Passionate about objectively great products and problems worth solving.
I’m currently the founder of Ascendable, making missions manifest, helping ambitious founders create the best possible products. I’m a product design leader 🚀 with 23 years hands-on commercial experience, working for businesses from micro-, right up to PLCs.
Most of my experience has been in Enterprise SaaS, but also with local and national brands such as The AA, Stella Artois, Tesco, Hotel Chocolat, etc. I have been in leadership roles for 9 years. Previously Head of Design & Research, EU Amazon Payment Products. Before that, Head of UX, and Head of Product, at a FTSE 250 business.
I’ve had a significant exposure to Data Science (incl. ML and AI) and I’m passionate about combining Qualitative (Human-centred Design, ISO 9241-210:2019) with Quantitative (statistical data science, ISO 20252:2019) research.
Created a gamified approach to a new Customer Service app.
A number of details have been redacted, due to contractual agreements and sensitivities.
The bank had developed a CRM system which allowed for all front-line staff to view the communication between the business and the customer. All Staff to learn how to use the interface for the CRM system, and for an audit trail should be available for regulatory purposes.
The bank realised that the universal adoption and education of Staff was dependent upon it’s acceptance and adoption across the business.
The purpose of the system was to ensure that 100% of UK branch and call-centre staff were able to use the new CRM sytem.
The training should be supportive of:
On the 7th July 2016, a day of scoping and interviewing staff members took place.
I interviewed 5 people within these groups, who told me about their competencies with digital technologies, times when they’d been able to use technology well to support their workflow, what a negative or unrewarding workflow might look like.
There were two types of end user, the Cashier and the Standalone / Specialist. Both users had a good level of competency, and both users Each user type had a different outcome in mind.
The Cashier had a transactional and specific customer-driven goal based upon a requirement from the customer who was in branch. The Cashier worked mainly from a Servicing Portal, and would therefore need an easy way to access it as part of the busy day-to-day workflow within a branch or in a call-centre.
The Specialist was someone who was a brand manager, and often had staff who reported directly to them. Their requirement was for a pick-up-and-put-down tool, which could be used intermittently, and to search for specific customers to make connections between product offerings for them.
Because the learning system was designed to promote the learning of an existing interface, it was necessary for us to fully map all the potential actions and journeys within the existing system.
It was the intention to overlay the training on the real system itself, so as not to deliver an experience which was abstracted from the actual system they needed to learn.
[This schematic has been redacted]
In order to frame our delivery of the project, I defined high-level acceptance criteria in order to act as our ‘definition of done’.
Once we have fulfilled this criteria, we know that we have achieved high standard against the Objectives.
For the Specialist User group, it was necessary for activities to be tracked, so that they could flag when users weren’t reaching their goals, or people were falling behind. They could also reward those who had achieved great scores within the system.
The project objectives could most viably be fulfilled by a gamification model (as per Gray, Brown & Macaufano (2010): Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers). In accordance with the model, aligned with the requirement for training, I was keen to address the motivations of learning intrinsically, without too much reliance upon extrinsic rewards for the short-term.
I therefore focussed upon the priority actions to be taken (completing the tasks), and explored the potential for ‘wrapping’ the tool in a narrative which motivates the exploration and completion of tasks in a positive way.
The super-objective was to promote learning and use of the tool, without getting too distracted with what might be construed as gimmicks. Allowing for an appropriate balance of fun, and some low-level distraction (in order to evoke a sense of freedom) was considered without the focus being too heavy upon a points-based systems.
With this in mind, I provided a set of different game mechanics, each one themed around Santander’s brand, to fulfill the criteria outlined above.
All the routes provided below offer narratives to motivate and promote use of the tool, and also explore the potential for introducing competition. Once a consensus has been reached about the game narrative, in context with the options and elements addressed in this outline, the necessary assets will be produced for iteration 2.
So the following are the current game mechanics we suggest as being most appropriate:
Participants are involved in a Santander cycles, bike race. The key is to reach the finish (complete the tasks) before anyone else.
The known constraint on this route is the time of the participants, and we feel that busy participants should not be penalised for being busy.
