I friend has been talking about how he wants to use gameification at his employer. One Saturday morning, over coffee I logged into Duolingo.com and showed him their interface and demonstrated the elements of gamification in it. Since then they have made several notable enhancements. The most notible technique they use is the owl, Duo. He?She? is pretty cute and expressive enough in response to what I do on the site that I feel something as I interact with the software. When I get busy and the two practice sessions build up I feel guilty because Duo will cry. Ok, not that guilty but enough that I will consciously decide to make time to at least crank through the practice sessions. Then there are the levels that one can earn by doing lessons and translating real websites. So I can level up and as time has gone on I can follow others and see how I compare - not in a competitive way but in a “Wow, how did they get that many points?” motivational way. Recently I noticed that they enhanced the translating the real web interface so that I can earn more or less points depending on how difficult the translation is. Not only that I can rate others translations after I have done mine and this affects what I think of my translation after I see how others interpreted it. But, and this is important, I can’t see how well someone else’s translation has rated with others until after I rate it. Cool huh? I don’t know if its coming back but I miss the blur effect. The blur effect was applied to the background image of the sun and the hills (notice the seagulls flying high up in the air). Someone has spent a lot of time making the beautiful artwork besides all the expressive owl postures. So when you went from the home screen to the lesson or game session screen, the background image stayed there but lost clarity and the interface for the session was highlighted. This last observation isn’t really gamification but from a web development perspective it’s pretty cool. They also use Backbone.js and thats pretty cool too even though I stll run into trouble with my views on the iOS interpreter, but I don’t think I am using them correctly. Have you always wanted to learn a language? Check it out. I have been consistently learning Spanish since December because of their gamification techniques subtly applied to the interface.
4/5/2012 ~ 3 min read
