We are now at the point where we need to figure out what to include and what to avoid in our proposed system, with guidance from a survey about motivators and interviews. One interesting fact that we've discovered is that people at this workplace are not motivated by gaining status, actually quite the contrary. Instead, there are many other goals that people want to achieve than the feeling of being professionally superior to their collegues.
This has some implications for our design. Can we really use some kind of leaderboard if people are not seeking status? We have been discussing this quite intensively, both during interviews and with others in the company, and decided that we probably can. But in a different way than we thought initially.
Statistics has the great feature that one can show almost anything depending on what you measure. A good example was provided by Gabe Zichermann in his book Gamification by design (which by the way is a great read) about how to use a leaderboard in a gym. If the gym wants to implement a leaderboard-system to engage people to work out more, they can't really measure people's weight change or how much they could lift - that would probably demotivate new entrants to the gym. But they could design a leaderboard on how often they visit the gym, it still serves the same purpose but without measuring anything personal or sensitive.
By the same reasoning, why couldn't we use a leaderboard to picture how often players use the system or log an activity? And the leaderboard could also have dimensions, it may not be optimal for it to just show the top-20 users in the country. It could be cut to show a local leaderboard, a project-based leaderboard, a friend-based leaderboard or similar. In this way we hope that we can remove the" all-too-serious-and-not-so-fun-and-motivating"-feeling from a leaderboard mechanism, and make it a fun and engaging addition to the system.
What do you think?
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