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Joris Beerda tested Human-Focused Design vs Design Thinking (Which actually works?) | Episode 438
00:42:27
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- [00:01]
Rob
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- [00:31]
Joris
come in, the keywords that people have on the lips is design thinking, which is sounds like human focused design. And yet we've seen that it doesn't work. It doesn't really work to make experiences where people want to come back to over and over and over again.
- [00:52]
Rob
So engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And as you know, on this podcast we are always talking about the importance of engagement, the importance of retention, building stronger products. And that's how through gamification and behavioral design we've become the number one gamification podcast. And that's what we are exploring every single time. I'm Rob. I'm the founder and coach at Professor Game. I'm also the head of Engagement strategy in Europe at the OCDIS Group, the leading gamification consultancy. And I'm also a professor ambassador of gamification and game based solutions at global institutions including IE Business School, EFMD EVS University and many others around the world. And of course, before we dive into this super interesting conversation we'll have with Joris, if you're struggling with retention, churn engagement in your project, product, service or business and you want to turn that around, please let us know. We have something for you for sure. Just go to the link in the description and we'll have a chat. So Joris, welcome to the Professor Gain podcast. We're delighted to have you here. I'm going to get started with a few things, but before that we need to know, are you prepared to engage?
- [02:00]
Joris
In fact, engagement has been my life story in a sense. And you know, you could say engagement is everybody's life story in a sense. It starts with your first cry, which is basically engagement with your mom. So that's what we call human folks design. You know, even prenatal seems to be already something in engagement lurking, you know, when people are pregnant. So yes, very much, very much engaged to be engaged.
- [02:27]
Rob
That sounds like a part of the discussion for your upcoming book. We're excited to look into that once it comes out as well. So Joris, as you might know, he is the CEO and co founder of the Octalysis Group which is a work and he's a world leading expert in human focused design and octalis gamification. His global career in creating engagement spans across 20 years, 15 countries and seven languages. And he has designed human focused experience for dozens of Fortune 5000 as well as medium sized companies. He's also well known as a keynote speaker on gamification in many renowned conferences across Europe, Asia and Australia. And you might be asking yourselves is this, are we having yours now? Because Rob is at the of Thalysis Group. So the answer is yes and no. I think I've had wanted to have yours for a while but also he as you can tell being the CEO and the co founder of the Otalysis group, his schedule looks crazy, crazy every day. So getting him on the podcast I think is almost a privilege of me now being part of the Utilities Group. And I thank you for that opportunity. Yours. And without further ado, is there anything that you, you want us to know about you before we dive into the questions?
- [03:38]
Joris
Well, I hope that the questions are going to tell a lot about me, so let's just go with the questions. So what is it?
- [03:45]
Rob
We were talking about how crazy your schedule can be and I know you do many different things, but if we were to talk about a regular day or week or even maybe, maybe even month, what would it look like? What are the kinds of things that you're doing nowadays?
- [03:59]
Joris
Being a CEO, I'm responsible for a number of things. So you're constantly all over the place. And because we have teams in Latin America, North America, Europe as well as Asia, you're basically operational around the clock. You have no real choice. Also because our clients are also distributed globally and so you know, most of our clients still, the majority probably in the United States, but as you know, you know, you're, you're busy with that project yourself. We have a big client in Mexico, we have clients in Georgia, we have clients in Kazakhstan with clients in Singapore. So it's a non stop operation. So my week basically consists of very long days mainly sometimes till 12, 1 o', clock, sometimes later in the morning. And then I hopefully, you know, if I'm lucky I can turn the dial down on Friday and do more in depth work, you know, on Friday and also my Sunday evening normally is about in depth work. And for us it's just trying to make things work and making sure that we keep our clients happy and making sure that the people working at two Gift Analysis Group are satisfied as well. Because in the end, you know, we are, we feel like A big family. That's at least how it feels to me. Many of the people that work in our company known for, for a decade, including you, I think we met each other in 2015 and in the, the World Gamification Congress where we launched, I think the trade samurai gamified trading experience on stage. I still remember that and I remember talking to you and other awesome people in the industry. So, yes, it's a, it's, it's family. And as you know, with family and friends, you know, it never stops. And that's, that's the pleasure of, of having such a, such a, you know, deep relationship with everybody.