If a deadline for completion is pending, then we might consider a ‘chase’, in which participants are given a certain amount of time to complete objectives, but must do so within the allotted timeframe. Again, constraints for this are the fact that participants may rush through the lessons without learning, potentially being too fixated upon the ‘flight’ mechanism of the chase.
The participant collects gold coins (or any form of artefact) based upon achieving tasks. This allows for power-ups and badges, and might also take the form of ‘mining’ or ‘butterfly catching’.
The overall super-objective is the main prize and focus, and the entire course is framed as a journey. In order to allow for difference in competition, it might be framed as a mountain. The participants must ascend the mountain, making use of ‘life-lines’ if the journey becomes too difficult, or taking easy, medium or hard routes up the mountain. The hard route would have no life-lines, fewer but more complex tasks, and hence greater value of points/coins/score is rewarded. The medium and easy routes would allow for life-lines, but the maximum points awarded are incrementally lower. A mountain offers a real sense of resistance as well as adding to the sense of achievement.
Upfront, I immediately listed the deliverables which would be needed for the game. Some of the assets I listed at the time were:
The welcome screen was designed in order to explain the process, and also to set the tone for the experience. It was intentionally designed to look ‘fun’, and supportive of a sense of play and freedom. The CRM system was accessible as a ‘demo’ mode, and when the player/user wanted to play the game, they could access the rosette icon in the navigation bar at the top right of the screen.
From the welcome screen, the user is then asked to login. This data collection process allowed the system to report on their useage, performance and which departments and branches were the highest performing.
There were 4 options, each one with it’s own bespoke iconography which was based upon Santander’s icon set, but designed to be playful and more tangible.
The main dashboard needed to show the user how many modules there were, and how many they had achieved so far. An achievement of a task allowed for the user to be given Coins. The coins were the users’ defined means of measuring success.
I designed 2 screens for this.
The first was an iconographic option, which also made use of cards within accordions. This route made the tasks feel more tangible, and each step more of an achievement than simply ticking off a line of text.
The second option was lines of text, but with positive reinforcement (the status was shown on the left-hand side of the label). New tasks could only be unlocked after playing the earlier tasks. These locked tasks followed a ‘disabled’ pattern, and also made use of a padlock symbol. Hovering over the padlock explained how to unlock that task.
For each task, an introduction modal would appear to explain the task. The aim was to demonstrate the actual usecase in the form of a customer request. In order to offer a sense of direction and focussed attention on the task, the call-to-action also contained active language to ensure the task outcome was explicit and unambiguous.
I designed a set of badges for a list of user action usecases. They were based upon perfect scores, quick times, and other achievements. Below is an example of the ‘Lightning badge’ which offered a sense of achievement, and a positive reinforcement for playing.
Social facilitation is one of the known drivers to achievement. Sportsmen tend to perform far better when competing directly against other athletes than in a time-trial scenario. With this in mind, I designed a leaderboard to offer a ranking of players according to tasks.
It was also possible for the user to view their own best achievements, ranked in terms of coins, number of tasks performed, time, and lifelines. The overall score was calculated to take into account latency and use of lifelines.
Penalising exploration was avoided, because when free action is penalised, it creates an inhibition to explore. Exploration was central to the project, and therefore we avoided anything which might inhibit that natural behaviour.
In order to be brand compliant, a number of routes and treatments of the icons were designed.
Because the requirement was for a sense of fun, and light-heartedness – I departed from the usual brand icons which are generally used across customer and internal comms. The version which suitable the objectives best was option 1, which were used across the system.
This project went live in November 2016. It was initially active for over 2 months.
During that time, the entire front-line members of staff in the UK used the system.
A survey of staff had over 2,500 responses from staff-members. Astonishingly, 100% of them were postive, 93% of those who played the training program passed within a few days (based upon the average training timespan).
The responses from those who used the training game were fantastic! A few of them are shown below…
I feel this is the best and most interactive training course I have completed in my 16 years at Santander!!
What a fantastic way to help us understand the new system. I feel I have learnt more and it was fun to complete. It also motivated my team with some friendly competition.
