61% of Retailers cite customer retention as their biggest obstacle. 69% of consumers say their choice of Retailer is influenced by where they can earn customer loyalty / reward program points. And 64% of Retailers say their loyalty / rewards program is the best way to connect with customers.
We wanted to use game-design elements and game principles to create a fun shopping experience and improve the connection with the retailer by utilizing the POS customer display to engage customers while their baskets are being processed.
Therefore, we came with the idea to use Gamification as a platform service which exposes cloud based APIs and is intended to serve any application and client:
The discovery phase was a quick, high‐intensity effort that allowed us to define project milestones, understand our customers vision, and begin research into user needs, behaviours and pain‐points. We also kicked off a technical discovery phase to understand feasibility and constraints.
We conducted an online survey in Google Forms to understand whether the idea of gamification in Retail would yield results. With the small questionnaire the results indicated that we're on a the right track. 90% out of 32 participants said they like the idea of using gaming elements as part of the shopping experience.
Knowing who exactly I was designing for allowed me to ask myself how our ideas fit into the lives of the users. I imagined ideal experiences and focused on how our personas think and behave rather than getting into specifics about interfaces, technologies or business goals. Through our combination of research and brainstorming the different Loyalty levels & rewards, we came up with some great Gamification mechanics.
Wheel of Fortune (WoF) ranks as the longest-running game show in the United States. The concept of the “Wheel of Fortune”: it’s all about FUN and the element of surprise!
With a WoF Widget possibly the most simple and easy way to implement a gamification marketing strategy, we decided to build the stories around that feature.
Loyalty entered. Big button "Let's Play" to start the game.
Trivia question. Customer must score 20 points to continue playing with the "Wheel of Fortune.
Stop playing. The customer can always continue the game from the point at which he stoped, since the game is tied to his loyalty data.
For instant reward WOF played, "$X discount off this purchase" message appears.
I decided to use Adobe Illustrator as my basic design tool along with Photoshop to communicate the background animations. This gave me an ability to be flexible by designing the main theme and additional images for the Trivia.
Since we wanted to implement our idea at the Point-of-Sale, further work included creating a prototype in HTML to make it easier for the back end to add it to the POS.
Company Benefits
Customer Benefits
Our work impressed the stakeholders so much that NCR decided to patent this innovation as Loyalty Platform Integration Processing.
• One of the key benefits behind ‘why teamwork is important’ logic is associated with the synergy of ideas. You may have heard of the famous concept about sharing apples vs. ideas. If you have an apple and I have an apple, it will only be one apple at the end of the day. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, we will have two ideas on the same topic.
• Working as a team benefits everyone. We have extensively written about best mind mapping activities because everyone is involved in sharing ideas. Working within a team reaps tons of benefits.
• Big challenges require small steps. Take small steps, because big changes can not be brought overnight, especially not just by an application alone. Accordingly, use more strategically meaningful and realistically applicable ideas that steer in the intended direction.
2025 © Anatoly Slobodskoy