Design is becoming behavioral: here’s how to ethically implement gamification
Introduction
The global value of the gamification industry increased by $7.03 billion USD between 2016 and 2021: it now stands at a whopping $11.9 billion USD.1
Gamification is a manifestation of behavioral product design: a vision of design that exploits the brain’s predictable irrationalities to induce desired behaviors.
And these induced behaviors can have big impacts — 90% of employees say gamification improves productivity. This leads gamified companies to be 7x more profitable than non-gamified companies.1
Despite its climbing popularity, current implementations of gamification are not always aligned with consumer interests. Transparency for users on how, why, and when gamification is used is vital to its healthy and ethical development.
References
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About the Authors
Janessa Pong
Janessa is a rising junior at the University of California, Los Angeles pursuing a BS in Cognitive Science with a Specialization in Computing, and minoring in Bioinformatics. She believes that psychology holds the power to ameliorate many of the world’s biggest problems, with climate change being one that she holds closest to her heart. It ultimately serves as a roadmap to why humans do what they do. Understanding this roadmap — our predispositions, biases, and instincts — are crucial to guiding people to make better choices for themselves, others, and our planet.
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
