by Yu-kai Chou
The first thing to improve in Waze through this quick analysis is to emphasize the Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling more. I mentioned earlier that the “Traffic Monster” onboarding image was there in the earlier days, but since then has been replaced by more social-related messages. Even if the company wants to emphasize the “playful fantasy” part of Core Drive 1, they should continue to provide the Epic Meaning of “helping a community beat traffic” throughout the Scaffolding, and Endgame experience. Unfortunately, Onboarding is the only place where many Feedback Mechanics elements are present.
To improve Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment, Waze should consider making every arrival to the destination a bigger Win-State. Play a victorious tune, show a popup that excitedly shows, “You have arrived safely. Awesome!” Maybe even show the image of the location like some other navigation apps do so the user knows what to look out for. All this is much better than the bland GPS voice of “You have reached your destination.” I would probably use Waze more if every time I reach the destination, there is a 25% chance the mechanical female voice says, “You have reached your destination. You’re awesome.” Of course, that also adds a blend of Core Drive 7 Easter Egg design into it.
For Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession, we mentioned that one of the great things about Waze is the Alfred Effect as it starts to offer personalized suggestions. The problem is, most users aren’t aware that Waze is intelligently learning about their preferences until later on in the Scaffolding Phase. If more users knew about it, maybe fewer of them would drop out before they realized the feature was there. The app could consider adding an “Intelligent Score” for itself, where each time you drove with Waze, its intelligence score goes up as it is learning more and more about your preferences. This may have more contextual meaning than just points and builds some anticipation for what lies ahead in the experience.
Another idea with Core Drive 4 is to start showing cute graphics and charts that reflect the user’s driving behaviors. Charts that reflect things like, “Did you know that you went to the gym 105 times this year and stayed there for a total of 5,775 minutes?” Or, “Did you know that you spent 9,422 minutes last year commuting to work?” These could really build more Core Drive 4 into the experience.
Even though information like this is not necessarily useful, people like it because it reflects who they are and makes them understand their behaviors better. This will increase their desire to use Waze more often to ensure that the data, and hence insights, have more integrity in them and become more interesting.
Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is actually rather difficult to design for since the point of a navigation app is to get users to their destinations as efficiently as possible. There isn’t much room for creativity and meaningful choices that may divert the user or waste their time. However, one potential idea is to introduce a feature called “Accelerwaze,” which allows users to try to beat Waze’s predetermined “Estimated Time of Arrivals.”
When you set Waze on a destination, it will tell you the most optimal way to get there, as well as the “ETA” if you took that route. Users could potentially choose to “challenge” Waze by saying, “I believe if I took this route instead, I would get there much faster than Waze’s ETA.” This would make the driving experience a bit more fun and dynamic, as well as allow Waze to learn about new driving routes in order to upgrade its own systems. People may even want to use Waze on destinations that they know full well how to get to, such as their daily commutes to work.
Of course, there are potential risks where, in order to prove that their routes are faster, drivers would drive more recklessly and run through red lights. For every motivating feature you design, you must consider the unintended consequences and negative ramifications before implementing it. Hopefully, these “Accelerwaze” drivers would be driving past many Speed Camera Lotteries and slowing down to potentially win prizes instead.
Octalysis allows you to ask the right questions and design for motivation with the 8 Core Drives. But just because you have a bunch of fun ideas doesn’t mean they are all sound ideas. It is up to the designer’s judgement to determine which features are sound and which ones need more refining.
Remember, we mentioned earlier that Waze’s gamification system could incentivize people to drive unnecessarily more and hurt the environment? Luckily, there are ideas within Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness that also help reduce driving. Since Waze knows who commutes where every day, they can potentially introduce a carpool matching service where individuals can save on gas, energy and the environment. All while making a new friend. Waze could potentially match people by declared interest, industry, or even in the same company, to commute together on a regular basis.
If they really wanted to, Waze could even create a dating service and set up first dates as carpools. Of course, the joke here is that almost everyone would be getting second dates because the potential lovebirds at least have to carpool back from their commutes. Just don’t be the one that is so terrible that the other person calls their friends to pick them up, so they don’t have to go through the agony of being in a car with you again.
For Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, they could add interesting and delightful experiences to Endgame users, such as randomly telling users that a flash mob is in effect and ask them if they want to participate. If the user taps “Yes,” it could reroute their car to a location such as a beach, where many other Wazers would gather. They could then implement interesting themes like, “Figure out why we brought all of you here.”
