To be honest, all I really want the people at the “top of the house” (I hate the business jargon, but you know what I mean) to just leave me alone.
And, over the years, I’ve been pretty lucky. There was only one time where I really had to deal with meddlesome execs. Boy, though, was it a doozy.
What I was dealing with was a C-suite exec who wanted to incorporate some social media trope on a financial services site. I won’t tell you what that was, as it might give the game away. So, let’s just call them “awards.”
I think the idea was to gamify the boring task of handling one’s money. Now, there’s nothing wrong with gamification. It just needs to be done in the right context. Social media is a great example of that context, as are things like self-improvement, learning, and so on. Finances, however, can be a little dicey.
Looking at an old report, I see that my users agreed with me: “You know, like I don't really expect to have to a earn an award. You know, this isn't a game – this is my bank account.”
They also pointed out how task-oriented they typically are on a finance site: “I’m here for one real purpose. This is just extra noise that I don’t need when I’m really just trying to do some online banking.”
They also mentioned that they wanted to get something out of it:
- “It doesn’t look like I gain anything from them, which is another reason why they’re not super interesting to me. If it was something like, once you’ve been a member for two years, you’ll get a higher interest rate, then I might be interested in the badges.”
- “So, unless it's gonna be pertinent to things that are happening to me that are affecting my bank account, I probably wouldn't wanna see them over there.”
Finally, users felt a little talked down to: “It’s like they're trying to gamify saving, which I feel like is kind of silly, and like they're treating me kind of like a child.”
Did they pay attention to my results? Of course not. It launched with few if any changes.
What’s interesting is that, once it was launched, the feedback was about the same. I lost track of what happened from there, I’m afraid.
Here’s hoping, though, that the exec got some understanding that that wasn’t such a brilliant idea after all, and that he should leave that sort of stuff to the professionals who he’s hired and pays good money to. Heck, I could have let him know both of those things right off the bat, and saved the company a lot of time and money.
Carl’s LinkedIn page lists him as a “chaos wrangler,” though I know him better as a usability engineer
