valley. He later co-founded Russ-Net Technologies where he managed a team of engineers and designers in developing a social networking site targeted at sports enthusiasts. Before joining 2359 Media, he was focused on enterprise and consultative sales for business management solutions in BMC.

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2359 Media would like to thank all of you for coming down to our office. We were happy to make new friends and we hope it was also a happy journey for you.  Keep in touch, friends!

2359 Media is participating in WalkAbout Singapore on this coming Friday. Please refer to http://walkaboutsg.com/about/ for more event information. We are right here waiting for you this friday!

By   Kai Lin

Let’s recap.

B = MAT (working together at the same moment)

There are 3 types of Triggers, 6 measures of Ability and 3 Motivators.

The 3 classes of Motivations are:

Pain/Pleasure
Social Rejection/Social Acceptance
Fear/Hope

There is a huge body of research on motivations, intrinsic and extrinsic, as well as categorizations, models, etc. I will not cover motivation in detail for two reasons – firstly, it’s too large and has too many arguments to be pieced in a coherent manner, and secondly, Fogg does make it clear that in most circumstances, A > M.

So if you have done your audience-targeting well, you will be able to understand their motivations (even if only on a surface level) and tweak your copy/rewards to create built-in motivation. However, we should focus more on ability because that is an area that we have more control over and will have a higher impact.

So that’s the end of Fogg and his Behavioural Model.

Gamification and Mobility Solutions 3 | Mobile App development

The following series will cover rewards, schedules and how to shape user’s behaviour. This is pretty much what most people do with points and badges and the like.

Skinner’s Schedules of Reinforcement (Shaping)

Use this as a guide to build your reward system. Do use positive reinforcement (giving a carrot) instead of negative reinforcement (taking away the cane). Do not use punishment. This is because response always increases with rewards and decreases with punishments. This will affect the entire user experience. We always want to avoid negative emotions within our solutions.

E.g. If our goal is to get our users to punch tigers and not cats:

-       We will reward them with a Medal of Bravery when they punch a tiger (positive reinforcement) - use this one

-       We will remove one of their painful spiked shackles when they punch a tiger (negative reinforcement)

-       We will punch them in the nuts if they punch a cat (positive punishment)

-       We will take back one of their medals when they punch a cat (negative punishment)

In common marketing application:

Positive reinforcement – Loyalty programmes

Negative reinforcement – ‘Remove ad’ in app purchase

Positive punishment – Late fees for credit cards/loans

Negative punishment – Removal of customization features if insufficient credit is available

Pointless punishment – Clippy | Gamification | Mobile App development

Skinner’s Box

Skinner placed a simple-minded creature (rat, pigeon, american) in a controlled environment, a box that was usually sound-proof and light-proof. This box was called the operant conditioning chamber and was used to study operant conditioning and classical conditioning.  Operant conditioning is more relevant so this is the last time you will be seeing the phrase ‘classical conditioning’.

The simple-minded creature was primed to conduct a simple action such as depressing a lever (by taunting it and questioning the lever’s self-worth), or pecking on a button. What is of interest here is the way the creature’s behaviour changed when Skinner messed around with the ratio of reward interval: action: reward.

It is necessary to introduce 3 terms here that you will encounter should you read on (or, if you are an amazing human, Google more about conditioning).

Reinforcer: The stimulus/result of conducting a specific behaviour. In our case, it refers to a reward. With reference to the first set of examples given above, the reinforcer is a Medal of Bravery.

Contingency: The set of rules that dictate when users receive their rewards. This is the Schedule of Reinforcement.

Response: The required behaviour. In above, it’s punching children.

Look at them. They’re just asking for it | Gamification | Mobile App development

So Skinner (and later, a bunch of other people) messed about with rats in boxes and discovered that you can manipulate behaviour, interaction frequency, intensity, and make players develop specific game-playing habits.

There are 2 types of contingencies – ratios and intervals.

Ratio schedules give players rewards when they perform a fixed number of actions. Interval schedules give rewards when a fixed period of time has passed.

In general there are 4 basic types of schedules that are commonly used.

1.    Fixed ratio schedule

Gamification and Mobility Solutions 3 | Mobile App development

Example:

Medal of Bravery given every 10^th tiger punched. Medal of Infinite Valour given every 100^th tiger punched.

Leads to:

Long Pause -> Sharp intense burst of activity -> Reward given -> Long Pause (repeat)

Pros:

During the pause, players are more comfortable exploring actions outside the mission. E.g. a shopping app rewards players for every 10^th purchase. Assuming the player only bursts into a flurry of shopping activity at the 7^th purchase, he can leisurely explore the other app features (ads, discounts, etc) between the 1^st and 6^th purchase.

Commonly used to train young children and animals because it is effective for the initial stages of learning behaviour.

Cons:

Pause may lead to players quitting. The higher the number of actions required, the longer the pause. E.g. in the same shopping app, the 10^th purchase unlocks a free toaster and the 100^th rewards you with a home theater. Most players will give up before reaching the 100^th mark.

