Poor design hampers gamification in the enterprise, says Gartner

By 2014, 80% of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives, primarily because of poor design, according to Gartner.

Brian Burke, research vice-president at Gartner, said: “Poor game design is one of the key failings of many gamified applications today.”

Gamification is the application of game applied to non-game contexts to improve audience engagement. It can include customer engagement, employee performance, training and education, innovation management and personal development.

Burke said applications fail to focus on the competitive and collaborative elements of gamification, instead concentrating on obvious game mechanics, such as points, badges and leader boards.

“Organisations are simply counting points, slapping meaningless badges on activities and creating gamified applications that are simply not engaging for the target audience. Some organisations are already beginning to cast off poorly designed gamified applications,” Burke said.

The real challenge is to design player-centric applications that focus on the motivations and rewards to fully engage players., said Gartner. Virtually all areas of business could benefit from gamification as it can help to change behaviour, develop skills and enable innovation, said Gartner.

“As gamification moves from being leveraged by a limited number of leading-edge innovators to becoming more broadly adopted by early adopters, it is important that CIOs and IT leaders understand the underlying principle of gamification and how to apply it within the IT organisation,” said Burke.