Gamification and Travel

A decade ago, building a good user interface for a travel booking application was the perennial grail. Today, however, building a good user interface is an expectation for quality software applications. Good usability is no longer enough. Over the past few months, I’ve been becoming more immersed in the world of Enterprise “Gamification”. The most prevalent current definition of Gamification by Stephen Detarding and his colleagues describes it as “adding game elements to non-game contexts” like customer service centres, sales teams and learning applications. As they increasingly gain traction in business, Gamification strategies are likely to continue becoming increasingly embedded in the technology we interact with both inside and outside of the workplace.

Gamification is about making environments more engaging for end-users and creating the idyllic sense of “delight” that as website or application designers we’re always striving to attain for our products.

In the Business Travel context, for travellers, agents, travel bookers and expense handlers, we want to use gamification to generate more productive employees both for their well-being and the corporate bottom line. To be clear, we are not talking about virtual travel games. No one, we hope, will be coming into the office wearing sneakers, sporting beach towels and bringing their sticker-bombed gamepads. What we’re referring to are the dynamics of games—the emotions they generate, the sense of narrative and the drive to learn and progress through a task, and opportunities for fostering mutually beneficial co-working. Of course, this is what we are already trying to do in pursuing a good user experience through user research and analytics to inform our content strategy and the production of fast loading, efficient and visually appealing interface designs for our users. However, there is more than this to user experience even, or perhaps especially, where users are required to use our systems as part of their work. Taking a travel agent role as an example, there could be opportunities to reduce skill acquisition time through simulated e-learning scenarios or by regularly feeding back metrics in the applications they use to motivate self-improvement in call-handling times. Knowing that agents’ increased motivation can lead to improved productivity makes gamification as a deliberate design strategy for the systems they use an attractive business-focused proposition. Already, companies like Microsoft, Google, Lloyds, TSB and HSBC are embedding gamified experiences in their backend as well as consumer applications.

There is a whole cognitive and behavioural science as to why games are so immersive and we can enjoy them so much. There is a fair chance you’ve participated in a gamified experience already if you use LinkedIn which motivates through awarding points for completing your profile and has leaderboards and positive feedback mechanics for starting and contributing to discussions. In a way, the practice is already firmly embedded in a form within the business travel industry. Frequent Flyer and Hotel Loyalty programmes encourage travellers to collect brands points to redeem them for personal travel awards. Around 2005 I co-ran a focus group at Merrill Lynch London to gather travel booker opinions on a booking application. During the session, it emerged that the reason for escalating travel costs was that travellers were deliberately booking a more premium airline over Low-Cost Carrier routes to increase their personal loyalty points. The Travel Manager was shocked to hear this and the information, as I understood it, was going to be passed on to the Chief Executive who had locked down the noticeably high and inexplicable costs. Not only is this an example of why it’s of primary importance to talk to end-users rather than just their managers, but it also highlights that personal intrinsic motivation can lead to users, in a sense, creating their own games and practices from the systems we provide. Pilots who we trust with our lives usually make a significant number of their flight training hours within a game; albeit a “serious” simulation game. There’s every reason to consider then, that the elements of game thinking can inject increased engagement, a positive user experience that includes the time-honoured business factors that drive profitability within Business travel.

In some ways, business travel lends its self to social networking—think of the many travellers at their destinations not because they chose to be, but because their corporation sent them. How can we engineer the experience of business travel systems to turn a requirement into an opportunity or even a delight for the traveller? How many large clients have various employees flown into different offices from departments that normally wouldn’t have any connection at all? Are there benefits in encouraging networking between them and can we achieve this through injecting elements of the dynamics and mechanics of games into the process? What about in the travel implant? How can we use elements of games to drive productivity and at the same time give staff an increased sense of job achievement and satisfaction to stymie the prospect of high turnover?

Virtually all business travel is for the purpose of attending a meeting. Ultimately, we want to make sure the traveller arrives in the best way to their meeting, but if the traveller looks forward to the travel we can, reasonably and measurably, expect more from them during their meetings. Building that enjoyment is the architecting, or Game Thinking that’s required, and it is certainly possible to achieve.