Why I am helping Captain Up as their Behavioral Scientist
I get asked a lot why I chose to work with one specific gamification platform instead of staying neutral. The short answer: the Captain Up team won me over with something most companies forget. They made the working relationship fun. Here’s the full story.
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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.
Why Captain Up
Many of you know that I have been using Captain Up’s platform on my own site for a long time now.
At the beginning I was looking for a variety of Gamification platforms to experiment and research on, and most of them either required too much setup know-how (I am not a programmer), or were limited in what could be customized.
My friend Andrzej Marczewski recommended Captain Up to me and since I respect his opinion I decided to give it a try.
The setup only took a few minutes, and then I spent a couple hours customizing it to create challenges and language that fits my site.
I even documented my thinking process in this blogpost (as well as my book).
Too Friendly and Enjoyable to Quit
The team at Captain Up then reached out to me and asked if I needed more support. They proactively helped me on all my questions and needs, and it actually created a lasting impression: “Wow, I would love to work with these guys at one point.”
After a while, I was ready to move on and study other Gamification platforms, but then I realized that my readers loved the current Captain Up one so much, they kept on asking for more challenges and tried to level up more.
Many would say they were trying hard to level up or reach the top of that week.
That was to some extent expected, since the design is meant for people to fall in love and stay engaged with the experience, but it nevertheless gave me great emotional encouragement, so I decided to just stick with it and use it for my blog.
Making Videos for Captain Up
Eventually Captain Up asked me to make some videos to explain to people how to use their platform better, so I made a short series of Gamification Videos called the Engaging Website Design series for them. (Note: The Captain Up blog is no longer available.)
They were made in similar style to my Beginner’s Guide to Gamification Videos, but with a strong focus on HOW to do these things via Captain Up.
It was useful because I regularly get questions from my own readers on how to use Captain Up better, so now I have a great place to refer them to.
Taking Captain Up to New Heights
Even though Captain Up is a great platform, they are still young and still trying to cover all the amazing features that people want.
Since I am using their platform and my readers all depend on Captain Up to create more enjoyable experiences, I thought I should get involved with how the product evolves and how they incorporate sound principles of my Octalysis Framework.
Because of that, when they reached out again to talk to me, we quickly reached an agreement where I would try my best to help them become a great platform and something that can implement all the Core Drives via unpredictability, meaningful choices, and social platforms.
This is an exciting journey. As my own company The Octalysis Group is growing substantially, I don’t know how long I will be able to stay committed to Captain Up, but as of now I’m looking forward to make them as successful of a company they can be.
Hopefully my involvement will help turn them from a great product/platform to a great company.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Yu-kai Chou’s Blog Gamification System Explained
- What is Gamification?
- Engaging Website Design Series #4: Achievement Symbols
- 90+ Gamification Stats, Examples & Cases with ROI
- Books by Yu-kai Chou