Vending machine gets gamified

On my Google+ Explore tab I saw a YouTube video of Coke promoted vending machine shared by Mashable.  Before I explain and spoil the surprise, let me share the video:

It's a great marketing idea.  One it encouraged people to interact with Coke vending machine, but also while encouraging people to interact with the machine, it also introduced element of game mechanics.  If participants get the dance moves right, they get an immediate reward as bottles of Coke.

Ideas like this are all around us.  We have pieces of technologies that are ready to be applied to solve problems that we might not even realize that we have.

The future of our economy depends on how creative we are in applying today's technology to create cool user experience.  To do that we must encourage innovation by everyone.  No one has monopoly on creativity.

Product Manager: Product must be fun to use

Fun is not the first thing that a product manager thinks about when designing a product.  Especially those of us in enterprise software market.  People think that making something fun would only apply to companies like Zynga, Electronic Arts, etc.  But I think we all want a fun product as consumers, and we are all underestimating the effect of having fun when we use the product.

A classic example of a fun product is computer games.  It is purposefully created to deliver 'fun' to users.  So if we analyse what games deliver to their players, we must be getting closer to definition of 'fun'.

There are many wonderful talks available on YouTube about introducing game mechanics to your product, so called gamification.  I recommend talks by Amy Jo Kim, Gabe Zichermann, and Jane McGonigal.

Let me put them in my own words.  A fun product does following things:

Product Management: add 'juice' to your product

Web is full of things that you can learn from.  'Juice it or loose it' was one of those learning opportunity for me.  Although example that Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho used was a simple block buster game, ideas can be applied to any user interaction.



You can try the game yourself at Grapefrukt.com