by Yu-kai Chou
Needless to say, this is what the eCommerce company would love also, as each new seller who skipped the boring tutorials can now learn how to become great sellers in an engaging fashion.
At the end of every month, the eCommerce site could then calculate how many “mentorship hours” the veteran had accumulated, and apply that to some type of fee discount or free shipping credit for them. Since successful veterans typically sell in large volumes, these benefits would become attractive incentives. As mentioned in Chapter 7, when you can give users “boosters” as rewards to help enhance their core activities, that is the most ideal. Boosters, such as white screens for better photo-taking, or shipping services that deliver items directly from the seller’s home, act to further increase engagement towards the Desired Actions.
This is still economically efficient for the eCommerce site because compared to the massive costs of expensive support teams, fee discounts or free shipping plans would be considered negligible. That way, the veterans get their status perks and bonuses, the newbies get their questions answered and feels like they are part of a larger community, and the site saves a massive amount in support costs while having more engaged and professional sellers on their platform. What a fantastic win-win-win situation.
Brag Buttons (Game Technique #57) and Trophy Shelves (Game Technique #64)
Bragging is when a person explicitly and vocally expresses their accomplishments and achievements, whereas a Trophy Shelf allows a person to implicitly show off what they have accomplished without really saying it.
Intuitively encouraging users to brag about and show off their achievements comes in handy when it comes to recruiting new players and keeping veteran players active, but the two techniques are appropriate for different scenarios.
A Brag Button is a Desired Action that users can take in order to broadcast what they feel accomplished about - driven by Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. In other words, Brag Buttons are little action tools and mechanisms for users to broadcast how awesome they are. Take the game Temple Run for example. Whenever a game is over, there is a quick and easy way for users to tap a button and share a screenshot of their high scores on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
As the game gained in popularity, people were competing with those who were scoring in the millions and high-scoring users were proud to post their scores for everyone to see.
These days, many games and websites encourage users to share more with their friends on every single interface. Most of these Brag Buttons are ignored though, because they’re not fueled by strong Core Drive 2 motivation (the dynamics and relationships between each Core Drive and how they power each other will be studied in higher level Octalysis). You want to implement the Brag Buttons at the Major Win-States when users actually feel awesome about what they have just completed.
A Trophy Shelf, on the other hand, is an obvious display that exhibits the achievements of the user. In other words, the user simply has to put up the Shelf, and further promotion, everyone who comes by will see and acknowledge these great achievements.
Trophy Shelves are seen when you walk into someone’s office, and on their walls you see all types of awards, certificates, and credentials. These professionals don’t necessarily want to brag about how they graduated cum laude from Stanford University and have a Level 4 Octalysis Certificate to everyone all the time, but by having it on their walls, they implicitly show it.
In that sense, adding the Ph.D title after one’s own name in their bio is usually considered a Trophy Shelf. However, once they verbally introduce themselves as “John Doe, Ph.D,” they’ve pressed that Brag Button.
In gaming, Trophy Shelves can often be seen as crowns, badges, or avatars. In many games, some avatar gear or items can only be obtained after reaching difficult or exclusive milestones, such as beating a certain boss, inviting 100 friends to the game, or simply having been with the game since it launched. This allows everyone to clearly see that this user has achieved a lot without the person annoyingly bringing it up all the time.
Keep in mind that there needs to be some level of Relatedness when someone brags about or shows off something. When there is a mutual understanding of the difficult work required to reach a certain level, people are more likely to brag about or show off their scores because they know others recognize how hard it was to obtain the scores.
Temple Run does a great job gaining new users through utilizing the mechanism of Brag Buttons. This helped them become one of the most successful mobile games of all time with over a billion downloads throughout the franchise’s history152. Not bad for a monotonous game of constantly running forward.
Unfortunately, the interface for Temple Run 2 dimmed down the option of the Brag Button, which I believe would result in slightly lower frequency of someone sharing their scores based on the Glowing Choice and Dessert Oasis game techniques we discussed in Chapter 6.
Group Quests (Game Technique #22)
Another Game Technique that draws power from Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness is the Group Quest. Group Quests are very effective in collaborative play as well as viral marketing because it requires group participation before any individual can achieve the Win-State.
A successful game that utilizes this is World of Warcraft (WoW), another hugely successful and addictive game produced by Blizzard Entertainment153. In WoW, there are many quests that are so challenging that it requires an entire team of forty max-leveled players to work collaboratively, each specialized in their own responsibilities, before they have a chance of fulfilling the quest. In well-designed instances, even though the 40-player requirement is not imposed by the program, the users simply find it difficult to succeed if they only have 39 players.
