Gamification Mechanic Monday: Building confidence
Confidence is typically made up of knowledge about what you are doing and trust in your own ability to do it or learn it. In games you will often find simple instructions and early wins when a new mechanic is introduced in order to build confidence that you as a player can still continue to play the game and master additional techniques. The tutorial arrow demonstrating the technique required or a a run through environment helps you gain the essential skill, practising with the same tool for a few following levels then embeds that new skill and as you grow your mastery of the game thinking about how to do a partial move is significantly reduced in favour of looking at which tools or combinations could be best to overcome challenges.
In business software, we often only ever receive a technical manual about it’s functionality and in a recent CRM acquisition I found that the manual is missing in favour of some videos supposedly helping you get started. None of it is easy to understand nor searchable. I managed to get started in using the CRM software, however I am also very conscious of the fact that I am very likely not making the most of it.
Gamification of software on-boarding would help in overcoming these initial hurdles, from getting a mission to import my connections, to tagging them into list and then building up funnels and campaigns. Basically looking at what the user very likely hopes to achieve with your system and breaking it down into bite-size steps and then introducing fun missions that help the person get started.
Where have you seen confidence building game mechanics in business software?