- [05:53]
Rob
I have to vouch for that. I have to let people know this is absolutely true. I'm there, I'm part of that. Yor is always on a bit. Sometimes I worry I'm gonna send a message and it's like, oh, maybe I just program it for tomorrow so it doesn't wake up or see it too late in the day. Right. Because I know that's part of your game in many ways. You have vast experience in the industry and you're one of the few people in the industry who's had so many corporate projects as well. And that means plenty of good stuff that's happened and potentially also some pivots, some things that did not go as well, plenty of lessons learned. So is there one of those times that you can describe? Of course, outside of NDAs and all these difficulties, or being general enough not to disclose any information, if that's the case, where you can talk to us about one of those difficult times where things did not go your way, first attempt in learning or failure, perhaps, and you know, how it turned around or what do you learn from it?
- [06:53]
Joris
For sure. Yeah. So we've worked with many different large companies like Volkswagen, Porsche, Motors, and still work with Microsoft, Samsung, Coca Cola. So we have a large variety of big companies and they're all different. Right. You can say, oh, this is typical of all these clients. Every client has their own, has their own cultural, national, legal, you know, differences. And so the main, the main thing for big, working big companies is it goes much slower. Right. So processes are slower. Getting onboarded is slower. And, but, you know, normally once you're onboarded, the relationship lasts for a long time. So we've been partners with Microsoft since 2017. And so that's a, that's a long, long time. And we still regularly work together. But if you look at, you know, lessons learned or something, that, that didn't go as well is for Example Takeda, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, where we had a really, really cool design of a blood donation program. Takeda is really, really big in plasma donations collections. And so they wanted to make that really, really fun and engaging and make sure that people that actually donate have a cool experience that they want to come back to again. Because in the end we want people to donate blood because it saves lives and it makes Takeda profit. And so we were going to roll this out nationwide. We tested it quite well. It was very promising. And we had everybody lined up for months working to one goal. And then all of a sudden Takeda missed all their research and development goals and basically almost went bankrupt. And so it basically means that all our efforts, everything you focused for half year on was completely gone. And we had to almost our whole company was involved in that was a massive project. And so all of a sudden that disappeared. So this is the opportunity of working with large companies because you can have a really meaningful large project. But if it's, if it, if it fails, then all of a sudden you know, you're left with nothing that you know, getting me making sure that your diversity of clients, you know, is, is always there is something that, that still haunts me at night and keeps me awake that I always want to have a diverse pipeline also for, also for our people. Right. Our people are basically kind of co owners of the company. So they're actually getting part of the revenue directly into their pockets. So if that, that falls away, you know, it really pains me personally because we people have families expenses and so I really, really. Yeah, as I said, it always keeps me up and I. If I don't think we have a diverse enough
- [09:45]
Rob
and you know, maybe we can, we can talk a little bit about, about that. Like how does, how does the actualysis group work in that sense? You were mentioning that the, the consultants get a part of the. The revenue. They're you know, part of the family in many ways. How does that work? If somebody were to come tomorrow and say, oh, I want to work at the Telescope Group, how much can you of course say publicly? I don't know how much of it is, is. Is proprietary as well. If anything,
- [10:12]
Joris
I'm not going to, I'm not going to call out people's revenues or what they call is. But we are a distributed company, a remote company. And we've been like that ever since we were. Has been established in 2013, 14, long before other people went remote. Right. Which only happened after Covid really in large numbers. We've always said we have no choice, because we started the company, I lived in Asia and my Asian co founder lived in America. And so, so we had to make it work somewhere. We couldn't commute at all. And so remote. What does that mean? Remote also means that you have to be completely transparent. You have to be focusing only on meritocracy and not much on hierarchy. And so what we wanted to do is a. Is a model for people to work with us, completely dedicated to what we do, but also having this kind of ownership that they can get a really, really fair share of the revenue. And it's almost 40% goes directly to people do the work. So it's, it's pretty, pretty large compared to, you know, sales organizations, for example. And that revenue is also distributed not based on seniority, not based on where you live. It's just basically what value do you create? And that's the, that's the model. And so we are a very flat organization. There's very limited amount of titles that we have internally. And so we, we like that a lot because it means you have to lead by example rather than. Than. Than authority. Right. And so, so we lead from the front. We still participate in projects even though, you know, I have to force myself to do less and less and less. We still, we still want people to see that we came from the front lines. If we have done hundreds of client meetings, we have hundreds of designs in our pocket. And that gives people the, the, how to say, the trust that we're not just managers that, you know, get people to work, but actually don't know what we're talking about. I think that kind of culture is part of our DNA. So because we know what it means to deliver under pressure, we know what it means to do with difficult clients. We know what it means, you know, to be, to be with great clients as well, and the joy it gives. And so I think it creates a culture that is very open and transparent. And I think it has this, you know, it also has some negative sides, but the positive sides are meritocracy, transparency, and a fair, A fair revenue model.
