Evan Carroll » badges http://www.evancarroll.net Experience Designer, Researcher and Author Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:13:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Motivating users with badges http://www.evancarroll.net/2009/12/05/motivating-users-with-badges/ http://www.evancarroll.net/2009/12/05/motivating-users-with-badges/#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:56:04 +0000 Evan Carroll http://www.evancarroll.net/2009/12/05/motivating-users-with-badges/ As a UXD and especially one who works for a advertising agency I’m often faced with the challenge of motivating Web site visitors to do something that they ordinarily wouldn’t do. Perhaps its as simple leaving a comment or as significant as spending money, but there’s always a goal. In the business we refer to it as the “call to action.” Recently I have encountered several online services that use badges as a form of motivation. Users earn a badge by completing certain activities and are recognized with a visual element that appears on their profile page.

My badges on Foursquare

My badges on Foursquare

One such service, Foursquare, asks mobile Web users to check in whenever they arrive at a new location. Users can choose to alert their friends or even Tweet about their new location. This is one of the many location-based social networking services that are coming into popular use. Foursquare has adopted badges as one way to motivate users to check in. Examples include the “Adventurer” badge for checking in at your 10th unique location or the “Local” badge for your third check in at a particular location. These badges give you nothing more than a visual reward on your profile page. It’s similar to how a Scout earns a badge for completing certain activities. Other sites like StackOverflow have used the badge model to recognize users for good contributions to the site. Here the goal isn’t to increase participation, it’s to increase the quality of participation.

Online forums have used a reputation or karma score for some time now. Unless somebody started using a forum at its inception it quickly becomes more and more difficult to catch up with others. Badges are distinctly different in that they are attainable even by new users. Having badges at multiple levels of difficulty (StackOverflow does this explicitly) allows new users to get into the game and “catch the bug,” if you will. The quest for more badges becomes addicting and their participation frequency increases. I like to refer to this as the “win-all-you-can” principle.

Let’s extend this idea a bit further. I think this can be used outside of social networking and to great effect. What if a corporate intranet was treated like StackOverflow? Users could receive badges for helping with the maintenance of the site. An “Organizer” badge could be rewarded for adding tags to an article or a “Cleanup” badge for flagging out-of-date content. High levels of participation could even be rewarded with monetary compensation. While this sounds a bit hokey, it may be just the thing that brings social participation to typically asocial sites.

So what do you think? Is the stretch too far? How about other ideas for badges outside of the social-networking space? Comment it up, folks.

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