Perhaps after a few conversations, people will realize that they all go to the gym twice a day and are hardcore health buffs. Once they figured it out, they could even earn a new “Health Buff” avatar that only people who showed up at this flash mob would get. Imagine if you are driving with the very limited Health Buff avatar and you suddenly see on the map another Health Buff is nearby. That type of Relatedness gets people even more connected to each other through the Waze app.
One of the concerns of meeting new people, whether it is for dating or flash mobs, is the safety of it. After all, there are people out there that are sometimes harmful, and Waze shouldn’t risk their users getting a bad experience if perverts just used the app to find victims. This is where Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience becomes useful.
Currently for Waze, the only reason why people would level up is to unlock new status avatars. For most users who aren’t really hung up on their avatars, there isn’t much to look forward to when gaining more experience points. Waze could solve this problem by building in unlockable features such as the carpool matching and flash mobs, where only users with higher levels could set up more interest filters, preferences, and get better access to these features.
That way, everyone who “qualifies” to meet other members are proven and contributing members of the community. Waze even knows their driving history and where they frequent, such as where they live, where they work, and where they spend their weekends. It would be extremely difficult for shady people to sign up for Waze just to fulfill their harmful desires.
Finally, if the app has been doing everything well - getting users to accumulate points, the Alfred Effect, cool flash mob relatedness, carpooling with others, etc., Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance automatically sets in. Once people get used to a certain joyful driving experience, the thought of losing that for another plain and boring navigation system feels dreadful, and people habitually stick with Waze whenever they drive.
At this point, it is not necessary to design for more Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance game techniques since Black Hat Core Drives make users feel uncomfortable and therefore, not ideal for Endgame design. Since the app already has a strong and vibrant community, it is much better to focus on White Hat and Right Brain (intrinsic tendency) Core Drives.
As you can see, with Octalysis you are able to analyze your own product or experience thoroughly, as well as being able to use it t
o brainstorm other creative ideas to improve the experience. Of course, you rarely want to implement all the features that are planned, but it allows your thinking to have depth towards driving desired behaviors while allowing users to enjoy the process.
To get the most out of the book, Choose only ONE of the below options to do right now:
Easy: Check out Facebook, the Speed Camera Lottery, or the Waze navigation app. Review the analysis done in this chapter by experiencing through the various features. Does seeing these experiences with new Octalysis Glasses change the way you understand how they work?
Medium: Pick another product or experience that you have spent a significant amount of time on and which is also immensely popular. Try to run a Level I Octalysis Audit on it. Is it well designed within the context of the 8 Core Drives? How can you make it even better?
Hard: Find another project that is useful but struggling to get traction. Break down the experience into the 4 Experience Phases: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame. For each phase, analyze what Core Drives, if any, are present in that project. Then, start brainstorming through how you can increase the presence of each Core Drive during each phase. This means you are actively thinking through thirty-two Core Drives. Do you feel like the project would become more successful if they implemented your design?
Share what you come up with on Twitter or your preferred social network with the hashtag #OctalysisBook and see what ideas other people have.
Prove your Mastery: Get the Level 1 Octalysis Certificate
With the knowledge you have from this book, you qualify to send a submission for a Level I Octalysis Certificate from my company the Octalysis Group, showing that you demonstrate a competent knowledge of Octalysis and the 8 Core Drives.
Despite many submissions, as of this writing only nineteen people have qualified for the Level I Octalysis Certificate. The value of one is what you make of it, but I know of at least one hiring manager that had interviewed an applicant just because she saw the Level I Octalysis Certificate on his resume. The pass/no-pass version (without feedback) of the certificate is free. For instructions on how to qualify for one, go to yukaichou.com/certificate301.
Chapter 17: Designing a project from scratch with Octalysis
Redesigning Yukaichou.com
As the finale of this book, I would like to go over a brief showcase of using the Octalysis Framework to design a project experience from scratch.
As mentioned before, most of my work for clients is confidential, so often it is not practical to showcase my design process in detail. However, I thought it would be appropriate and fitting to work through the design process for my own site YukaiChou.com, especially the new Premium Membership section that I am launching called “Octalysis Prime.”
As a quick background, after I published the Octalysis Framework on my blog YukaiChou.com in late 2012, my site started to receive a great deal of traffic that led to most of my client work and speaker engagements. I then started to make my video series The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification, which is planned to contain ninety ten-minute Episodes. However, it has progressed very slowly since it is a time consuming hobby project for evangelical purposes, but not necessarily useful for business. As of this writing, I have finished 25 episodes online, though I do so many goofy things in the videos I’m often quite embarrassed to show people.
