Target behaviors

Now that we are clear about what we are trying to accomplish with our system, we will focus on the actions we are hoping to incentivize: our target behaviors.

One of the big questions around gamification efforts is can it really cause behavioral change. Will employees, customers, and stakeholders simply go back to doing things the way they are used to once the game is over? Will they figure out a way to "cheat" the system?

The only way to meet long-term organizational objectives in a systematic way is for the application to not only cause change for the moment, but lasting change over time. Many gamification applications fail in long-term behavior change, and here's why.

Psychologists have studied the behavior change life cycle at length. Studies show that people go through five distinct phases when changing a behavior. Each phase presents a different set of challenges.

The five phases of the behavioral life cycle are as follows:

How can we use this understanding to establish our target behaviors? Keep in mind that our objectives are to increase interaction through discussion and increase consideration for other perspectives. According to our understanding of changing behavior around our objectives, we need our users to:

This outlines the list of activities the user needs to perform for our systems to meet our objectives. Of course, some of our target behaviors will be clear. In other cases, it will require some creativity on our part to get users to take these actions.

So what are some possible actions that we can have our users take to move themselves along the behavior change life cycle?

Some of these target behaviors are relatively straightforward to implement. Others will require more thought. More importantly, we have now identified the target behaviors we want our users to take. This will guide the rest of our development efforts.