Behavior: Basic Psychology of the User - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 113

Use rewards, but:
1. Provide reason for task
2. Acknowledge it is boring
3. Allow multiple strategies

No

Can you make the
task more
challenging, less
routine, or tied to a
higher purpose?

Yes

Yes

Is the
task
mostly
routine?

Do so,
and....

* Focus on healthy environment
and fair pay.
* Foster autonomy, mastery, and
purpose.
* Avoid if-then rewards
* Consider unexpected rewards
that offer praise and feedback,
* Provide useful information rather
than control.

No

Fig. 4.20 When and how to use rewards based on theories in Pink ( 2009 )

4.7.4 Implications for System Design

How much you need to consider motivation during system design will depend on
three things: your particular users, the particular tasks they are doing, and the
particular context in which they are working. It is probably best to consider these
in reverse order, and think about the context first. If the context is a work setting,
then there may be little or nothing that you can do to provide any motivation for
your users to do their tasks over and above the motivation they already get from
their company. If it is a leisure setting, however, then you will need to look at ways
of engaging users in doing their tasks. You could offer virtual monetary rewards,
for example, or badges of achievement to show that they had attained a particular
level of proficiency at performing the task. Figure 4.20 summarizes this approach.
In terms of the particular tasks they are performing, there are more ways in
which you can contribute in work settings. Given what you know about how visual
perception and aural perception work, you can now start to think about how to
make important items stand out on a crowded screen (using pop-out effects), for
example, and how to design audible alarms that can be used to quickly identify a
problem (by making them distinctive). In this way you can help your users to
improve their task performance, and help them to achieve mastery.
In leisure settings your approach to dealing with the user's tasks may be more
perverse, in that you do not want to make it too easy for your users to achieve
mastery. You want to make them engage with the game, for example, and spend
time and effort to attain any rewards, such as being able to progress to the next
level of attainment, on the way to achieving mastery.