Game Thinking: Innovate smarter & drive deep engagement with design techniques from hit games

The best products don’t just fill a need. They help people get better at something they care about. Game thinking is a framework for building products that make your customers more powerful, knowledgeable, and connected. Like lean startup, game thinking is grounded in testing assumptions. And like design thinking, we start out in a problem space (a

Now think about situational triggers—the transitions, rituals, and events that structure your customer’s daily life and appear in your job stories.

Interest groups. Do you belong to interest groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other online communities? Those groups can be a great place to find superfans. Be

Mastery Is Better than Progress Many non-game designers understand this and eagerly adopt points, badges, leaderboards, and ratings systems to track and reward progress. They soon learn what every game designer knows: Numbers alone don’t confer meaning.

Activities and feedback work together to engage your customers and let them know they’re on the right track. Investment is what happens when you collect, earn, customize, win, or build something you don’t want to lose. Triggers are reminders to return to the system you’re invested in. Together, all these techniques pull your customers back and comp

the level of challenge increases to match your evolving skill, you’ve got a setup for flow—the ultimate goal of every game and product designer.

What group of people will need and want our offering first? What characteristics and behaviors will they have in common? The best way to develop loyal customers is to fulfill their needs in a pleasurable way. Think about the customers you’re targeting and ask yourself: What relevant needs do they have right now that we could potentially address? Ho

Product-centric triggers are designed into your product experience. The most effective ones tap into the customer’s existing emotions and habits. External triggers are environmental cues that remind you to do something, such as notifications, email, shoes by the door, or sticky notes on your laptop. Engaged triggers kick in once someone is engaged

Currency is for spending: Once customers are engaged with your system, giving them spendable currency is a powerful way to drive investment. This tactic is most effective if it’s layered onto other skill-building systems, instead of being used in isolation. Duolingo, for example, awards “lingots” for completing activities, which you can spend on cu

To choose the right elder game role for your community, ask yourself: What skills, knowledge and relationships are experts accumulating? What kind of roles are experts asking for? What are they eager to do? What does the community staff currently do that could be handled by experts?