Game Thinking: Innovate smarter & drive deep engagement with design techniques from hit games

Note internal and situational triggers that are already in your early customers’ lives. What emotions or urges could drive customers to seek out your product?

Many entrepreneurs are eager to release a product quickly, so they can get feedback on their idea, but if you’re building something meaningful and substantial, a private alpha test with a handful of early hot-core customers can get you much further, much faster—and set you up for long-term success.

Superfans are pre-chasm early adopters. They don’t need social proof before trying something new, because their need or desire is so great. This is who you’re looking for: people who actively feel the pain of not having what you offer.

Take your cues from the habits and desires of your experts—the people who master your systems and long to go deeper. Your goal is to create systems that tap into the deep needs and motivations of your most passionate players.

The most compelling reward for your investment is impact—not trinkets.

Mastery Is Better than Progress Many non-game designers understand this and eagerly adopt points, badges, leaderboards, and ratings systems to track and reward progress. They soon learn what every game designer knows: Numbers alone don’t confer meaning.

Anytime you create an avatar, refine your profile, check your stats, earn points, integrate your address book, post an update, or curate your friend list, you’re deepening your investment in that system, and making it harder to leave.

The most successful product creators I know always kickoff a new project by building, iterating and tuning the core activity chain, or what I call the core learning loop. Once that’s working well, they’ll start to add more features and polish. If you want to emulate successful innovators, this is how you build engagement from the ground up.

Progress metrics like points, badges, levels, leaderboards, and reputation systems are icing on this learning/mastery cake. These markers help you gauge where you stand, and how far you’ve come—but they’re meaningless as a stand-alone system without something to master. If you want to build a compelling product experience, forget points—think chara