How Can Barriers to Action Be Solved with Gamification?
If you haven’t heard of barriers to action as it relates to gamification, it’s time to start paying attention. The ability to identify and eliminate barriers to action is one of the fundamental properties common to successful gamification programs. Although the process typically goes unstated, identifying and eliminating barriers to action is widely used. The strategy is used in games like SuperBetter to help players reach their goals. It’s also used explicitly as a Health Belief Model in fields like healthcare as a way to assess the factors that prevent individuals from adhering to healthy habits. Consider looking at your problems from the perspective of barriers to improve your gamification strateg and design.
What Are Barriers to Action?
Barriers to action are factors, whether internal or external, that prevent individuals from taking action toward a goal. For example, a lack of reliable transportation is a barrier to action for coming to work on time. Many barriers to action are psychological; for example, the habit of checking social media sites before beginning work can be a barrier to action for productivity.
While not all barriers to action can be solved with a gamification system, it can be a great central starting point for your design. Gamification isn’t a cure-all solution but it is a great strategy to follow if you’re looking to solve a specific problem. By analyzing different barriers to action, you can look at what’s stopping or preventing desired behaviors and use gamification as a way to promote those actions instead.
Here’s a gamified example: one barrier to action for therapists, is that they often have a hard time treating and communicating with mentally-challenged patients because they can’t sustain eye-contact when talking to them. gNats Island addresses this barrier by giving the doctor and patient a game to play together that allows them to communicate without needing to see face to face.
How Barriers Fit into Gamification
First, you must clearly understand what your desired goals and activities are, like increasing response rate times at a call-center. The second step is to identify barriers to action: too much time on social media sites, excessive socializing, or even fearing failure can all be barriers to action for call-center productivity. Use your gamification system to quantify this socializing by making it a part of their internal-discussions for support and you can even consider incorporating an “hours-slept” leaderboard to see how it impacts performance!
By turning these barriers to action into challenges to overcome, or by designing concrete goals to overcome barriers to action, a gamification program can be tailored to specific employees at each company.
In summary, focusing on barriers to action is a way of identifying the factors that prevent individuals from full engagement in a gamification program. By incorporating barriers to action into the game, barriers to action can be systematically eliminated. Just remember to retest, review, and reiterate to make sure your system is working
What barriers to action do you see in your own company? How could these barriers be incorporated into a gamification program?
CC Flickr Image by Swamibu
