Project: It's a Party

Gamification and IaP

In order to add to the value proposition of the service and to help maintain a user base, IaP is able to really benefit from gamification. By incorporating some game design techniques IaP will be able to create an additional layer on the service which can engage an audience. Gamification applies very well to the social media features that are the core of the service already. Indeed many similar location based services, such as FourSquare and Gowalla have incorporated such game mechanics successfully. While it is a good idea to draw on the framework of gamification and from the successes of the others in the market, IaP must however come up with a certain originality in its mechanics.

Here is one view of gamification:

“Gamification works to satisfy some of the most fundamental human desires: recognition and reward, status, achievement, competition and collaboration, self-expression, and altruism. People are hungry for these things both in their everyday world and online. Gamification taps directly into this.”

It can definitely be seen as a useful strategy to encourage people to adopt the application. These “fundamental human desires” should not solely relied on, but would be put to work together with a strong value proposition at the core.

In addition to the initial encouragement to start using the IaP-service, the suggested gamification would be useful to prioritize the actions we want the users to take (eg. together with a partner party or venue). This can also be a useful way to get users to realize the full scope of the service, to steer them towards discovering everything they can do with it.

The initial idea of IaP, and indeed one of the suggested selling-points, was its simplicity. While game mechanics are seen as a potentially effective strategy, it will create some complexity into the service. This will need to be balanced in order to keep the simplicity at desired level.

One of the main points of developing and implementing game mechanics is to achieve user loyalty. Even a simple gamification (such as reputation or status points) can achieve this and keep user coming back to the app. In this way IaP is again seen as something to do while you going out and socializing – an added level of interaction.

Here are some initial ideas about IaP game mechanics:

• * Reputation and status (levels + leader board)
• * Achievements and badges (FourSquare style)
• * earned virtual goods into real goods
• * virtual currency
• * progress bar (visual meter of task completion)
• * secret discounts with secret passwords (real life)
• * special parties
• * “honor parties” (a party in honor of a user)
• * party challenges (a real life task to carry out)
• * challenges between parties
• * “battles” between parties

On top of finer research and thinking of the gamification elements for IaP, some sort of ethnographic research should be done to see how people interact with similar apps within the assumed context of the service (partying). There is some research which has been done in regards to FourSquare and other apps, and this will serve as a good starting point in this regard. This kind of research will be useful to gain insight into the interests of the users and to develop the gamification concept in term of those.

First session of the year

So we had a nice workshop session at Media Factory.

First there was a lot of great reminders from the earlier session with Markku Nousiainen - that is, concept design and prototyping. 

Fake it till you make it.

And another one liner to take away:

Fail fast.

Now, let’s not go too much into those as well certainly remember what they are all about. Still, they are strategies and mind-sets that are good to keep reminding yourself and your team about. Somehow, they might not always be intuitive.

Anyway, in regard to the project at hand, It’s a Party. We went back to giving a brief description of the concept. In doing this we tried to stress some new aspects of the concept as we have given this description to the MBL group so many times.

What were some of the new points that we made:

• finding and sharing parties
• gamification of the service
• initial engagement through eg. partners
• some interaction between users (“X is joining a party where you are currently”)
• focusing on young women as target audience (others will follow?)
• private party info vs. public party info

Next we have decided to take a closer look at the market (both the general trends and the competition at our local market) and to develop the concept in regards to these. Here is the initial split of work:

1) Business models of competitors (Atte) (How to get the money?)
2) Initial value proposition (Tapio) (Why start using it?)
3) Gamification of location-based social apps (Lauri) (Why keep using it?)
4) Marketing and potential partners (Essi) (How to launch service? What kind of partners we need to make service meaningful for users? It’s a Party brand?)

See you soon.

2012 Kick-Off in Copenhagen

THe MBL crew made a visit to Copenhagen right at the start of the 2012 academic year. It was good. Here is what took place.

Podio visit:

First of all we learned about Podio, which seems like a useful project management tool and a work platform. It it different enough from BaseCamp and Yammer, but we have not used it yet to say anything much about it other than it does sound like it could be used in out project here. We will adopt it for IaP.¨

Anyway, we sat down with Anders Pollas (co-founder) and about half of the afternoon (it ended up being quite a long visit - thanks for the cola) was spent talking about how Podio came about - from idea to company (via a basement). Anders described how the idea had come about and explained a little bit about the context of the time when it was first developed. Just about when Facebook was coming around and getting popular. Podio looks unmistakably like Facebook by the way - just saying.

The starting team for Podio consisted of just two people and later a developer joined as well as another memeber. The beginning of the idea can be traced to 2006, so about 6 years back, and Podio was founded in 2009 in stealth mode. It was in the same year that they signed their first customers, still operating in stealth mode. The start-up was being funded by investments from individual investors and later god a large angel investment by Tommy Ahlsers who became the CEO. From here it can be seen that while good ideas are really at the heart of start-ups, funding and a good team is vital. This is how they got things to go forwards. Also, hard work for very little money is something that you will most likely have to do, perhaps for a rather long period of time.   

As far a design processes go, we did not get too much insight into how Podio actually works internally (nor did we get a very open explanation of the business model - which is based on “freemium”). One thing we saw was the use of post-its (can’t get away from those) and the use of the wall as well for diagrams and other things. Good! Put things on the wall, it helps, we will. There was a mention of a day spent inside one room, the entire working-day. You go in, you have some agenda or issue, and you really focus on it during that time. Solved! Maybe… 

Morning session:

We had a morning session where the teams described the projects we each have and their statuses. 

Here is the feedback we got:

• Competition + need to benchmark (Onks Jonoo)
• Clarification of value proposition
• + Why will the first user sign up for? Critical mass to vital?
• Partners (clubs and alcohol brands)
• The distinction between parties (private + clubs/venues)
• The categorization of parties. What kind of a party is it?
• Need of programmer
• Market research (benchmarking)

University:

OK, so we also visited CBS which is “where university means business”. The school looks great. We heard a talk by professor Tove from marketing. He talked about an experimental research technique which is very different form interviews and focus groups. It was concerned with recording the changes over time and at certain points in time of viewers of a TV show. It focused on political views of these viewers and how these changed during the airing of the show and looked at the content in relation to particular changes to question. The technique uses a open polar scale between two statements (not a 1-5 which is typical).

This talk was quite insightful into such an experimental method and it is potentially very useful alternative to other qualitative methods. 

Politikenhus:

We also visit JP / Politiken Hus. We got after some heavy security measures, due much to the Mohammed cartoons and their aftermath of reactions. The publishing house stand strong behind their choice and principles, which is great - “We support democracy and free of speech”.

Again we heard about the company itself, how they stand in the market and how they view themselves. The insight into how they work within the company IT-dep and product development was great. Sounds about right. 

We took a very close look how they have adopted their product (a tabloid paper) into mobile form and how their pricing works. They even steer more users towards the product they want them to use, by leaving that free and another priced. 

Blog is up

Description of the project will be put up soon and weekly updates will follow.