Gamification to drive behavioral change of frontline workers

What is behavioral design?

Behavioral design is a problem-solving approach that draws on design thinking, psychology, and behavioral economics to influence people’s actions for positive change.

Benefits of behavioral design

Behavioral design principles, applied with the right gamification elements, let us drive the behaviour we wanted from users. In an enterprise application that behaviour is tied to how the employees perform at work, compliance for example.

Project Overview

A major mining company in South East Asia wanted to do a tech-enabled operational transformation. As part of those initiatives, they wanted to explore ways of motivating the frontline workers, the supervisors, to improve 3 key aspects.

• Safety Compliance
• Operational Efficiency
• Team Performance

The three are tightly coupled. The end users are on average 45–50 years old and not tech-savvy. They are not motivated: they are settled in their jobs, and some of them are retiring in the next few years. They have followed the same process for many years and are not willing to adopt a new one.

Research Process

We used several research methods to uncover the end users’ pain points and the opportunity areas.

• 01 Ethnographic Ride Alongs
• 02 In-depth Interviews
• 03 Focus Group Discussions
• 04 Secondary Research

1. Ethnographic Ride Alongs

The primary users were the mining supervisors, who spend most of their time in the pit where mining happened. They keep moving between locations in their vehicle, in constant communication with people from their own and other departments. Riding along with them was important for understanding their day-to-day work and the problems they face. These ride alongs usually lasted 120 minutes to half days at a time.

2. In-depth Interviews

We ran 10 to 12 in-depth interviews with the end users, either during the ride alongs or in the office, to uncover the way of working and the pain points. We prepared an interview guide first, which helped make sure all the areas were covered, in the right order.

3. Focus Group Discussions

We invited multiple stakeholders to focus group discussions. The groups were formed so that we could gather insights on operations, end users, and business goals. Each agenda was set in advance to keep the discussion focused.

4. Secondary Research

We did desktop research on the gamification methods different applications use across different industries. It was very helpful in defining the design principles.

Research Outputs

• Current state user journeys with pain points and opportunity areas
• Gamification design principles

Workshops & Ideation

We ran design thinking workshops and co-creation workshops to share the findings and work up the first ideas for the problems.

1. Design Thinking Workshops

We ran several design thinking workshops, with different stakeholders taking part. They gave us early alignment on the problem statement and the high-level design directions. Workshops ran from 2 hours to half a day. The agenda and the artefacts they needed were prepared well in advance.

2. Co-creation Working Sessions

Co-creation working sessions were the more detailed ones, held with the working team: product owner, architect, business analysts, and client working team members. In these sessions we made more detailed paper prototypes and aligned quickly at the working team level.

Ideation Outputs

• Future state journeys with solutions to the pain points
• High-level key screens which help to visualize the journey better

Design

We translated the ideas into low fidelity and high fidelity screens, journey by journey.

1. Low Fidelity Wireframes

We drew wireframes quickly to get reactions from the stakeholders and the users on the flow and usability.

2. High Fidelity Visual Designs

High fidelity designs followed and were used for further testing. Once aligned, we handed them over to the front-end development team.

Testing

We used different types of testing to get reactions from the users and other stakeholders.

1. Concept Testing

Concept testing was important for checking some of the gamification principles and methods. We explained the gamification concepts to the users with real-life examples and posters. No screens were shown. The testing helped us decide the type of rewards, the leaderboards, and the offline activities. It also made us drop yearly rewards in favour of more frequent rewarding and ceremonies.

2. Usability Testing

We ran usability testing on both the low fidelity wireframes and the high fidelity screens. Prototypes were built in Invision and given to the users to interact with. We gave them tasks to complete and watched them work. Based on the feedback we redesigned content, typography, hierarchy, and even the flow.

The Solution

• A mobile app that complements a main supervisor app, encouraging users to do better in their day-to-day work
• A simple and engaging learning experience where the user can learn a little every day
• Instantaneous rewards for compliance work such as timely checklists and other activities
• Encouragement for individual performance and team performance, so that overall productivity increases

Outcome and Impact

90%+ daily engagement: More than 90% of the users used the learning feature every day.

Compliance improvement: Visible improvement in compliance, especially filling the checklists both accurately and on time.

Productivity awareness: Users became more aware of their own productivity and of the team’s.

Cultural shift: The app enabled more conversations about performance during free time.

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More detail on this project can be shared in an interview or portfolio review.