Ever wondered why people feel a connection to their avatars when playing a game? Is there a special reason it should be incorporated in Gamification?
An avatar is a game mechanic that allows the user to personalize their profile or make it more playful. The user can choose an avatar for their profile picture and customize its gender, skin and hair color as well as add accessories.
A study by Katrina Fong and Raymond Mar published in the February 2015 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, concludes that people draw inferences about personality characteristics from avatars. In addition, most people tend to pick avatars that truly represent their personalities.
So how does it work and, more importantly, how can we use it to engage employees?
Nir Eyal’s ‘Hook Model’ explains the impact on engagement of personalizing an avatar. The hook model tries to explain why we are more engaged with certain products out of pure habit, and the pattern that technologies use to hook us in. The first phase of the four-step cycle is the ‘Investment’ phase. This is the phase in which the user does some work and invests time committing to the usage of the product. This investment is most likely going to encourage the user to re-engage with the product more frequently.
Gamification looks for ways to engage users so that they feel compelled to do certain activities or use an application (such as a learning platform) and invest time in it. An avatar on a gamified platform provides users with the ability to create a virtual representation of themselves that people will recognize and attribute to that person – it’s their virtual ID. The user often gets creative, representing him/herself in the way they want to be seen and then embraces the avatar.
What’s more important is that avatars let employees do more than have fun – they can show off their achievements by adding accessories that are only available once they’ve achieved certain levels in the game, or in our case, in their professional development path. In essence, it’s like wearing your badges. For example, certain ‘Master’ accessories can be only available for employees who are strong contributors to their employee knowledge community thus both rewarding them for their work and showing off their social status as veteran, knowledgeable employees.
Naturally, when you put effort into creating something, you feel a strong sense of ownership towards it. The user will start by investing time into their avatar and choosing what hat it should have or what hairstyle it should wear, creating some type of emotional connection with his/hers avatar. Often, the user will be proud of their avatar and want people to see it and show it off.
For this to occur, the user needs to accomplish challenges and land itself on a good place on the leaderboard or in personal challenges where he/she is encouraged to improve and reach higher levels of performance. Therefore, the avatar plays a part in encouraging the user to further him or herself and making such progress apparent to others.
Once you “own” something, you want to improve it, protect it and nurture it. By driving employees to emotionally invest in their “workplace” avatars, we are driving them to invest in the actual workplace, setting them on a career path and encouraging excellence.
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Prior to Centrical, Dalit worked at LivePerson and NICE creating digital transformation and customer engagement solutions. Her areas of expertise include complete product lifecycle management, translating market and customer requirements to draw a viable product roadmap, identifying champions, and then harnessing their enthusiasm to drive adoption of innovations.
Dalit Holds a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science from the Technion Technological institute in Haifa.
Previously the Global Head of Marketing for SAP SuccessFactors, April was responsible for end-to-end marketing for SuccessFactors around the world. In this role, April led strategic marketing plans to grow global brand recognition, revenue, customer success and category creation of human experience management (HXM), which is focused on solution innovations that put the employee at the center of work. April also served as a Diversity and Inclusion Lead at SAP and led global thought leadership and strategic partnerships inspiring an inclusive culture, women’s equality, supplier diversity, and sustainable supply chains.
April has been honored by various organizations including CRN’s “Women of the Channel” and as a “Top 100 Ethnic Minority Executive” by EmPower. She holds a B.A. in Communications and Marketing from Simon Fraser University, Canada’s leading comprehensive university.
Ella holds a B.A in Psychology from the Hebrew University and MSc in Organizational Behavior from Recanati Business School at Tel Aviv University.
Previously, she held the role of Head of Product Experience and Communications for LivePerson, a leading Conversational AI platform, where she played crucial part in delivering significant product innovation and customer growth. Prior to her time at LivePerson, she held multiple senior product roles at NICE, a leading enterprise customer experience (CX) software provider, including Director of Product Portfolio and Director of Product Management.
Linat holds an MBA from Tel Aviv University and a BA in Computer Science from Reichman University (IDC Herzliya). She graduated magna cum laude from both institutions.
Prior to that he was CEO of Gilon-Synergy Business Insight, a national leader in Business Intelligence. In 2010, Gilon-Synergy was acquired by Ness Technologies (NASDAQ:NSTC) and Gal went on to serve as Senior VP at Ness, and was member of its executive management.
Prior to that he was VP customer relations and operations at Deloitte Consulting. He also worked at EDS and Bashan. He holds a MBA degree in Marketing and Information Technologies from the Tel Aviv University.
Jayme Smithers brings 25 years of leadership experience in enterprise software. He has been building and scaling high performance revenue teams in the worlds leading technology companies including Oracle, NetSuite, SAP, BusinessObjects, Crystal Decisions and most recently ThoughtExchange.
As the CRO at ThoughtExchange (a leader in Enterprise Discussion Management) he helped significantly scale their growth, led them into new markets, brought in key investment and helped them become the leader in community engagement across the Education sector.
At NetSuite, Jayme helped innovate, grow and scale key verticals as NetSuite become the standard Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) thanks to the introduction of new channels and a value centric approach to the sales process.
Prior to NetSuite, Jayme worked at SAP where he led various roles including global revenue channels, large enterprise and mid market teams. It was here at SAP where he built a strong partnership with our CMO April Crichlow where they focused on building world class teams with clear expectations, coaching and career development!
Outside of work, Jayme can typically be found with his family in the mountains sharing his love, passion and knowledge of nature and sport.
Jayme is actively coaching the Nancy Greene Ski league and competitive youth soccer.
Jayme holds a business degree from University of Denver where he competed in two varsity sports (soccer and alpine skiing) and he helped led the Alpine Ski team to back to back NCAA National Titles in 00 and 01.
Daphne has over 15 years of experience in Customer Relations and Retention in both B2B and B2C environments. Her area of expertise is leading customer success, consulting and global professional services teams within public and private sector companies. She is focused on leading teams to grow the partnership with our clients.
Prior to Centrical, Daphne worked software and service companies in the online marketing and gaming industry.
Daphne holds MA in Statistics – Specialization in Operations Research and a MBA degree, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Ariel has over 16 years’ experience in a wide variety of R&D leadership roles. He is highly experienced at building R&D teams from the ground up, driving high levels of accountability and ownership and setting up automation infrastructures. For the past 10 years Ariel has managed both in-house and offshore development teams at companies ranging from startups to enterprise organizations.
Prior to joining Centrical, Ariel served as VP of R&D at Worthy.com where his team dramatically improved product stability, quality and execution. Before that, he was VP R&D at Applicaster where he led infrastructure changes from project to product. Ariel has also held various R&D positions at Retalix (later acquired by NCR).
Ariel holds B.sc in Computer science & Math, and MBA degree in Information Technologies, both from Bar Ilan University
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