Badgeville today launched a toolkit on the Salesforce Platform that is designed to get people more engaged in using online apps. The new toolkit puts a Salesforce Force.com wrapper around Badgeville’s APIs that hook into behavior tools and are designed to affect how people use the customer’s service, said CEO Kris Duggan in an email interview.
Using the toolkit, developers can reward cloud user behaviors in realtime by leveraging mechanics, such as points, achievements and missions. They can also provide recognition and rank to make users feel special or smart by leveraging mechanics, such as levels, tracks and leaderboards. They can also leverage social mechanics such as activity streams and real-time notifications to draw attention to relevant content and people.
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“The cloud provides very compelling economics compared to traditional software, with its flexible pay-as-you-go model,” Duggan said. “Cloud applications providers have also focused on improving ergonomics of the user experience, and as a result, many of these applications look and feel a lot less clunky than software of days past. However, it has become clear that economics and ergonomics alone do not ensure that these cloud applications will be adopted. Businesses will spend nearly $300 billion on enterprise software (Gartner Research), yet usage of this software is only 50 percent, according to a survey by the IT Adoption Alliance. This means $150 billion of software is wasted.”
Badgeville customers include marketers, CIOs and line-of-business managers, training/human resource leaders, and product executives. It is deployed for both customer-facing and employee-facing use cases.
Badgeville, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in fall 2010, competes with gamification tools like Bunchball, as well as single-app, niche approaches to gamification such as 500 Friends and Hoopla.
“We also see businesses building their own gamification solutions in-house, but a large percentage of these companies seek out a scalable gamification technology and strategy team once realizing the challenge to deploy gamification right requires proper design expertise and a SaaS platform to support a program that drives long-term engagement and fulfills business objectives,” Duggan said.
The idea that software gets wasted means that the user interface is troublesome or the information architecture has inherent issues. It may also be a latency issue. Really, a whole host of issues may be at play. Gamification has its value but by itself it is nothing more than a game. Finding the bugs and studying the interactions determines the success of an app. Gamification must be driven into that process so it can enhance the fundamental value of the app itself.