Because this is better than any home theater | Gamification | Mobile App development

2.   Variable ratio schedule

Gamification and Mobility Solutions 3 | Mobile App development

Example:

Some tigers carry Medals of Bravery, some don’t. Therefore you have to punch an undetermined number of tigers before receiving a medal.

Leads to:

Steady flow of activity at a reasonably high rate (though not as high as during a fixed ratio activity burst)

Pros:

No pauses. Players keep playing because there is a possibility of a reward with every action. A lot of adventure/RPG games use this schedule. E.g. Collect 10 Horns of Virility by slaying the Red Rambunctious Reindeer in the forest nearby. While the number of collectible items is fixed, not all reindeers carry these items so the number of reindeer murdered is not fixed. Also, crafting success. It’s very much what the slot machine uses (in addition to making the size of reward variable). And we all know how addictive the slot machine is.

Cons:

None in particular

As virile as virile can get | Gamification | Mobile App development

3.    Fixed interval schedule

Gamification and Mobility Solutions 3 | Mobile App development

Example:

A medikit is dropped into the field exactly 5 minutes after the last medikit was used.

Leads to:

Pause -> Gradual increase -> Reward (Repeat)

Pros:

Similar to fixed ratio. However, I hypothesize that because we have less control over the passage of time as compared to the number of actions required in a fixed ratio schedule, a fixed interval schedule is better at steadily building hype and increasing anticipation.

For a good real life experiment, borrow someone’s young child, order Mac’s and tell the kid that he will get as many nuggets as he likes if he greets the deliveryman at the door in 15 minutes. Assuming that this child has grasped the concept of time, he will possibly proceed to ruin your house for the first 5 minutes, seemingly oblivious to the promise of infinite nuggets. However, as the minutes pass, he will get more and more excited and frequently stop maniacally destroying precious objects to run to the door and check for the deliveryman. By the 13^th minute, the child would probably be panting heavily, wailing and hanging onto the doorframe (before breaking it).

Cons:

Same problem as fixed ratio schedule. Pause correlates to low motivation and may lead to player dropout.

They are in a desert because he destroyed everything | Gamification | Mobile App development

4.    Variable interval schedule

Gamification and Mobility Solutions 3 | Mobile App development

Example:

A medikit is dropped into the field immediately after it was used, 5 minutes after or half an hour later.

Leads to:

Sustained activity

Pros:

Similar to variable ratio. An example of this in an RPG (or IRL) is fishing.

Cons:

At a slower pace and at a lower activity level than variable ratio schedule because there is less perceived control. It is kind of like entering a lottery versus playing a slot machine.

To read an explanation from someone who actually designs games and can write intelligibly, please see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php

Note:

Do be consistent with the type and ‘size’ of the rewards you provide your users. It should increase or plateau but never decrease (unless you are trying to get users to reduce/kill a behaviour).

In a very famous and humorous experiment, a monkey was placed in a cage with a lever. The monkey pulled the lever and received a piece of lettuce. The monkey was happy, ate the lettuce and pulled the lever several more times to get more lettuce. Then this one time, he was given a grape. The monkey was insanely happy (because who doesn’t like grapes), clapped his little monkey hands and ate the grape. He pulled the lever another time. But this time, he received a piece of lettuce. The monkey went nuts and threw the lettuce at the scientist in the cage with him.  Amusingly, when the experiment was repeated with a second monkey shackled to the cage (just watching, not doing anything to affect the magic produce machine), the angry monkey began attacking the second monkey in blind irrational rage.

Moral of the story, don’t break expectations, do not create negative behaviour contrast effects.

By  Kai Lin

Recap: There are 3 things that need to occur concurrently for behaviour to occur – Motivation, Ability and Trigger.

We need to make the target behaviour easier to do. Therefore, we must make it simple. We can do this by either training your target audience to give them higher ability to perform a certain task – as frequently seen in forced labour/athletics. Or we could increase simplicity by reducing the degree and amount of resources required to perform a task.

Here is a commercial from a brand that centers their entire brand strength on increasing simplicity for their users: http://youtu.be/9YkR4Xg9Ubw

“Simplicity is a function of your scarcest resources at that moment” – BJ

There are 6 resources that affect the simplicity of performing a specific behaviour. These are, in no certain order:

Time / Money / Physical effort / Brain cycles / Social deviance / Non-routine

Try to think of these 6 as finite resources for your target audience. Take for example, time. If you require your audience to sit leisurely and stare into space for half-an-hour, time (as a resource) is abundant for someone has nothing on their schedule on a lazy Sunday morning (i.e. me) thus making the task easy. However, for a doctor working in an ER on the night of a tragic widespread man-eating puppy attack, time is a scarce resource and the task becomes very difficult to perform.