- [12:51]
Rob
Yeah, yeah. And you're talking about great clients as well. And I know there's been plenty of successes, even one of the ones that you led, and I'm sure many more. I'm saying one, because I actually saw it on gamification in Europe being awarded. You have plenty of awarded designs and, you know, great results you. That could be checked out on the webpage and so on. Is there, is there one story that you would like to get into, you
- [13:16]
Joris
know, it's kind of talking about your kids. If you have more than one kid, who's your favorite kid, right?
- [13:22]
Rob
That's why I didn't say favorite because failure, you can always say favorite. Right? But. But with good ones it's harder, right?
- [13:30]
Joris
So there's a number, there's a number that were really impactful. I think one of the. One of the most interesting in terms of design was probably the Porsche Motors, Volkswagen Group 1, because the design is so futuristic. People can go to our website and look at the case study. Porsche motors. It's pretty, pretty cool. And it was a concept by Volkswagen that was well ahead of its time. This pre Covid where they already said, hey, we are not going to sell cars anymore that, you know, just need a maintenance unit. But actually these cars, especially electrical or electric vehicles, they're going to be platforms for, for mobile service. So how can we get people to interact with our car on a daily basis? You know, next to just driving the car, how can we get them to interact with our brand? And how can you make the whole process of driving, which is really boring because you go from your home to your work and bed basically, right. And maybe the weekend you go whatever, to the football stadium. And so how can you make that really, really engaging? It was. Was a big ask. And I think the victory there is not only that it was successful, although it was disrupted by Covid, but very successful pilot in Vienna, the project manager of Volkswagen Group, Porsche. He then left his job, the Volkswagen Group, to join us.
- [14:50]
Rob
Wow.
- [14:50]
Joris
Right. And so, so much was the joy of doing that that he left a, a very secure position in a very, very big company in Germany, you know, for, for, for us. And that was for us that was a really big validation of the work that we're doing and the pleasure that it gives to people that work on projects with us. So amazing. One of the projects that stands out. There's more. You've mentioned one yourself already. Like the gamification reward that we got in the European Gamification Awards. I can't remember the title of the conference again.
- [15:24]
Rob
That was the one in Brighton, Gamification Europe. So it's probably 2017, I want to say, or 18, somewhere along those lines,
- [15:33]
Joris
probably a bit later. I don't know. It was something like that. And it was the work that we did for the Procter and Gamble distributor Navajo Arbico, which one won that prize as best gamification product project? And it was also. Yes, yes, yes. It was actually very successful. And one of the few projects that I've been in part of where you even four or five years down the road could still see the numbers increasing because they gave us access to these numbers which normally clients lock the door after one or two years and they say yeah, it's fine, it's great, nice to see four or five years.
- [16:15]
Rob
That's amazing. Normally what I tend to do is ask people what's their process for creating gamification. I think the audience might have a clue and starts with an O, ends with an analysis. Is there anything that you would like to highlight of the process and maybe how it's different from what you've observed outside on other places?
- [16:39]
Joris
Well, often when we come in the keywords that people have on the lips is design thinking. Right. And quite confusing for us term human centered design which is sounds like human focused design. And I think human centered design from IDEO is a process that people like to follow. There's a whole canvas that you can follow. It's all out there, it's iterative, it's, it's, it's user focused. So it ticks all the right boxes for everybody to like it. Yet we've seen that it doesn't work. I mean it works to create inclusive experiences that are intuitive but it doesn't really work to make experiences that where people want to come back to over and over and over again. And so and for that we have our five step octalis design process which you know, was so recognized that we, we actually did talks with IDEO at IDEO and you guys did talks at IDO to, to. To. To teach them how to do analysis. And they have also come out said hey we actually need to, to improve the, the design thinking process. And, and we put this into practice for example by, with DBS bank in Singapore, the largest bank in Singapore who had mainstreams design thinking for two years in all the operations and said hey, we can't really use this to combat, combat, you know, Neo banks, mobile banks because we cannot get people engaged enough in our products. So we basically mainstream prop telysis in, in in the back and I don't know if you want me to get into the whole process of how we, how we design or if you want
- [18:21]
Rob
to take a couple of minutes in giving an overview I think it could be a good because when we have we had Yukai in the past he of course focuses especially on the eight core drives and we recently also had an episode discussing the eight core drives. I think that's where there's more accessible information out There the five step process tends to be something. And you know, when I was starting at the octalysis group, I remember the only place where I found most of the information and of course in depth and all that was in Octelsis Prime. But there's not much, you know, on the Internet on how to, how to figure out about that other than the strategy dashboard, which is more popular.