It came to a point where I feel a need to redesign my website again, partially because the design feels dated, but primarily because I now have a more complex set of Desired Actions for users as well as rewards to give out. Besides just focusing on clients and speaking engagements, I now have a book to sell (or offer as a reward), workshops to promote, foreign Octalysis Licensing Partners to attract, and premium subscription memberships to sign-up. The premium subscription program is called Octalysis Prime.
The goal for the Octalysis Prime program is for me to further enhance my research efforts on gamification design, behavioral economics, motivational psychology and more, while still being able to support my team of talented consultants, programmers, writers, and operational folks. Right now, even though I feel like I am likely one of the leading practitioners of gamification, there are so many things that I still long to explore and conduct research on.
For instance, I would love to dive deeper into Chain Combos of Game Techniques - what Game Technique combinations foster others Core Drives, and which ones suppress other Core Drives. Or research on how various player types respond to White/Black Hat and Right/Left Brain Core Drives, whether it is possible to use Octalysis to create better music, and how the Endowment Effect balance out the Scarcity Effect (in other words, do we value what we have, or do we covet what we don’t have - and in what context is one effect more powerful than the other?).
These are all fascinating topics for me, but I am unable to investigate them further because of the continuous client projects I am committed to. I love working with clients and seeing my knowledge become fruitful, but I myself don’t necessarily grow towards a higher level during that process (which means people learning from me aren’t getting everything they could be potentially getting). As a result, I would like to create a way for me to investigate these fascinating questions, share my findings with the world, while still being able to support my team.
I fully believe my content can also transform peoples’ lives into becoming more meaningful, fulfilling, fun, and enriching. It has definitely done that for me, and I would like the same thing to happen for the members of my audience. The difference is that my audience members can go straight to the crystallized benefits of my work instead of wasting years exploring and fumbling without direction. There’s always a huge efficiency loss when you’re a pioneer (but luckily a status and influence gain).
Before we dive into this last section, keep in mind that it is always risky to share the actual Game Design Techniques you have implemented for your own target market. When a magician shares the secrets behind their magic tricks, it instantly becomes lame and both sides lose - the audience is no longer entertained and the magician no longer has any business. I’m sharing this in a very genuine manner since I sincerely appreciate you reading my book and hope that you can make the world better with this knowledge, even if it means that I risk having a less successful online experience because of it.
With that said, let’s check out how I would use the Octalysis Framework to redesign my own site.
The Octalysis Strategy Dashboard
At the beginning of every gamification campaign, the first thing I do is to define five items:
1) Business Metrics, which lead to Game Objective
2) Users, which lead to Players
3) Desired Actions, which lead to Win-States
4) Feedback Mechanics, which lead to Triggers
5) Incentives, which lead to Rewards
These come together to form the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard. Without understanding the business metrics, the users, and the desired actions, it is very difficult to see how effective a gamified design fulfills its objective.
Define Business Metrics
Below are the Business Metrics for my new site, in order of the importance:
Increase sign-ups to Octalysis Prime
Increase book purchases
Workshop orders
Increase consulting leads via the website
Increase Email subscriptions
Increase Social shares
Increase video views for TEDx or Beginners Guide to Gamification
Increase page views for the Octalysis Framework
Increase overall views on my website
Notice that this list is based on quantifiable metrics for what creates a successful website, and less on my social and personal aspirations. Also, the ones on top are final metrics that would make a project successful, while the ones on the bottom are more of a “means-to-an-end” type of metrics.
Many clients would ask me, “Well, don’t we need many viewers on the website before we
can get purchases?” That’s true, but one is to enable the other, not the other way around. This means that the enabled is more important than the enabler.
On every interface, you will realize that you can improve many different Business Metrics, but you can only optimize for one Business Metric with the limited real-estate and user attention span. As a rule of thumb, the question to ask is, if my top three Business Metrics are doing amazingly well, while the other Business Metrics are doing modestly, would this project still be successful. Since my goal is to scale my knowledge transfer without being pinned down by client work (creating sustainable revenue), I think my list is appropriate.
The Business Metrics then become the Game Objective. If these quantifiable numbers go up, then the gamification campaign is successful. If these metrics do not go up, then the gamification campaign is a failure. No fluffy things that can’t be A/B Tested302 or held accountable for.
Define User Types
The next step is to define who are my target Users, which ultimately become Players in the system if the gamified designs work:
Company employees that want to use gamification or behavioral design to improve their organizations
Educators, nonprofits, and governments that want to use the knowledge to create a social impact
Individuals who are passionate about gamification, games, or self-improvement
In Level III Octalysis, we would run separate Octalysis Charts to understand which Core Drives motivate each player type more, as well as define separate tracks of Desired Actions. However, since this is just a quick Level I Octalysis display, we will skip that and move ahead.