Capturing Attention, Gamification in the Service of Engagement

Employees, customers and executives are drowning in notifications, competing messages and fragmented priorities. This keynote shows how gamification, applying game design principles outside of games, works on three things at once: engagement, recall and behaviour.

The starting point is a field observation: the brain has predictable biases. Sunk costs, overconfidence, familiarity, group conformity. The room experiences them live, game-show style, before drawing the useful conclusion. If biases are predictable, then the environment can be designed to offset them.

Then come the levers of behavioural design, with examples everyone recognises: the piano staircase that moves the flow, the smiling radar that slows drivers down, the sound-effect bin that gets litter picked up. The eight motivation drivers act as a grid for choosing which ones fit your context.

The hardest application of this material is safety, because errors are expensive there and heroic vigilance has never held over time. What holds is an environment designed to make the right move easier than the wrong one. The same reasoning serves compliance, training and customer experience.