- [19:00]
Joris
Yes. So most people know the eight core drives by now. I think Talysis is the leading, or maybe the only behavioral, behavioral design gamification framework in the world according to me. There may be others, but I think this is the most accelerative as the most inclusive one. But the eight cord vibes only tells part of the story. It's nice to look at. Oh, is it extrinsic? Is it intrinsic? Does it create a good feeling or does it create urgency? White hat, black hat. Some people know about the four phases of the user journey. Something about the design needs to change. So in the discovery phase, the design of the experience will be different than when I first land into the experience in the onboarding and, and then it is scaffolding. We want to make sure it becomes even more intrinsic than before. Give people more strategic options, give people more social interaction options and you know, make sure that the journey is not so linear, which you often see right. In gamification and gamified apps. So how can you design for these joyful surprises along the way? And then, you know, in the end game, which is the fourth phase of the user experience, how can you create an experience that also has still something left for the veteran users in your application? So what's there to do for people that have been with you for one and a half years? How can they become your internal ambassadors and tell or inspire everybody in the experience, you know, how to behave well so that, so that we get good outcomes in experiences. And they're also your external brand investors to be able to tell everybody outside the experience to join. So that's what we specialize in. And of course we want to make sure that we optimize this also for what we call player types. And some people may know work of other gamification specialists about it. We craft player types for every single new experience that we design. And so that's basically as far as it goes that people say, yeah, I heard of that. And you're right. What comes after, people often don't know. So they know the eight chord rights, they know the four phases, they know player types, and that's the analysis. But how do you get from there to a product that actually works. That's your question. And for that we use the five step octalysis design process. Because container people think we're not just going to throw concept at users and say, oh, how about this? Let's make, you know, if you work for Microsoft, let's make Microsoft into Pokemon Go and see how we can design around this beautiful mechanical, collecting stuff. That's not how we work. How we work is in this five step process. The first step is actually really boring, basically, like, what are we designing for? What is it? And a lot of clients are surprised. Wait, wait, wait. Are you guys going to make it gamey and visual? And what is it? No, the first week is you and I or you and us talking about what are your objectives? And we call them the business metrics is part of the strategy dashboard that you were talking about. And the strategy dashboard is basically a living document that is the backbone of every game five design that we do. And these business metrics, when we talk to clients, they often have 10 or 20 objectives and we cannot optimize design for that many. We can only optimize for, actually for only one. We can optimize only for one, but there are other objectives that we want to, you know, also prioritize. And why do we do that? Because there is a small canvas that we designed for the screen often. And so if we optimize for daily active users, if that's a priority, the design will be very different than if we design for revenue per user, if that's, you know, another business metric. And so we want to make sure that we always have the top metric in mind when we design and don't focus on 20, but make sure we have like four or five that we know we want to focus on particularly because if we do that, then we can also say, well, in order for a client to see an uptick in the business metrics, what kind of desired actions does a player or a user need to take into indie experience so that Microsoft sees more use of their products? For example, if that's, if that's a business and we list all these desired actions across the four phases that we just talked about and then see, okay, what kind of features can we think of that will motivate people to want to commit to these desired actions over and over and over again. So what kind of reward do we need for that? Not only extrinsic rewards like points, badges and stuff like that, but also intrinsic rewards like, I can give you more strategic options in the experience I can give you more access, more power, you know, all kinds of non linearity in the experience as well, which is motivational people. And, and so that's the first thing we do, make a big overview of how this all comes together in terms of objectives, actions, players, reward systems and what we call feedback mechanics. Where I keep track of where I am in the experience. That is a, is a quite long explanation of probably one of the most important parts of the work that we do. And clients are often surprised that when they talk to us they come to the conclusion that what they were designing for is actually completely different. And that is almost, almost always the case. Even when we talk to very, very highly professional companies, they always have deeper insights. It's like, oh wait, what are we actually designing for? And so in a sense, especially in the, in the early stages of the engagement, we are almost more like product designers. It's not just gamification, not just engagement, not just fun. We are redefining for most companies what they are actually about. And that is a profound, for me as an enterprise gamification man, that is a profound joy to see. Hey, you can have immediate impact on improving what whole businesses, even $3 trillion businesses like Microsoft are all about and that you don't often have that chance as individual to do that. So that's step