How to build great products with game design, not gamification

When you design for Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, it is important to create a setup where the user is given a goal, as well as a variety of tools and methodologies to strategize towards reaching that goal. Often your users are not motivated because they don’t understand the purpose of the activity, do not clearly identify

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The best products don’t just fill a need. They help people get better at something they care about. Game thinking is a framework for building products that make your customers more powerful, knowledgeable, and connected. Like lean startup, game thinking is grounded in testing assumptions. And like design thinking, we start out in a problem space (a

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The truth is, simply incorporating game mechanics and game elements does not make a game fun. Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, behavioral economics, motivational psychology, UX/UI (User Experience and User Interface), neurobiology, technology platforms, as well as ROI-driving business implementations.

Amy Jo labels this approach “game thinking.” (I could only wish that all of our projects used a process like what she describes here!) She calls it that because it is inspired by the way in which we game designers think of our players and their journeys: as a process of learning, guided by feedback, of hobby- and habit-building. A process of gettin

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