Foundations of the Octalysis Framework

Human-Focused Design vs Function-Focused Design

• System that is designed to optimize for the motivations and feelings of the human inside instead of assuming the people with are robots that will complete the task
• Gaming industry = first to master Human-focused Design. You never HAVE to play a game, but when it’s no longer fun, you leave a game.
• Games have spent decades/centuries mastering how to engage people without a mandated purpose
• Now we are learning from games, hence “Gamification”
• Gartner predicted 80% of the gamified apps withh fail due to bad design
• People will use it if it’s motivating and if it drives their engagement and excitement
• Design Problem: beginning with “game mechanics” instead of the Core Drives
• How do I want my users to FEEL: Inspired? Proud? Scared? What game elements do I need in other to get that?

Introduction of the Octalysis Framework

• Epic Meaning & Calling - drive that say you’re motivated because we feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.
• Development and Accomplishments - drive to learn and progress. -he Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback - being motivated to be creative and try different strategies, see feedback, then adjust
• Ownership & Possession - become we feel like we own something, we want to improve it. Eg. baseball cards, currency, profiles.
• Social Influence & Relatedness - group quests, social gifting, competition, nostalgia.
• Scarcity and Impatience - we want something because it’s difficult to obtain. Exclusive rewards.
• Unpredictability and Curiousity - because we don’t know what’s gonna happen next, it makes us curious. Eg. Gambling, reading a book, watching a movie
• Loss and Avoidance - you don’t want something bad to happen.

Examples

FoldIt

• Scientists were trying to solve a AIDS virus protein structure problem which PHDs can’t solve for about 15 years.
• Protein folding game that was released
• A gamer solved it in 10 days

OPower

• Trying to save energy. They tried to design how much money you can save, but people didn’t notice.
• Created a leaderboard format for energy saving. This design saved 1 terrawat ($120M) energy

Autodesk

• Released an adventure game “Uncharted Teritories” where you have to download a free trial to solve problems
• Increased trial usafe by 40%
• Increased conversions by 15%

Level 2 Octalysis: Design for All 4 Phases

Different types of people are motivated differently, how do you cater to their experience? Eg. Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, Killers

• Discovery - why would they want to use the product?
• Onboarding - what are the tools to get them started?
• Scaffolding - why would people come back? what’s the motivating activity loop?
• Endgame - how do you retain your veterans? Your veterans are your evangelists.

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The 8 Core Drives of Human Behavior

Epic Meaning & Calling

• We are motivated because we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
• One example is Wikipedia contributors who believe that they protect humanity’s knowledge. It’s about giving yourself to the vision.
• Waze’s message “Beat Traffic Together” is another example that incites how you help the community, not just getting to your destination
• Apple’s campaign
• What can the product make you become, not just what features they can offer.

Development & Accomplishment

• We’re motivated about improving ourselves
• Leaderboard systems, progression, achievement badges.
• Make users feel smart in every step

Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback

• Make people do different strategies = engagement
• The moment it’s no longer fun, people leave. It’s important to make veterans stay.
• Difference in motivation: People can memorize MTG and other card games, but not a periodic table. Make it enjoyable, use that knowedlge to make cooler things.

Ownership and Possession

• Makes you feel that you own something, you want to protect it, you want to improve it
• Baseball cards, avatar and their items. Spending time to customize = more attachment
• Prize Pacing = break the prize to little pieces and reward people who did an action.
• The Alfred Effect: if a system constantly learn about your preferences and serves you those preferences, you’re less likely to switch.

Social Influence & Relatedness

• Everything you do is based on what other people think or say: Collaboration, competition, group quest. It also has this relatedness piece where if you see a product that gives you nostalgia, you’re more likely to get the product.
• What we’ve always been doing + What other people like us have always been doing
• Group Quest - accomplished if more people do it together and you win major rewards.
• Competition - people don’t want to be below average.
• Recommendation engine in Amazon - “Customer who bought this also bought this”
• Review in Amazon - studies show that consumers don’t actually trust opinions of expert critics. They more likely to trust opinions of people like them.
• Social Norm/Proof - make sure that you’re encouraging people to do the desired behavior rather than telling them that most people do the negative action, because they will likely do the negative action too.

