Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Looking to add a little more drama to your new game? How about: “To Catch A Thief.” The goal of this game is to build real-life cases against employee theft. Many retail organizations have the POS and video data to build real cases of real theft, yet many general managers pay little attention to the data. “Reducing shrink” is not sexy or fun. But catching a thief, that’s Law and Order/Dateline stuff right there.

One of the bigger problems that I have seen in retail applications over the years is this focus on data rather than business process. It seems like too many applications are designed around providing data to people, who must then determine what process to follow to correct bad numbers or continue good numbers. I know part of that is driven by the complexity and variety in retail operations between one location and another. But part of it is due to poor application interface development.

Organizations will spend millions of dollars developing a data warehouse to consume and crunch numbers to produce nothing more than a bloated Excel spreadsheet for users to consume. Why not go that extra mile and determine how to bring real usability to the application while adding gamification elements to improve its use?

Another thing that I often here is that “without some sort of financial reward, no one will use it.” Although I agree that money is a great motivator (bribe) to use an application, I would argue that you might be able to do as well or better with gamification elements than with money, when it’s implemented properly. There are hundreds of examples of applications thriving due to user involvement that included no financial gain for the users. Linux and Wikipedia come to mind.

Linux, used by a large percentage of corporate America, was developed and supported by people who had no financial incentive. Millions of people get information from Wikipedia when none of the authors receive financial benefit for their contributions. Citizen reports blog and tweet about the news for no direct benefit. The list goes on. These applications don’t even have gaming elements, and yet still people contribute freely to their success.

But the executives at many organizations are skeptical about their employees jumping on the bandwagon and are reluctant to build in social or gamification elements into their applications. I’ve heard that it “sounds cheesy” or “would never work here.” Just because execs don’t see themselves doing it, doesn’t mean that others in the organization won’t.

I really don’t want to throw the generation card here. But the reality is that when it comes to application design and usability, in my experience, there is a pretty distinct line between people older—and younger—than 40. Most of the executives making the business decisions around business process (read: application design) are older than that magic number. If you are older than 40, do yourself a favor and consider that you are likely as out of touch with application design as you are with music. If you don’t like Top-40 anymore or don’t have a Twitter account, you would be better served to let others in your organization make final application design decisions. Just sayin’.

So application service providers and in-house development organizations should seriously consider elements of gamification in their next software releases. It’s cheaper than pay-for-use incentives and is an easy way to improve application adoption.

What do you think? If you disagree (or even, heaven forbid, agree), please comment below or send me a private message. Or check out the Twitter discussion on @todd_michaud.