Rahul Vohra (founder of Superhuman, my favourite email app) spoke about how he designed an enterprise application based on 7 primary game design principles to make it fun, rewarding and productive.
Principles of Game Design:
- Create concrete, achievable, and rewarding goals
- Design for nuanced emotion
- Create rapid and robust controls
- Make fun toys, and combine them into games
- Make the next action obvious
- Give clear and immediate feedback with no distraction
- Balance high perceived skill with high perceived challenge
Some quotes:
Game design is not gamification.
Games need goals and are a defining feature of games.
The best games create strong emotions because emotions are the foundation of memory.
Source: a16z