number one. And then there's more steps because we talked about five and I'll keep this a bit shorter. So once we have all these desired actions and we think of all these features that we can, you know, think of, brainstorm of that will motivate people to commit to these desired actions, we get a whole list of features. And sometimes, you know, because we are very, very competent colleagues, they come up with hundreds, probably not more than 200, but quite a lot features. And you know, there's no way that you could put 150 features in an app. So you need to make a way, and I call it the biggest bang for the buck exercise. So we give all these features a score, a power score. So how powerful is this particular feature to motivate people to commit to, to the desired action that we want people to commit to. And then you know, we, we combine it with an E score. It's an ease implementation score which gives us, and we have a whole algorithm that underlies all these, these measurements but it gives us a score from, from, from 1 to 10. But how easy it is to implement for the client because no client has unlimited time, unlimited budget and even resources, you know, human resources. And so sometimes we Jokingly say, well if I give everybody a Ferrari to sign up which could be a desired action then you know, the power will be really, really will be really big, right? Will be 10, but the E score will be very low one. And so therefore the weighted score which is at the end we're trying to get to will be very low as well. So that feature will be disregarded. Luckily if you're, if you're working for Ferrari, maybe that, that would be a good thing. But you know, this is actually, actually good so people like that because oh, now I know what is powerful and actually what is within my means for a V1 or MVP. And then you know we, we scale them down to, to V2 and then you know, others maybe get a characteristic of we'll never do it. That's where we, where we know what we're designing for. Then we're going to bring everything together visually in a gain loop where we connect all the features that we have scored with all the desired actions and say is there a closed gain loop that we can make that we can see a circular that we know there's no dropout points which is really, really important. And at that time after we have talked about it and presented it to the clients and agreed to, then we sometimes do some sketching and show it to early users. Hey, this is, this is what we are thinking that user journey could look like. Give me some, some high level feedback on the base of that we may adjust or not or just continue. And what we continue with is basically two paths. One is the battle plan which is basically step four of the, of the five step process where we are making the whole in game economy. Everything that shows the relationship between actions and rewards. How do people level up, what kind of non linearity is there, et cetera, et cetera. And then the other track that we're also following after the sketch design is the final deliverable on the design part which is the wire framing. And so that's basically the fifth step. And after that we hand over to, to development for the implementation. Now it's not always this linear. Sometimes we hand over over quicker because developers are keen to, to get started, right? They don't want to wait for three months until we're done. And so often they can start already with some back end stuff maybe after, after a couple of weeks. But that's basically in a nutshell the five step. And it's not easy because you need people that know about many, many different get the right team in place is, is what we are Known for amazing, amazing yours.
- [29:05]
Rob
We've been chatting for a bit and I guess you have a gist as well now for what the podcast has and what are the kinds of questions is there, is there somebody that you would like to listen to answering these questions? Maybe somebody you're curious to hear from or somebody you admire or, I don't know, whatever, whatever you want to go for?
- [29:22]
Joris
Well, I don't want to be cliche, say Elon Musk. You know, I think a lot of people just want to have Elon Musk because he has so many brilliant ideas. Although maybe some people want them on because they don't like him politically that's possible too. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to mention him. To be honest. I, I always regret not seeing Daniel Kahneman more on podcasts. I mean, we all know his books and especially, you know, his famous book, which I think, you know, is a difficult book to get through. The first hundred pages are good and then it gets really tough. And I was, I always would wanted to have his opinion on Thalassis because if you look at it from a scientific perspective, Thalassis actually integrates a lot of the things, you know, that he and others have been talking about and writing about for a long time. And you may know that our Octalisys framework itself has around 4000 academic level, PhD level citations in scientific academic community. And it will be just fun to ask him more engagement questions. Right. So this book is profound and let's talk about loss aversion, let's talk about the fast system and the slow system. But how does it relate to design? Right. How does it relate to all the other things he doesn't talk about like epic meaning and calling? How does it relate to feelings of agency? How does his view on self determination theory, what we call white hat. White hat, you know, dialysis. Does he, what does he think of it? I don't know because most of the behavioral economics is about, is about, hey, we're not rational actors and you know, we have all these things on the extrinsic motivation, nudging and loss aversion. But you don't hit him too much, you know, about the other side of the pyramid, so to speak. And I think that will be a really interesting conversation. But you know, he's not there anymore, unfortunately. But maybe, you know, maybe Richard Tyler could be a nice, a nice substitute.
