Microsoft SharePoint Gamification: How Badgeville Improved Adoption Rates
Microsoft poured over $1 billion annually into SharePoint, yet adoption remained stubbornly low. Only 40% of business users engaged with the platform regularly while 41% preferred plain email. This is a textbook case of what happens when you design for features instead of human motivation.
In 2013, gamification platform Badgeville partnered with SharePoint consultancy Salient6 to tackle this adoption crisis through behavioral design. Their webinar revealed exactly which game mechanics moved the needle, and which ones backfired when applied without understanding the underlying psychology.
This article breaks down the Badgeville approach, its results (including a 58% increase in ratings and votes), and what it reveals about designing enterprise software people actually want to use.
Table of Contents
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
The SharePoint Adoption Challenge
SharePoint is a web-based collaboration platform developed by Microsoft, providing document management, intranet portals, content management, and social features for organizations. Since its launch in 2001, it has become one of the most widely deployed enterprise platforms in the world.
Despite this, adoption rates have been painfully slow. Many organizations find their employees prefer to minimize use of the platform, or ignore it entirely.
A 2011 Forrester report found that 31% of SharePoint organizations still had users who preferred collaborating via email. Both Forrester Research and Gartner Research reported that despite over $1 billion being spent annually on SharePoint, only about 40% of line-of-business users regularly engaged with it.
A full 41% of all users preferred standard tools like email. And 51% of users reported dissatisfaction with the user experience.
In February 2013, Forrester released “SharePoint Enters Its Awkward Teenage Years,” identifying four critical problem areas:
- Adoption: Lack of forethought in rolling out SharePoint to regular users
- User Experience: The interface proved cumbersome and confusing
- Tools: Users preferred familiar apps like email despite SharePoint’s integrated features
- Business Value: 40% of respondents reported their organizations saw no business value from SharePoint
The learning curve presented a significant challenge. Without proper onboarding, training, or encouragement, users simply turned their backs on the platform. From an Octalysis Framework perspective, this is a classic failure of the Discovery and Onboarding phases, where no Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning & Calling) exists to make users care, and no Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment) feedback loops reward early effort.
Digging Deeper: Engagement, Community, and Loyalty
Joel Olson from Salient6 identified three dimensions for evaluating an adoption situation:
- Engagement: Getting people to use the solution is not enough. Putting the timekeeping app on the intranet homepage would get nearly 100% of users to touch the platform, but it would not solve the real engagement challenge. Users need to become actively involved.
- Community: Users need information, training, and peer support. Building an in-house SharePoint User Group helps identify champions who share with others and accelerate adoption.
- Loyalty & Expertise: Power users need recognition and rewards. Without them, the SharePoint team will not scale on its own.
The Badgeville–SharePoint Partnership
Badgeville, a gamification platform provider, partnered with SharePoint to integrate behavioral game mechanics directly into the collaboration platform. The goal: influence and reward key user behaviors to improve knowledge sharing, resource management, and collaboration.
In a July 2013 webinar, Badgeville’s Chris Lynch (Director of Product Marketing) and Caroline Dangson (Producer) presented the collaboration with Joel Olson (Managing Director at Salient6).
A survey of webinar attendees revealed how diversely organizations used SharePoint:
- Site/portal/intranet: 71.5%
- Collaboration: 58.1%
- Content Management: 57.0%
- Custom Apps (internal): 26.3%
- Social: 19.0%
- Business intelligence/analytics: 8.9%
SharePoint 2013 had already built in some gamification features: reputation systems within communities showing points, levels, and progress toward the next rank. However, these reputation features stopped at the community level and did not transfer across multiple web applications or interact with team sites.
Microsoft’s Yammer integration provided another example. The SharePoint Yammer community (over 3,000 users by 2012) enabled leaderboards that identified not just who was active, but who was contributing the highest quality.
Key Game Mechanics Applied
The Badgeville–SharePoint integration employed several game mechanics, each targeting specific behavioral outcomes:
Points
Within the Badgeville platform, administrators could define which behaviors to encourage and assign corresponding point values. Low-effort static activities received low point values, while demanding activities received proportionally higher assignments.
Caroline Dangson noted that many users are not competitive. A point-based system alone may not drive desired behaviors. Points are the most common game mechanic but far from the only effective one. This aligns with what the gamification field has long recognized: relying solely on points leads to what Yu-kai Chou calls the PBL (Points, Badges, Leaderboards) fallacy.
Levels and Achievements
Levels served as a non-competitive mechanic to encourage productive behavior. Employees could “level up” within their functional area. For example, becoming more proficient at customer service best practices on the company wiki.
Achievements rewarded specific accomplishments without competition. A “Commentator Achievement” recognized individuals who provided valuable comments and opinions on content.
Missions
Missions grouped multiple goals into guided paths that employees could complete over defined periods, from a single week to an entire year.
The key insight: many users did not realize SharePoint had powerful features because the features were not obvious. Missions made the platform’s capabilities discoverable by guiding users through them.
Smart mission design provided variation and choice rather than rigid sequences. Individual users could focus on features relevant to their interests, making the experience feel personalized rather than prescribed.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards were used strategically rather than broadly. Company-wide leaderboards spanning the entire intranet interested only “hyper-adopters” who were already heavily invested.
Department-specific leaderboards proved far more engaging because they related directly to each user’s job function and daily responsibilities, something they would actually strive for.
