From Game Design to Service Design

Abstract

Background. Game designers have long been developing strategies to foster engagement, pleasure and a variety of sensations in game experiences, increasingly applying their research to areas beyond games. This has led to a growing recognition of the use of game elements in non-game settings. In parallel, service designers have been seeking to improve user experience and engagement in services. Method. Drawing on relevant literature about game design, the authors develop a framework that gathers a variety of game design research endeavors to form a practical tool to support service development from a user experience perspective. Its application is exemplified and simulated in a methodological approach to Action Design Research on a selected service. Results. The service is then analyzed and compared ‘before and after’ the utilization of the framework, with no measurement of results. At last, a simplified method to gamify services, the GSF Application Model, is presented, Conclusions. This article presents and describes the development of the Gamification Service Framework, an IT artifact designed to solve a class of problems related to the service field: the gamification of services. The central aim is to provide a new tool for service designers to use game design concepts in their practices, by structuring services in an analogous way to games.