In my last post, It’s All in the Play – Improving User Engagement Through Social Gaming, I looked briefly at the rapidly growing popularity of social gaming. Now let’s take a look at the underlying principles of their design and examine how they potentially can be translated into products aimed at professional markets.

Guarav Mishra, a marketing consultant and a former teacher of social media at Georgetown, distills the principles from social game design to seven principles.

1. Social Proof: Sign up new users and encourage existing users to participate more by showcasing active friends and friends-of-friends.
2. Small-Step Stages: Design for ‘short, but often’ use so that time-poor or attention-poor users can participate regularly.
3. Statistics: Show dynamic stats for each desired user behavior to add an element of currency to it.
4. Status: Reward desired user behavior with points that add up to visible reward levels that the users can show-off.
5. Sharing: Design for sharing so that users are prompted to broadcast or narrow-cast their activity stream to their friends at each step.
6. Social Capital: Design for “giving” so that users can do a series of favors for their friends.
7. Surprise: Design to capture the curiosity of users and create unexpected moments of delight.

These same principles have the potential to be applied in whole or in part to any product created – even products for professional markets. One area that clearly lends itself to the application of these principles is e-learning. There already is a significant amount of literature that demonstrates how video or computer games can effectively promote learning. However, computer game development as applied to professional learning has not been commercially practical because of the relatively high cost of development as well as difficulty in developing programs accredited with professional regulatory bodies.

Cost effective possibilities
But social gaming principles can potentially be introduced to e-learning more cost effectively. For example:

• Performance statistics on fast-paced questions can be maintained and statistics shared across peer groups.
• Lifetime correct answers/points can be accumulated to award the user with items to adorn their virtual office walls with, or
• Similarly designed “badges” that reinforce feedback on their cumulative performance.

The possibilities for user reinforcement are endless but as we explore this we need to draw from what customers’ value that aligns with what success means in their profession.

e-Learning for CPAs
As we think about the future of e-learning for CPAs, we are starting to look at how some of these social gaming principles can be incorporated to improve the engagement level within their learning environment. Finding creative ways to incorporate these principles in non-game product design can promote usage and ultimately product retention. Yet a challenge in customer-centric design is that the customer is not likely to identify these type of features as a need, per se – so we need to go much deeper in understanding our customer’s behaviors and make sure we fully understand how some of the psychological motivations encompassed by these principles translate as part of the customers usage of the product(s).

Right now there are more questions than answers – but by taking a few cues from web game designers and learning consultants – creating more engaging professional learning product models may be just around the corner.

Thought leaders like Jesse Schelling, a former creative director at the Disney Virtual Reality Studio, paint an interesting picture of how games are beginning to shape and drive behavior as well as share their insights as to where technology and society will continue to evolve in this regard. Check out parts of this video for a designer’s perspective of this evolution and how gaming may continue to transcend into the real world.