- [31:26]
Rob
Absolutely, absolutely fantastic people. And I mean, to be fair, I've had this sort of nudge a couple of times already of maybe Trying to come up with an AI that that represents and being very clear, of course about it, one of these people and having a chat with them. You know, people have mentioned, for example, Steve Jobs. Right, Steve Jobs. He has a massive amount of work available and visible on the Internet. It could be interesting to have the debate between Napoleon and Steve Jobs or something like that that they mentioned a few years ago. Rather than a debate, how about asking them just some interesting questions and see what they, what they might have thought. Of course, you know, with all the possible hallucinations of AI but you know, it's always, it's always something that could be curious and the more, the more advances, the better, hopefully, that it gets.
- [32:15]
Joris
Yeah, definitely.
- [32:17]
Rob
You definitely mentioned several books and authors as well. Is there a book that you would recommend? The engagers, people who are looking into, you know, behavioral design, gamification.
- [32:27]
Joris
People always get. Get fed up with me because I always named the same book and that maybe it says something about myself or it says something about the world and the book is why everyone else is a hypocrite. That's by far my, my, my favorite book. It's a evolutionary psychology book and it, it goes on about why people are hypocrite. Right? So, so we can, we can have many conflicting opinions in our head at the same time. And some people proudly share photos that they are going to Vanuatu island, you know, on cruise ships to protest against climate change, you know, and, and maybe temporarily forgetting that that cruise lines are probably the most pollutive way of transportation. You know, that's obviously kind of hypocrisy, but we all have that hypocrisy because there are different parts of our brain responsible for different kinds of, of messaging. So we have a social messaging system and we have a survival messaging system and we have a, we have a more rational system as well. And so all of these have different interests that sometimes spur up at the same time or sometimes not at the same time. And then we call out people, oh, you're such a hypocrite. But everybody who has kids knows that we all hypocrites because we tell our kids not to be on the phones or in the computers a long time. But in the end, you know, we sometimes even do that while we are on the phone ourselves. Right? So, so we are all hypocrites. And I think it's a, it's a. Why is it a good book for gamification? Because for me it's built up a lot of empathy for humanity. Right. If you want to appreciate Human focused design. You need to emphasize that we're all fallible and hypocritical and, and, and, and, and all the good things that we also are. I think this is a really good book for people who want to not just approach this from a spiritual thing, but from an evolutionary biology, psychology perspective. I think it's a brilliant book and funnily written.
- [34:29]
Rob
Sounds like a very fun book, for sure. That's one that I haven't read, so it makes it even more interesting for me, for sure. And Joris, you've done again, many things in gamification and behavioral design. What would you say is your superpower in this world? That thing that you do at least better than most other people? You know, several superheroes fly, so it could be something shared with other people as well. But what's that thing that you feel distinguishes you from most other people?
- [34:54]
Joris
Yeah, I think it's feeling the experience and it comes back to empathy and it comes back to being able to feel, to feel yourself as a user. When you look at design, it's like, why would I want to interact with this design? What pulls me in or what doesn't pull me in? And I think this is something that has shaped me from when I was young because my parents moved me a lot, so I was in three primary schools, three secondary schools, for example. I've lived in I don't know how many countries in the world, maybe 15 or 16, also because I was a diplomat, but also after. And I think it forces you to constantly know, you know, know the scene, scan the scene and understand what's going on and have empathy why people react in a certain way. There's so many different cultures that you have to understand and feel that this became a natural element of who I am. And so I think what I see around me, luckily in our company, not so much because we're doing this on a daily basis, but what I see around me is that people look at, still look at experiences as functionality and hierarchy and logic. And there's no reason why somebody would not want to interact with my experience. And then you look at the screens like, yes, but I don't feel it. And so that is probably a superpower that.
