Will the future of work be heavily influenced by the games we play and the consumer websites we visit? Visualization and gamification are becoming important for SaaS business applications.
Ensuring an application is visually attractive wouldn’t have been a top priority ten years ago. However, visualization is becoming essential. Nowadays, when young people start work they have high expectations of business applications because they have years of experience using consumer websites such as Facebook and Twitter. They want similar qualities to be available in the workplace and, as a result, enterprise applications that are graphical, interactive and fun to use are winning market share over those with a more traditional look and feel.
The new generation of SaaS applications are sold on a free trial basis and are accessed via users’ web browsers, tablets and smartphones. When people start using the software they are enthusiastic, but the product has to quickly prove itself to convince users to continue to use the application and become paying customers. This means the software has to be easy to use and to engage the user continuously. “Stickiness” will become the key to commercial success.
Visualization
Visualization can be used for two main purposes. Firstly, to make it clear how the user can interact with the application. Today’s SaaS applications are designed for use on tablets and smartphones using highly interactive touch interfaces. The graphics must provide signposts to the interactive controls in the user interface. Secondly, visualization can be used to enable the user to understand complex data at a glance. The well-established trend to display complex data in the form of infographics is being reflected in SaaS applications enabled by new and powerful graphical tools such as D3 for Javascript.
SalesSeek is a great example of a highly visual SaaS application. This has been designed for sales and marketing functions within small businesses and is based on the observation that existing software is too complex to use on mobile devices. It uses graphics to allow users to quickly and accurately assess the sales funnel showing the various stages of all potential customer contracts. This visual approach means it is much easier to understand than traditional solutions and, because it is interactive, users can simply click and drag graphics to change the sales outlook.
Gamification
Most managers probably view online games as a potential distraction for their workforce. However, gamification is another important trend in enterprise software. By 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes, according to Gartner.
Gamification incorporates the principles of game design thinking into business software to help motivate employees, make work more fun and fulfilling and encourage desired behaviour. Gamification also encourages active engagement with the application – this “activation” is in some ways the counterpoint to visualization. Visualization enables users to understand the data in the application, activation motivates them to use the application frequently – to increase their activity level.
Gamification can help keep people focused on tasks and give them a sense of purpose which is particularly useful when employees do boring or repetitive jobs. For example, to motivate agents in a contact centre to sell more you could use a gamification system to introduce an element of competition among agents. Users can be tasked with collecting points and awarded virtual badges when they reach certain goals. Leaderboards can be used to rank players with the winner at the top. LinkedIn uses several of these techniques; for example, to motivate endorsements and to encourage completion of your user profile.
The use of challenges or missions can be a powerful motivational tool, especially if employees believe they are working to achieve something worthwhile. For example, goals can be linked to solving important problems or to corporate charitable donations. Wellevue is an example of a social tool that encourages users to expand their personal networks within their workplace. Players complete missions and post photos of their activities on the company mood board. A stream of amusing photos encourages new connections and cross-functional interaction within the organization. Wellevue is said to have an immediate return on investment, improving things like productivity, innovation and even well-being.
Consumerization is the key to commercial success
The consumerization of enterprise software applications has only just begun and SaaS vendors will need to consider not only whether their software is easy to use and quick to offer enterprises a return on investment but also whether it is visually appealing and incorporates an element of play – after all keeping employees happy and motivated is a challenge for even the most forward thinking and innovative companies. Commercial success will depend on how “sticky” these applications become just as it always has been for consumer web sites. Visualization and gamification are the core ideas to create the satisfied and engaged users which are essential to long term commercial success.