Scarcity & Impatience

• We want something just because we can have it. We want something more if it’s hard to gain.
• The higher the price, more people bought it because of the perceived value it has.

Unpredictability and Curiosity

• Raffle, casino, randomness
• Easter eggs

Loss & Avoidance

• You don’t want something bad to happen. Eg. Crops die in Farmville when you don’t log in.
• Sunk Cost Prison - you don’t want to quit something because you’re already invested, making it hard to leave.

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Applying the Octalysis Framework

Designing for White Hat vs Black Hat Gamification

• White Hat
  • Long term motivation. Good for building a community
  • Google
    • Epic Meaning and Calling - Organize world’s information, Do no evil
    • Development and Accomplishments - Sense of progression, 9 levels of engineer
    • Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback - 20% time to allow employees to use their creativity w/o risk
  • Top core drives of the Octalysis Framework
  • Powerful, in control, but no urgency
  • We just want to do to feel very good: Improving skills, being creative, changing the world. But we tend to procrastinate on it.
• Black Hat
  • Short term motivation. Good for one time transactions.
  • Addictive
  • Not in control of your own behavior
  • Eg. Social Media Pull-to-Refresh

Switching between White Hat and Black Hat

White Hat	Black Hat
Marketing	Sales
Onboarding	Scarcity & Impatience
Endgame	Sunk Cost Prison

• Marketing - you want people to like the brand

• Onboarding - there’s meaning, they feel smart doing processes

• Endgame - long term engagement

• Sales - getting people to sign up

• Scarcity & Impatience - “hey these are things you cant have yet”, develop curiousity

• Sunk Cost Prison

Designing for Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation

• See [[Unsafe Thinking#Use motivational synergy to stay energized]]

Left Brain Core Drives

• Logical side of the brain
• Focus a lot on Extrinsic Motivation: you do for a reward, purpose or a goal but you don’t necessarily enjoy the activity
• Extrinsic motivation can kill intrinsic motivation.
• Schools that devalues learning and make the systems more about tests, degrees, getting jobs.
• Extrinsic Motivation enhances initial action, justifying the action afterwards, efficiency on mundane tasks

Right Brain Core Drives

• Emotional side of the brain
• Intrinsic Motivation. You just enjoy doing to the point that you pay money to experience it. You don’t need a reward to be with friends, to experience unpredictability in casinos. It’s not for the results, but for the experiences

Applying Octalysis to othe Behavioral and Gameful Frameworks

Self Determination Theory

People aren’t just motivated by making money and punishment, they are motivated by:

• Competence
• Autonomy
• Relatedness
• Purpose

4 Keys 2 Fun

Every component of enjoyment has 4 types of fun

• Hard Fun - challenges
• Easy Fun - creativity, you don’t lose as long as you’re playing
• People fun - you love it because you get to play with others
• Serious - you make money for yourself, you change the world, there’s tangible results

Flow Theory

The challenge is met with the skill set.

Building New Experiences from Scratch with Octalysis

Octalysis Strategy Dashboard

The minimum viable information to design a fully gamified campaign.

• Define: Business Metrics - Game Objective
  • What we want to improve in numbers. Quantifiable. Daily active users, revenue per users, how many comeback after 6 months, retention, etc.
• Define: Users - Players
  • What motivates your users?
• Define: Desired Actions - Win-state
  • List down all your desired actions in chronological order
• Define: Feedback Mechanics - Triggers
  • What items can user keep track? Badges, leaderboards, countdown timers, who are your friends in the platform?
• Define: Incentives - Rewards
  • Emotional rewards can be considered. Make the users feel good about completing a process.
  • Things that help the users enrich their gameplay

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References

• Gamification & Behavioral Design: The Octalysis Framework in Udemy