This motivated many players to group together into clans and guilds to orchestrate raids on a regularly basis. Because of this, people were encouraged to login regularly and not drop out due to the social pressure.
Farmville by Zynga is another game that has Group Quests. These quests require users to invite a group of farming friends to produce a certain yield of crops within 24 hours. The game forces you to not only invite your friends to join, but to participate with you, which is more powerful than a spammy “I just started playing this game. Click on this link!”
Group Quests have been experienced in games for decades, but only more recently have they been adopted into the business world. In late 2008, the newborn startup Groupon realized that businesses and consumers would be highly motivated if they were offered Group Quests that ensured consumers would get dramatic discounts provided that enough of them signed up for the discount154.
They promoted 60%-off discounts if “over 200 people buy this deal.” In essence, if enough people in the group takes the Desired Action towards the Win State, only then could each group individual obtain the discount. Naturally, people who wanted the tremendous discount invited their friends to “go in on this together,” making the company a huge success at the time.
Although later on Groupon failed to realize the full potential that late investors hoped it would obtain due to operational issues, during 2013 it still generated $2.57 Billion in revenue with $1.48 Billion in profits just off the Group Quest game technique155. Similar Group Quest models such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo have also become very popular services that crowdsource funds to support the development of innovative projects that cannot raise money from institutional investors.
There are so many of these fascinating concepts within games that we are just beginning to extract into the real world. If we just understood these techniques and applied them effectively to meaningful projects, we might even create the next billion dollar business.
Social Treasures (Game Technique #63)
Social Treasures are gifts or rewards that can only be given to you by friends or other players.
Back in the days of Farmville, there were certain types of virtual goods that were not obtainable through regular channels, including purchasing with real m
oney. The only way to obtain these items was to have friends click on the “Give to Friend” button and have them sent to you, without your friends losing anything in the process. As a result of this type of design, when people wanted these unique Social Treasure items, they just gave one to each other, ensuring a win-win situation.
This of course, pushed people to get their friends to join the game, so they could get more opportunities to obtain these Social Treasures.
Soon, people were requesting items from their friends on Facebook non-stop, badgering friends to give them various items all the time. Though it became a nuisance, even an annoyance for many Facebook users, it effectively attracted more users to the game and massively advertised the game across millions of pages.
I remember there was a time around 2007 where people kept posting on my Facebook wall and requesting that I give them a Goat in Farmville. After receiving a few of those, I became annoyed and simply responded with, “I don’t play Farmville,” thinking that it would effectively stop these people from asking again. Unfortunately, the response I received was, “Hey! That’s okay, just create a Farmville account, and I can give you a Goat too!” It was striking to me that these people assumed I would also value a goat so much that I would be motivated to create a Farmville account.
Social Treasures are commonly found these days in games such as Candy Crush, to obtain more lives or with Angry Birds Epic where you can obtain more “rerolls” for its reward slot/dice machine.
In the real world, the most common form of a Social Treasure is a vote. Other than your own vote, you cannot (legally) get yourself more votes in an election or poll, even if you were ready and able to spend money. The only way for you to obtain more votes is if other people give them to you.
There are many “popularity contests” conducted by companies that utilize Social Influence by having people compete to get the most votes on their submissions. To obtain more votes from their social network, applicants will blast their friends with links to the submissions which directly promote the company to thousands of people.
Social Prods (Game Technique #62)
Another game technique that is often seen within Core Drive 5 is the Social Prod. A Social Prod is an action of minimal effort to create a social interaction, often a simple click of a button. Good examples are Facebook Pokes/Likes and Google’s +1s.
In the early days, Facebook provided a small “Poke” button that didn’t do anything other than notify the user that someone had “poked” them. At first, it seems pretty pointless. I just got poked? What does that mean? The advantage of a Social Prod is that the user does not need to spend time thinking about something witty to say, or worry about sounding stupid when they just want to have a quick, basic interaction.
When you get poked, you don’t know what it means either but you don’t worry about it. You just poke back. Now both of you will feel like you have interacted socially without having to spend notable effort.
A less obvious example of a Social Prod is the Linkedin Endorsement. The professional social network generally does very well with Left Brain (Extrinsic Tendency) Core Drives such as Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession - as your profile represents your life/career, and Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment - as these are real achievements you’ve accomplished.
However, for many years LinkedIn wasn’t able to successfully implement many Right Brain (Intrinsic Tendency) Core Drives to keep users frequently engaged on LinkedIn. Most people just create profiles and then leave it sitting there for months. Some engage in exclusive community or professional forums but generally these are only utilized by a relatively small number of LinkedIn users.
This is why in the past few years, LinkedIn has been focusing on Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness, by showing you how much you have in common with certain people, recommendations, and endorsements.