It was a confusingly cuddly and horrific day for humanity

As such:

- If the task requires more money than you can afford, it is difficult

- If the task requires more physical effort than you can muscle, it is difficult

- If the task requires more thinking (brain cycles) than you are accustomed to, it is difficult

- If the task requires you to do something that makes you stand out from society (deviate from the social norm) either in a good or bad light, it is difficult

- If the task requires you to break from routine, it is difficult

This all seems like common sense, however it is a good checklist to use when designing an efficient user experience. We often assume things to be easier to do than they actually are so it is good to take the task apart and view it from the angle of resources required.

Now, it is pretty obvious that every individual’s wealth of these 6 resources is different. Therefore, it is rather impossible to tailor our solutions to suit every user’s true ability. What we can do however is manipulate our user’s perceived simplicity based on assumed norms.

For example, if I am trying to get people to donate money to a charitable cause, there are several methods I can use to increase simplicity for the donors. I could use a clear transparent collection box that is half full to decrease social deviance so you will donate because ‘lots of people do it anyway’. I could also ask for a mere $1 every day for a month instead of $30 immediately to reduce your perceived monetary commitment. I could arrange to deduct a donation when you tap your ezlink card at the MRT so it becomes part of your routine.

In this article, I do not allow the paragraphs to go longer than 7 lines. By visually breaking up the text, you would perceive the article easier to consume. Additionally, by adding silly pictures and examples, you perceive the content to be less serious and therefore requiring less brain cycles.

Now, it is time for a visual model.

For me, I estimate the simplicity of a task by using the diagram below:

Gamification and Mobility Solutions | Mobile App development | example 3

This particular model is based on this whole Gamification 101 exercise and your perceived ability. For you, as a target audience, you would perceive an educational exercise to require these resources in decreasing order; Time, Brain Cycles, Non-routine, Money, Social Deviance, and Physical Effort. As a designer of this experience, I would need to reduce the perceived consumption of time and brain cycles primarily (still working on this).

All that being said, a high degree of simplicity is not always a good thing to have.

Depending on your target group, the consumption of certain resources is more enjoyable the more difficult it becomes. For example, a professional body builder would better appreciate a challenging workout programme that pushes him beyond the physical effort he is used to instead of one that is at a level he is comfortably capable of. If this series was about how to differentiate between a desk and a lamppost, it will not be enjoyable for you because you appreciate a higher cognitive simulation than that.

In application, it is useful to break up the task you want your target audience to perform into behaviour chains. This was mentioned briefly in last week’s Facebook triggers example. By breaking a task into a chain of smaller tasks, you will be able to pinpoint where difficulty arises and place triggers at each point to propel your user along.

Next week, MOTIVATION!

By  Kailin

The concept of Gamification is so new that hasn’t been included in popular dictionaries such as Longman and Cambridge. If you do a quick search, you can see that Gamification means the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. We have seen enough overnight fame in the app world. How do simple mobile applications such as Draw Something and Instagram become so successful? What are the mechanisms behind their success?  From today, we are going to publish a series of articles, providing insights on how to use gamification techniques to help with mobile solutions designing.

Part 1 – Fogg’s and Triggers

Gamification and Mobility solutions | Fogg Behavior Model

Facilitator type triggers are suitable for users with high motivation and low ability; spark type triggers are suitable for users with low motivation and high ability; signal type triggers are suitable for users with high motivation and high ability.

To illustrate appropriate trigger usage, let’s take the example of getting a dog to walk to you (behaviour). You have 3 dogs – the puppy, the old dog, the quadriplegic puppy with steely determination and a gut-wrenching origins story.

- The puppy has low motivation (he doesn’t want to entertain you, strange human, when there are butterflies to chase outside) and high ability (all limbs are functioning and he’s pretty accomplished at walking). Getting him to walk to you is best triggered by waving a delicious piece of liver at him (Spark).
- The old dog has high motivation (he loves you so so much, magic treats person) and high ability (like the puppy, just older). Getting him to walk to you is best triggered by calling him to come (Signal).
- The quadriplegic puppy has high motivation (“I can do it! I believe in myself!” says the quadriplegic puppy) and low ability (none of his limbs are functioning). Getting him to walk to you is best triggered by building a mech walker for the little guy (Facilitator).

Facebook is good place to look for effective trigger usage. Generally the behaviour chain to get you completely hooked on Facebook should be something like this:

- Get users to log in
- Get users to link to more friends
- Get users to keep coming back
- Sit back and watch users get obsessed

Gamification and Mobility Solutions | Facebook example 1

This is mostly a Facilitator to get you back to Facebook.

Gamification and Mobility Solutions | Facebook example 2 |

You will see this trigger when you are already using Facebook. To get you to connect to more friends, Facebook uses a Facilitator (the one-click find friends function) to make it simpler for you. The copy suggests social acceptance/inclusion, which is built in motivation.

Gamification and Mobility Solutions | Facebook example 3

Tags are amazing at bringing you back to Facebook by motivating you to return to check it out. Notifications that you have been tagged act as Signals to get you to visit Facebook once more.

Fogg suggests that designing behavioural change should follow this system:

Gamification and Mobility Solutions | Behavior Change

Next week, ABILITY.