Potential for Microsoft SharePoint Gamification?
Whether you are a project manager of a fortune 500 companies or a small business owner, organizing a project can often times be a tedious and strenuous process. Thankfully with the advent of collaborative software such as Microsoft SharePoint, the days of conflicting information and miscommunication between projects are a thing of the past. Yet, while SharePoint has been adopted by almost 4 out of 5 Fortune 500 companies, spanning over 125 million users, the software is still not being optimized to its full potential. This is where gamification could play a leading role in rectifying these challenges by increasing end user adoption as well as boosting organizational productivity.
Microsoft SharePoint has come a long way since its first inception in 2001 with new features added to the collaborative platform over the passing years. As these new updates continues to expand SharePoint’s features, it can be a overwhelming experience for both current and new users.
Current users may be tempted to ignore newer features as they are comfortable with their previous practices while new users are easily overwhelmed by the vast possibilities offered by the software. However, these issues can be overcome by designing a gamified tutorial system which caters to different learning levels of SharePoint users with the specific goal of enabling everyone to eventually obtain mastery.
With a gamified tutorial system, SharePoint’s key features could be condensed and its importance highlighted instead of going through from A to Z of SharePoint’s capabilities. More importantly, designers could customize the learning materials and objectives catering to different experience levels of SharePoint users.
A beginner-level tutorial could educate new users on the basic features necessary to use the software, while intermediary or higher level tutorials could introduce advanced features and techniques for more productive and effective SharePoint work. Beyond the mere tutorial aspect, system designers can also incorporate virtual scenarios like those of TrueOffice.
By constructing virtual examples, which would mirror real life scenarios, it provides users with a simple and easy outlook on the capabilities of SharePoint features while offering an alternative form of engagement with the learning material.By encompassing a tutorial that can be easily customized in order to cater to a variety of user needs, gamification could vastly boost the overall experience for SharePoint users. Nonetheless, gamifying the tutorial and onboarding process is merely the tip of the iceberg.
The inclusion of gamified mechanics such as gamified profile feedback system for performance anayltics coupled with quest and reward system may provide further user engagement for SharePoint users. Furthermore, user engagement can be improved by designing the overall gamified system through a subtle approach while encouraging a nature of self-discovery for users. The end goal of implementing gamification should be to direct users to develop a positive attitude towards of motivation of productivity at work.
Nevertheless, gamification is akin to the icing on a cake. It can greatly improve the overall experience of the cake but if the cake’s content is bad, it only serves as a cover up. Prior to implementing gamification for any other industry, it should be forewarned that gamification is not a one size fit all solution.
It can enhance the overall user experience in utilizing the software but at the same time, it will not be able to fix a inherently broken collaborative platform. Despite this, Microsoft SharePoint’s astounding user adoption within the enterprise sector shows that it is already a competent system and gamification would serve as an opportunity to extend its user outreach. With the opportunities abound, the question now is whether Microsoft SharePoint designers will view gamification as temporary fad or become a trend setter themselves for others to follow in their footsteps?
They should definitely get on board.
Badgeville released “Badgeville for Sharepoint” in Summer 2012. It has been our most successful employee-facing solution – larger than Jive, Salesforce, IBM Connections, and the rest of the employee-facing solutions we’ve done. The demand for “gamified Sharepoint” is extremely high, literally hundreds of companies have come inbound to us regarding the solution…. and the results we’re seeing for mid-market, large, and Fortune 500 organizations are remarkable. Given the breadth of Sharepoint functionality and adoption, the breadth of what gets “gamified” is also fairly broad. We’ll be doing a webinar in the 2nd half of 2013 about the most adopted gamified Sharepoint functionality, and some emerging best practices.
Several of our System Integration / Consulting partners are already re-selling Badgeville for Sharepoint, and we have a nice VAR (lots of Sharepoint is sold thorugh the Channel of VARS for MSFT, so we’re following suit) network building for Badgeville for Sharepoint as well.
Overall, Heong Weng Mak is spot on regarding the potential here. And we are seeing the real business value materialize with our clients.
We don’t think it’s a fad. We think it’s real.