LinkedIn Recommendations are actually considered Social Treasures, as they are true valuables that only other people can give you. Unfortunately, they take time and work to generate, and so the growth rate of Recommendations haven’t picked up over the years.
Endorsements on the other hand, are Social Prods – they are designed to be fairly meaningless but easy to execute. Early on in the design, there were even buttons that allowed you to endorse people in batches of four, allowing you to quickly endorse dozens of people without even thinking about who they were.
However, most people have no idea whether or not this individual is good at all the activities listed. But if you just want to endorse one specific skill that you actually want to acknowledge, you cannot simply select that skill. You have to click on the “x”s to slowly cancel out the other ones listed before you can endorse the one you know about. Most people would rather not do that much work, and as a result simply click the “Endorse All” button.
This reveals that by design, LinkedIn does not want endorsements to be meaningful. It’s designed to be easy, thoughtless, and abundant.
And as a result, people start to endorse each other left and right. This leads to LinkedIn sending users multiple e-mails each day notifying them that they’ve just been endorsed by a friend, which prods them to feel the reciprocal urge and go on LinkedIn to endorse their friends in return.
Though these endorsements mean very little from a career standpoint, by allowing users to aimlessly endorse each other, there is finally something to do on Linkedin.
Conformity Anchor (Game Technique #58)
Earlier we learned about the power of Social Norming. A game design technique I call Conformity Anchors implements this effect into products or experiences by displaying how close users are to the social norm through Feedback Mechanics.
The SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company Opower, which supplies services to public utilities, is a great example of using Conformity Anchors. Opower’s mission is to reduce our collective energy consumption. Their model is inspired by Robert Cialdini whom we have mentioned a few times in this book and is one of the leading experts on Core Drives 4 and 5, as well as the upcoming Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience.
Opower has discovered that, the best way to motivate households to consume less energy is to show them a chart comparing them to their neighbors.
With this interface, Opower reportedly reduced 2.6 terawatt hours of electricity through 16 million households worldwide between 2007 and 2013, the equivalent of $300 Million156. They were personally endorsed by President Barrack Obama, named a Technology Pioneer at the prestigious World Economic Forum, and placed on the CNBC Disruptor 50 List157.
When oPower applied the Conformity Anchors to the utility billing process, one unexpected observation emerged. The top energy savers actually started to consume more energy because they felt they could relax a bit and be more like the norm.
As a result, the company started to apply smiley faces to those who were above average, and two smiley faces to those who were at the top, in an effort to reinforce Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. This has reportedly reduced the effects of negative social norming, where users on the top decide to fall closer towards the average. Of course, there’s much more that Opower can do to add the other Core Drives into the process and motivate behavior, but so far the smiley faces seem to do their jobs :-).
Water Coolers (Game Technique #55)
Another way to reinforce Social Influence and Conformity Anchors in your system is by establishing Water Coolers. In American corporate office culture, the water cooler is often the place where people take a small break from work and chat about a variety of non-work related topics. Much of the conversations focus around office gossip or complaints, and actively gets employees to bond with one another.
One example of a Water Cooler is adding a forum to your site. Forums are very helpful for getting a community to bond and share ideas with each other. For this purpose, it also provides an environment to broadcast a social norm, while also connecting veterans to newbies for Mentorship opportunities.
Whe
n I first started playing the game Geomon, I was skeptical about buying virtual goods with real money. Without paying, I could only capture 10 monsters. After that, when I wanted to capture more monsters, I would have to “evaporate” an old one. That scarcity design (Core Drive #6) tempted me to spend some money, but I held on and painfully continued to play without committing any cash.
However, when I visited the game’s forum I found many people talking about how they were spending their purchased gold coins as if that was common practice. After that, I was influenced by the social norm established in the forum and had no problem spending a few dollars to unlock a few slots required to capture more monsters.
Surprisingly, two years after the game had ceased operation, I discovered that the Geomon forums was still active with some loyalists still sharing about the fun old days with each other.
In the Battle Camp158, another mobile game where you train monsters and team with other players to fight bosses, spending is even more established as a social norm than Geomon. Players who spend money are referred to as “Coiners” and many troops would post messages such as, “We only accept coiners.” In response, people would plead, “I’m not a coiner, but I’m literally on every hour that I’m not sleeping. Please let me join your troop!” It is not uncommon for regular coiners to spend $50-$100 a week on Battle Camp.
One thing to take note of is that when you introduce a forum-like Water Cooler into your system, it could easily become plagued by constant inactivity. Generally forums are not very good at creating a community, but are good at mingling within an already-established community. If people visit a new forum and see that it’s relatively empty, it reinforces a negative social proof. As we have learned in this chapter, this is a big sin which will only demotivate people towards the Desired Actions.