Trapper Markelz

Bill Sabram on Gamification - Accepting Limitations

We were having a discussion internally at MeYou Health about a new product we are working on. In the conversation, Bill Sabram, our lead game designer, said this:

"Games are particularly good at asking us to put seemingly irrelevant limitations on our performance (Draw only one card, Roll only two dice to move, Wait for your turn before going again, etc.) and yet they are so fun that we gladly give up control to live within the 'rules' of this new group experience."

I think that is a great statement about one of the main powers of gamification. It isn't just about adding points, levels, or badges to your product.  Gamification provides an operating context that makes your participants open to experiencing a product in a very different manner than they otherwise might. It makes them open to direction, to ritual, to limitations. And not only are they open to it, they generally accept it at face value, and rarely even question it.

"Why should I do this? Because the game says so. That is how you play. That is the rule."

Very powerful stuff.

Reading Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

I grabbed Anything you want on Kindle because it was short. I was in the mood for a quick read. Sometimes you get like that right? Every where I looked (on Twitter) were people quoting parts of it, so I figured that was enough social proof to check out just who this Derek Sivers person was!

I was not familiar with the website CD Baby. I am not super into the indi music scene, so no surprise there. It sounds like it was a brilliant, disruptive idea that was almost ahead of its time. Through sheer blood, sweat and tears, Derek walked his own path, and managed to find some amount of success.

I can't say I can identiy much with Derek. As a product manager, some of his decisions seem pretty foreign to me. He sounded like a control freak in some cases (around the web code) and in other cases didn't want to be bothered to a point of general neglect for his company. If there is one lesson I learned, it is that a good idea with amazingly strong product/market fit will succeed, even when you do everything possible to keep it small. 

Given that I was reading this on Kindle, I did highlight a few quotes. Kindle is nice enough to save these on the web where I can easily find them, so here you go... some interesting stuff/advice from Derek Sivers:

Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you're not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say “no.”

No plan survives first contact with customers.

None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding.

When you build your business on serving thousands of customers, not dozens, you don't have to worry about any one customer leaving or making special demands. If most of your customers love what you do, but one doesn't, you can just say goodbye

You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you're not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want.

Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you've shown how much you value them.

You can probably read this book in a single sitting. I blasted through it on the train during my morning commute in two days. I can recommend Anything You Want as a unique perspective on brute forcing a company your own way no matter what anyone tells you. There are lessons here for sure on being true to yourself, but I can't help but ignore that Derek really didn't want to start a company. He wanted to be a musician. He loves music. The company just sort of happened because he was there with the right idea and the right execution at the right moment. Timing as it turns out, continues to be everything.

Get out the vote for my SXSW 2012 health panel!

I don't typically ask for much from the internets, but here it is:

Can you please vote for my SXSW 2012 panel? Pretty please?

 The title of the panel is "Health Games for all: employer, employee & public". As the title suggests, all of us panelists are interested in exploring health games at work. This includes their design, their effectiveness, their viability, their future, etc. The participants include:

• Fran Melmed, Moderator, Context Communication Consulting
• Rajiv Kumar, M.D., CMO and co-founder of ShapeUp
• Trapper Markelz, Head of Product at MeYou Health <----me!
• Sean McNattin, Vice President, Product Management Wellness, at United Health Group
• Bryce Williams, Director Wellvolution, Blue Shield of California

Here is a snip from the submission:

This panel focuses on the implementation and outcomes of health games in the workplace environment. We’ll zero in on measurement, motivation and scalability. And we won’t skip over practicality. Gamification may be hot, but it means squat if your business model isn’t proven.

Read more

I think our panel is specifically interesting because we are bringing together a combination of solution providers who are using gamification techniques, and the people that purchase and implement these solutions at scale. This will hopefully result in a frank discussion about how health gamification works when get down into the tactical execution of these programs to drive outcomes.

How can you help?

Between now and Friday, Sept 2, please vote for my panel and leave a comment about why you think our panel will add an interesting perspective, or about your interest in the specific speakers. Even if you are not attending, all of the panels are video taped and typically made available online, so you can catch it if the topic is something you are interested in. 

To vote, do these two things:

1. Register an account: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register?return=/stars/update/10083/1
2. Go to the panel page and vote (click thumbs up) : http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/10083
3. Add a comment about what you think is interesting at the bottom!

You don't have to just vote for mine. There are a ton of cool panels in the Health space. Check them all out!

Thank you friends and family and everyone else who happens to come here for your support! If the panel gets chosen, this will be my first visit to SXSW!

Building a social product vs a social network

As many of you (friends and family) know, at MeYou Health we are working on a social health product called Daily Challenge. We are taking some of the latest thinking in game design, social network science, and behavior change and blending it all together in pursuit of measurable improvements in people's well-being.

What is well-being? It is all the aspects that make up who we are. It is a mix of our choices in the past, the choices we can make now, and how both of these affect the choices we could make or might have to make in the future. I have come to learn that improving well-being is a partnership between what we can design in the product and what the human being who uses Daily Challenge brings to the table. Our mission at Daily Challenge is to engage. The mission of our participants is to improve. From these two things together, product and person, emerges an individual outcome for each unique individual.

Designing for this to happen turns out to be incredibly hard. But that is why I love my job.

The biggest challenge recently has been balancing the use of social features in the product that allow people to create support networks and the temptation to expand these into features that comprise an entire social network product.

The goal of Daily Challenge has always been to build a network that can support you in the improvement of your well-being. From the research that we did which informs the product, this circle of influence is rather small. Anywhere from 3-12 people. Daily Challenge was never conceived nor optimized to connect you to hundreds of people like Facebook does. It has always been about taking these larger networks like Facebook, and using that as a starting point, asking you to identify the true influencers and supporters in your life. 

But, the moment you put friending in your product. The moment you put messaging, and commenting and interacting, some amount of "social networking" is assumed. The participants of your product are going to do what they do. They are going to take your expectations in directions outside your control. And that is ok. The problem is, if the actions they do, like friending hundreds of people, is not going to move the needle on the health outcomes you are looking for, it becomes impossible to justify supporting that, no matter how vocal they become. To pivot the product to a true social network to satisfy the needs of a few who arrived for that reason would mean abandoning those that are actually using it to find a framework for support and encouragement at a more intimate scale. 

So I find myself wondering, if you add social features to your product, will you always end up building a social network? When I started Daily Challenge, it was never the plan to build a separate social network from Facebook. But it seems that you are naturally pulled in that direction the moment you start asking people to connect.

We use Get Satisfaction for our support, and that product has social features. Do some hard core users of that product consider it their social network? 

If you put friending in your product, is the creation of a social network inevitable? Is this some law of the universe?