Designing an Effective Gamification Plan
Caroline Dangson made a critical point: it is easy for companies to bolt game elements onto an experience, but doing so without seamless integration leads to failure. According to Gartner (November 2012), 80% of gamification applications would fail to meet business objectives by 2014, primarily due to poor design.
The solution is to focus on the total user experience: understanding users, their activities, and their environment before selecting game elements.
For example, if your audience is not competitive, leaderboards will not drive engagement. Worse, they may actively discourage participation. This connects directly to the Core Drive 8 (Loss & Avoidance) dynamic: poorly designed competitive elements can trigger avoidance behavior rather than motivation.
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation
The webinar emphasized two categories of motivation:
In Octalysis terms, motivation splits into Left Brain Core Drives, which are extrinsic and driven by goals, rewards, and ownership, and Right Brain Core Drives, which are intrinsic and driven by creativity, social connection, and curiosity.
Left Brain Core Drives power extrinsic motivation: the logic-driven pull of goals, points, and rewards.
Right Brain Core Drives power intrinsic motivation: the experience-driven pull of creativity, relatedness, and curiosity.
Intrinsic motivation comes from within: wanting to feel smart, successful, socially valued. When actions and contributions receive acknowledgment through levels, badges, or points, users feel good about themselves and their role in the community. This maps to Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment) and Core Drive 5 (Social Influence & Relatedness).
Extrinsic motivation in a corporate context often means merging incentive programs with the gamification system: gift cards and material rewards at certain achievement thresholds. While these produce short-term engagement, they lack the sustained power of intrinsic motivators.
Three “Motivation Mechanics”
The webinar outlined three essential design principles:
- Recognition and Positive Feedback: Deliver achievements and instant feedback for valued behaviors
- Learning and Improvement: Elevate user rank, status, and expertise
- Social Reputation and Status: Surface key people, behaviors, and achievements through activity streams
Motivating Collaboration, Learning & Compliance
Collaboration
To drive knowledge management, the design required users to get community validation before earning full achievement or points. Others reviewed, tagged, commented, and edited content, receiving their own feedback and rewards. The original author received instant feedback as validation accumulated.
This created a virtuous cycle where contribution quality improved because multiple people had stake in the outcome.
Learning
A Fortune 500 technology company used SharePoint’s structure to deliver product training videos, with game mechanics showing user progress and currency of knowledge. Activity streams added social pressure (and support) by showing what peers were completing.
As employees completed video training, they earned “IQ” points redeemable at certain thresholds for gift cards and company rewards.
Compliance
For compliance training (which employees find uninspiring), Badgeville designers abandoned points and badges in favor of achievement cards showing progress through each module.
Knowing where the “light at the end of the tunnel” was motivated users to finish. A prescribed mission path ensured every required element was covered. This leveraged Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment), the progress bar effect, rather than competition.
Badgeville Results: The Numbers
Across Badgeville’s client base of enterprise companies, gamification produced measurable improvements:
| Category | Metric | Improvement |
|---|---|---|
| Contributions | Docs Created | +21% |
| Idea Submission | +36% | |
| Expertise | Profile Views | +20% |
| Questions Answered | +47% | |
| Ratings and Votes | +58% | |
| Retention | Daily Return | +50% |
| Weekly Return | +40% |
The most significant gains appeared in expertise metrics: ratings and votes increased 58%, and questions answered rose 47%. Retention also improved dramatically, with daily return rates up 50%.
Octalysis Analysis: What This Gets Right (and Wrong)
The Badgeville approach to SharePoint gamification got several things right from an Octalysis perspective:
Right: Context-specific leaderboards. Rather than company-wide rankings that only interest power users, department-level leaderboards connect to daily work. This activates Core Drive 5 (Social Influence & Relatedness) within meaningful peer groups.
Right: Mission-based discovery. Guiding users through features they did not know existed leverages Core Drive 7 (Unpredictability & Curiosity) and Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment) simultaneously.
Right: Validation-driven collaboration. Requiring peer review before granting full rewards creates real Social Influence (CD5) dynamics rather than solitary point accumulation.
Wrong: Heavy reliance on extrinsic rewards. The “IQ points redeemable for gift cards” approach risks the Overjustification Effect. Once users are conditioned to expect material rewards, removing them can destroy the intrinsic motivation that existed before.
Missing: No Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning). The implementation focused on individual advancement but never connected users to a larger organizational mission, the “why” behind collaboration. This limits long-term engagement.
Conclusion
The Badgeville–SharePoint case demonstrates both the promise and the limitations of enterprise gamification. When carefully designed, with attention to audience competitiveness, context-specific mechanics, and intrinsic motivation, gamification can meaningfully improve platform adoption.
The results speak for themselves: 58% more ratings and votes, 50% higher daily return rates, and 47% more questions answered. These are not trivial improvements.
However, the approach remained largely in the Points, Badges, and Leaderboards paradigm. A deeper application of the Octalysis Framework, incorporating Core Drive 3 (Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback), stronger Epic Meaning (CD1), and Core Drive 4 (Ownership & Possession), would have likely produced even stronger, more sustainable engagement.
Corporate gamification is an ongoing endeavor. By iterating over time and moving beyond surface-level mechanics toward real human-focused design, organizations can transform tools like SharePoint from obligations into platforms people actually want to use.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework: Complete Gamification Framework
- The Points, Badges, and Leaderboards Fallacy
- How to Implement Gamification at Work
- How Rewards Kill Our Creativity
- How to Design Effective Leaderboards