Using games and rewards to encourage site usage
Charles Forman from iminlikewithyou.com
- Provide realtime feedbck for actions.
- Provide rewards.
- Provide objectives through quests.
- Level people up.
A good site will notify the user that new content is available.
- Give the user a taste before the signup.
- Facebook has a chat but it works very poorly.
- Quests to complete objectives (LinkedIn has the level the user is at so they put in more information)
- For forums, comments should show as ‘new’ in real time.
- Allow people to easily communicate with eachother (IRC on the content page)
Problems with real time communication and data:
- Concurrency – one problem is that if you show how many users are on a site, you’d be surprised how low it is – which makes it seem like nobody is there – a ghost town.
- Game breakers – if the game breaks, most people will simply leave forever. Â There isn’t loyalty.
- Technical scale is an issues since online interaction increases exponentially with linear growth in users.
- Social problems include ‘griefers’ who just make life miserable by screwing with other people on the system. Â Racists, bigots, etc… Â In real time interaction, it’s hard to have aggressive filters. Â The ability to leverage somebody’s status against them helps though. Â If somebody has a status of 20, you can threaten termination for being a griefer.
- Race conditions are problems on real time sites – this is a design issue and probably isn’t a major problem for social network coordination sites.
- Poor design that prevents easy initial use is a major problem.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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