Case Study: WomenLEAD

WomenLEAD is a startup that’s disrupting and revolutionizing mentorship with an online personal advisory board platform for women. WomenLEAD wanted to use Gamification to make sure their users become active community members engaged in seeking/providing personal and professional advice from/to other women.

Building a Gamification strategy for WomenLEAD was challenging for many reasons, but most challenging of all was the fact that this platform was targeting a very specific audience – businesswomen.

While games are played by both men and women, there is a stark difference in what types of games and gamification approaches men and women prefer. Studies have shown that while men prefer games that emphasize competition, mastery, destruction, violence, trial and error, and spatial puzzles (amongst others), women prefer emotion, nurturing, real world connection, learning by example, and dialog and verbal puzzles. In general women represent 42% of all video-gamers, while for mobile and social games women are the majority in the range of 60-70%. (source: enterprise-gamification.com)

Studies and statistics are great. They help us generalize certain a certain “Truth” about the world which can guide our approach to a specific problem. However, take these generalizations with a grain of salt and look for what’s right for your users. In the case of WomenLEAD, we wanted to know if our businesswomen played games and if they did what games were they playing and why. We decided to conduct several focus groups to get some answers to these questions.

In an age of sophisticated data mining technologies, it’s amazing what you can learn simply by talking to your users. For example, we learned that many of our users play casual games on Facebook and almost all of them play Farmville. That’s not surprising because 53-percent of Zynga players are women between 25 and 44 (source). However, when we asked the women in our focus group why they played Farmville and what kept them coming back, they told us that it was finding out a friend had visited their farm and helped them out that made their playing experience meaningful. If you haven’t played Farmville, visiting a friend’s farm and helping them out (like watering their crops) is one way of earning credit in the game. But for the women playing Farmville, it wasn’t about the credits, it wasn’t about competition (i.e., who can earn the most credits), it was about Relatedness, Acknowledgement, and Embellishment.

Relatedness

One of the principles of Self-Determination Theory, relatedness symbolizes the fact that we’re inherently social beings and are motivated by a need to interact with others, make connections, and be part of some community. Being able to visit other farms, gave female players the opportunity to satisfy their need for social interaction in a way that required very little effort on their end (visiting another farm is just a mouse click away). Being able to help out once on someone’s farm, made the social interaction meaningful (visiting without the option of action / helping, would have changed the nature of this game dynamic from emotion (= social connection) to exploration (= curious about what’s out there)…making it less attractive for female players.

Acknowledgement

A powerful intrinsic motivator…we all want to be acknowledged for who we are, the things we’re good at, something we’ve done. In real life, it’s often difficult to satisfy the need for acknowledgement. There are so many ways in which to get recognition that people often drown in the noise. Farmville makes it easy for players to stand out by offering a fixed number of actions and objects from which to choose and a stage ( = farm) on which to shine. That means every player has the same inventory to work with and an open channel to a huge community. Acknowledgement results from doing something creative with the inventory you’ve been given and attracting people to your farm. The women in our focus group craved acknowledgement…most of them played short sessions of Farmville while at work as a way of getting a quick acknowledgment “fix.”

Embellishment

Whether it’s an avatar, a farm, or both…we love to decorate, design, and customize ourselves and the objects we own. Embellishment is not necessarily bad, in fact, when done in moderation it’s an excellent outlet for creativity and uniqueness.

Takeaway message:

Bunchball’s Psych Club (source)

So how can you translate the concepts we discussed above from Game to Gamification? Bunchball used a room metaphor for USA Network’s Psych Club allowing fans to create and customize their own room with trophies, memorabilia, and more.