UsableMarkets

The NY Times has a fun little article in this weekend’s business section about how some companies are trying to make their business software more game-like.

The primary example of the story is from a CRM application that now allows salespeople to give rankings to prospects “not by how new they are – common in C.R.M. programs – but by how likely they are to buy something. All prospects are also tracked on a timeline, another gamelike feature.”

To anyone in the usability world this statement is quite hilarious. Shooting aliens is another “gamelike” feature, but I doubt you’ll ever see that in corporate software (well, at least corporate software outside of the security and defense industry).

What’s perhaps more important about these features than their “gamelike” quality, is that they more accurately map to how a salesperson actually works. In fact, the irony is that they are more “worklike” than “gamelike.”

Touting your corporate software’s “gamelike” features might seem like a good marketing move, but wouldn’t the truth be more compelling? Saying your software is more usable seems like a better sales tactic, particularly in the corporate world, than saying your software is more “gamelike.”

Your future corporate intranet

As always, thanks for listening.
~alex