There was a challenge from the previous week (week 4) that I was yet to complete - looking at how your product was starting to shape up and potentially gamify an element of it. I had already considered including some of kind of tracker for the impact that people saving food was having inspired by the fact that Kitche (one of the competitors I investigated) does it and it seemed to be a good motivator so this challenge came at the perfect time to explore it.
The gamification lecture in this week’s content explained that intrinsic motivation is more effective than when it is extrinsic as Brown said “Motivation is the crux of a successful gamified experience” (2021). Through my user research I knew that there was a lot of intrinsic motivation to avoid waste, both of food and money as this was something that my user actively tries to avoid.
I thought therefore that it could be effective, as it is designed to be in the Kitche app, to make the cumulative amount of food that a user saves over time with the app use tangible in some form.
I flirted with the idea of playing around with unpredictable discoverability in that a trial-and-error approach to trying new recipes could somehow be rewarded but, as excited as I was by the fact that trying out a new recipe ties in well (at least in my head) with the potential to reward the adventurousness of trial-and-error, I felt that this was moving too far away from leveraging gamification in my favour and focusing too much on making a fun game which is not the point of the exercise.
I also considered doing a worldwide food saving leaderboard but ultimately thought that competitiveness was not necessarily a trait I wanted to promote in this setting: the focus is on an individual contribution towards minimising food waste, competitivity felt too aggressive for this approach.
This user flow shows how a guest would interact with the basic mechanics of the app and how the gamification element would play out after you had completed a recipe.
I took the opportunity to consider how the experience would differ between a someone cooking as a guest or using the app with their account: if you’re on your account you get to know cumulatively how much you have helped but as a guest you just get information for how much you saved in this particular instance. In both cases you get to know how much of an impact worldwide the app has had as I want to promote a feeling of collective effort regardless of how the app is used.
I also chose to include the opportunity to share your handiwork through social medial, this ties in with the SAPS rewards model which explains that Status is the most powerful of possible game rewards (Setiawan 2019). I didn’t want to force this on people however so it remains a choice.
As already stated, the rewards of this potential gamification are that they tie in with the intrinsic motivation of my users to help save food as well as they even have the opportunity to declare their status online if they so wish.