- [36:22]
Rob
Absolutely. And very, very important, especially in this world that we're in right now. Yours. Now, the difficult question, what would you say is your favorite game?
- [36:31]
Joris
Oh, it changes, you know, and that's a, that's a kind of a avoiding answer, but a game gain. Like if it's a real game game, it's probably heroes of the storm, but blizzard still it's been like that for many, many years. And even more cliche but more, more true answer is my is my, my company. And especially now with AI we actually see a lot more demand for our services and it also becomes more interesting to integrate it into what we do. So we are almost always at the forefront of new development. And it sounds very arrogant and you know, pretentious, but when there's a new technology then there's a technological solution for something that is needed. But every time people come up with oh, but people are not using it or how do we get it to be engaging? Blockchain was and still is one of those. For example, everybody knows it from oh, it can go up 10,000% and then it crashes again. And so where's the long term journey that you can design for that? And we've worked with the co founders of Ethereum, actually we're still working with some of them into how can you create communities around blockchain that actually really work, that have longevity? How can you make that dream of decentralized blockchain and real world assets? How can you make that come true? The same is with AI. Even though everything seems to be automated with AI, the more AI automates, the less engaging it will be because it runs on the average of the data set. And that actually means that you won't get the outliers of really engaging content because that is not the norm. And so we are seeing a lot of, a lot of demand. Actually. We are trying to mainstream AI in our community of developers. How do we do that? You know, we had a large and I cannot mention the name, but let's say one of the largest companies in the world that had their AI for their support department and no one used it at all because they were scared and they didn't feel agency. How can you create a journey for your employees that they actually find it interesting to interact with something, a technology that in essence scares them. And so this is what we are doing with AI Also, how can you integrate AI in for example a Duolingo app or something like that so that it doesn't feel foreign, it feels that you have some kind of agency over the AI that is there as a friend, as a companion and how do you, how do you build that up into design but also on the back end and the AI engine? So there's a lot of stuff that I think I'm looking forward to and keep surprising me that we are always needed, you know, and that's really very Exciting.
- [39:34]
Rob
The game of life, you know, 10, 10,000 hours of play as well. We had Yukai a few months ago. So, yes, it is your. A very important game. Your favorite game in many ways, I am sure. So, Joris, you know, we're running out of time, but I don't want to let you go without, you know, giving you some time to let us, you know, get any final words, of course, where people can find out more about your work, about the otalysis group, wherever, wherever you want to lead. Lead us to.
- [40:00]
Joris
Yeah, well, obviously we have a website called www.octalysisgroup.com. most people will know it by now. I encourage people to have a look not only on that side, but also look at our case studies because there's so many people in the gamification world there that can talk and can do workshops and, you know, and can do all kinds of beautiful things on social media. But if you ask them, so who you work with, who have you actually empowered on a sustainable basis, a lot of people cannot really answer. And so I think if you want to. And there may be other companies too, right? I'm not saying that we're the only one, but. But if you want to have an overview of what we've done in the last 12 years for different kind of clients, you know, the case studies page, I think is really, really, really interesting. And, you know, if you say, well, whatever, I want to hear it from you. Right, Send me an email. Just put yours@octalusgroup.com and we can chat on how we answer questions of people on a daily basis, even if they become clients or no clients. It's irrelevant because we just like people to use octelis because we don't only see OCD as our company intellectual property, but we also see it as a force of good in the world because we think you can make the world a better place if experiences become, you know, more positive and more white hat and more intrinsically, for sure.
- [41:33]
Rob
And Joris, thanks again. I know your days are hectic. There's a lot going on. You have a lot of stuff going on at the Octelsis group, you know, keeping people and your, the family in the Octelsis group and clients and everything else. So I really, I'm deeply thankful for you taking all this time to engage with the engagers, this time to spread some of that actalysis knowledge that you, that you have, which is very, very deep and with lots of experience in case studies, which I definitely encourage people to look into. However, as you know, yours and the Engagers as well. At least for now and for today, it is time to say that it's Gamel. Hey Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you're interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on School. You can find the link right below in the description, but the main thing is to click there. Join us. It's a platform called Skool is for free and you'll find plenty of resources sources. There will be up to date with everything that we're doing, any opportunities that we might have for you, and of course, before you go on to your next mission, before you click Continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.
- [42:57]
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