Feminine Gamification Viewpoint: Real life benefits
When investing in solutions ladies are looking for real life benefits. In terms of gamification what we need to point out is how applying experiences, designing for specific behavioural interaction etc is of benefit to a real world problem. For the ladies it is the holistic experience that counts, so you want to be thinking of an end to end solution as opposed to adding a few badges or rewards.
I had a really interesting discussion to this effect with a potential client, who had been speaking with a number of gamification experts. He relayed back to me that I probably challenged him more than most on the why did he want to add gamification to his project and what kind of customer experience he was trying to create. What he had in mind originally was a soft layer of points and badges. I do believe they served a purpose, but I didn’t want to start there, because his main aim was to engage with business ladies. We went on to discuss the different kind of priorities for ladies, which may cause differences in decision making and behaviour, which ended up narrowing the target audience, but also increased the way of fine-tuning his service and equally gamification integration.
Some of the starting point questions to ask when you are aiming at the ladies for engaging with your project are in my view as follows:
– What is your service, project, app giving me as a user that will make my life easier, better, more enhanced?
– What end-to-end experience do you want to create?
– What kind of lady will find your product/solution useful?
– Is your product, solution easy to use?
– Would ladies value the gamification elements you are planning for?
These are just a few starting questions, but they are some of the ones when you come from a male viewpoint that you may naturally overlook. The reason for this is not ignorance, but rather a different way of experiencing life in general. Men are more feature driven as opposed to benefit driven. When there is a problem a man will want to fix it, for a woman, she also wants it fixed, but in the best possible way and easy to use with a consideration for her preferences and aesthetics is nearly as important. So in short us ladies are way harder to please, so when designing gamification beware!
What other questions would you ask to make sure yo are covering all the needs for the ladies?
