Gamification Mechanic Monday: Tutorial
In a game you typically find that when you play it for the first time, visual prompts will teach you step-by-step what actions you need to take to get started. Every time a new element is introduced the same visual arrow pointing or short video animation shows you how it works, occasionally you will also receive text or narrated instructions.
With a lot of enterprise applications, the tutorial element is lacking and replaced by a help function. When it comes to actual business processes both employees and customers are often left to their own devices on how they pick them up. On-boarding to a game is essential, yet in real life we expect people to just hit the ground running even when it is not necessarily a given that people would know what to do.
Because of the step-by-step approach most people will try out a game and it effectively sets them up for success and early positive reinforcement feedback to keep going. The early levels as you are learning tend to be relatively easy. I am really not sure if I ever experienced this kind of approach in a work environment. I definitely know as a manager I have been guilty of letting new hires fend for themselves when in reality they didn’t know what they were doing and were afraid to ask in fear of looking incompetent.
When forgetting instructions in a game, your attraction of female players reduces significantly, if they can’t figure out how it works in a short space of time, they will click away and potentially even delete the application if it isn’t easy to learn how to use.
Where have you experienced a tutorial to onboard you either for enterprise software or a business process?
