Bunchball rolled out what it called the “rock stars” of gamification on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco. Gamification is a service that Bunchball offers to clients who want to use game-like mechanics to increase interest in non-game applications.

Rajat Paharia (pictured), chief product officer and founder of San Jose, Calif.-based Bunchball, pointed to successes such as Adobe, which used Bunchball’s Nitro platform to gamify Adobe’s photo manipulation software, Photoshop. Adobe created missions that motivated users to learn different features of Photoshop. The result was a big increase in the number of people who completed a tutorial on learning the ins and outs of Photoshop.

While gamification has proven its worth in anecdotal examples, skeptics are plentiful. Market research firm Gartner recently predicted that by 2014, about 80 percent of current gamified apps will fail to meet business objectives because of poor design.

Paharia said, “Nothing could be farther from the truth.” He added that poor design will kill anything. And gamification done right can drive people to change their behavior, he said.
Paharia said he defines gamifcation as the “idea of motivating people through data.” Gamification can help measure and motivate, reward and recognize people, increase loyalty among employees and consumers, and guide and amplify behavior.

READ MORE>>