Positive Feedback Systems in Line of Business Applications
Last week I was having one of those “what if” conversations with a coworker regarding our application and I mentioned jokingly that we should add an achievement system into the app, kind of like Xbox or StackOverflow. The more I thought about it, the more I started asking myself, why *don’t* businesses consider this kind of functionality for applications? I know there are always time and resource pressures for software projects which might make the priority of such a feature float to the bottom of any project teams task bucket, but there may be something more to this. If you figure that the average end user is stuck using the same set of software on a daily basis to complete their work day after day, adding features to business applications that actually reward them in subtle ways for being productive and make using the software more fun may not be so superfluous after all.
I’ve heard that it’s not uncommon for sales teams to have “scores” and leader boards to encourage friendly competition among the various members of the team, why shouldn’t business software contain similar concepts if the data allows it? The fun part is, such a system would be relatively trivial to implement with the average data set that a line of business application collects about user activity. Maybe you just made $10,000 in sales today, how great would it be if your CRM application rewarded you with a little badge to display on your user profile?
ZOMG that was me