[GUEST POST] Simply Retail

Leina Tan

TJC Student

Introduction

Simply retail is a game that turns mundane tasks interesting in the retail scene and keeps store management more organised. The everyday tasks are disguised as missions with elements of socialisation and feedback to enhance the working experience.

Ideation

Retail was my topic of choice as I wanted to improve the processes used in this field. Since most of the tasks in retail are mostly very standard and repeated, the life of a retail associate can be rather mundane causing employees to be unmotivated. When asked to make this demo, I wanted to use gamification to enhance the retail experience of the associates, increase employee productivity and to facilitate the store maintenance at the managerial level.

Flow of Game

My game is divided into 3 different topics, “food”, “hearing your voice” and “break time”.

Food

I decided to focus on the food department for my game and therefore the “food” topic is where all the tasks of the employee can be found. Within the topic they will be brought into the narrative where they are sucked into a strange world and receive notes from “HQ” telling them what tasks to complete.

Basic admin matters such as clocking in and clocking out is made more engaging through the QR code challenge. Points earned allows players to look forward to coming to work and prevent them from forgetting to clock in and out. This is also the basis of the loyalty reward series. (To be elaborated in rewards & achievements paragraph)

Hearing your voice

Hearing your voice The “Hearing your voice” topic uses the shuffle function where players will be randomly assigned 2 challenges to complete each day. The topic allows the employees to effectively voice out any suggestions or concerns, and allows the superiors to understand how the employees feel about their working experience as well as their thoughts on the different products. This can support communication and cooperation to increase productivity and enjoyability of the job.

Break Time

The “break time” topic contains a break blog photo challenge where anyone can upload what they had for their break. This challenge serves to be a community where colleagues can socialize and find a sense of belonging, as it encourages one another to establish bonds and let loose during their break time.

Leaderboard

The leaderboard feature allows for friendly competition between colleagues and to acknowledge the efforts of the top players to allow them to feel a sense of recognition for their good work.

Rewards & Achievements

To incentivise players to perform well in the job, rewards and achievements are put in place. When the players accumulate enough points, they will be rewarded with the shining star award to affirm their efforts. To encourage long term commitment to the job, the “tree” series achievements are put in place. Players will attain a different “tree” badge based on how long they have worked for. Attaining the “old tree” badge would grant them access to the lockers on the top row as a reward.

To further incentivise players to give their best, the “get out of jail free pass” reward is given to the top 5 players of every month. It is tougher to obtain than the shining star badge however, the player will be able to use this pass to push for any request (e.g. a change in schedule) they want with a validity of 1 month. This reward does not cost the organisation any monetary resources but is attractive enough for the player to be interested in redeeming the award.

Features of the game

The challenges are formatted in a way where data collection on the managerial level is made easier. Through the report generated, the inputs from the players can be downloaded into an excel sheet that can form an inventory checklist using a few simple lines of code. This allows the superiors to be able to have an overview of the store inventory in real time. The product code number and quantities from the player’s entries in the different challenges can be consolidated into a mastersheet using the function =VLOOKUP. A report as shown below will be generated.

Challenges

The first challenge that I faced was creating a game that was general enough for any organisation to use. Due to my limited experience in the field, I do not know if the challenges meet the needs of the different organisations. To overcome this, I only stuck with the standard tasks in the department that can be easily altered to fit individual needs when the demo is used.

Another challenge that I faced was how the data would be downloaded as a report. My initial formatting of challenges and questions caused the data to be downloaded in a way that was not convenient for excel codes to run. To overcome this challenge, I reformatted the questions, only having one question per challenge so that the data would be collected in a much neater way, making it more convenient to run excel codes.

Conclusion

Through creating this game I learnt how to think from the point of view of multiple users and to be adaptable. I had to consider the perspective of both the retail associate as well as the superior. With each target audience there were different needs that I had to consider when making my game. I also learnt to be more critical about the processes in retail. When creating the game, I had to find gaps in the current system to fill. This taught me how to think critically of the things around me and to solve the problems that arose. (e.g. replenishment, stock taking, etc). For a job that is routine by nature, gamification can be used to make the experience more interesting and to motivate retail associates to give their best. Having a gamified experience also allows for a more relaxed work environment, allowing the different levels of management to work closely with each other.

What are you waiting for? Check out the game now!

https://gametize.com/project/retail