Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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The Magic Doesn’t Start Where You Think It Does | Episode 425

 

 

Want to run away from destroying an experience? Happy to brainstorm → professorgame.com/chat

A magical Christmas experience in Madrid almost collapsed because of one overlooked detail. We break down a real-world holiday experience through the stages of gamification, and reveal where confusion can destroy even the most beautiful experience.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00)
It was one of the most incredible and beautiful Christmas experiences I’ve seen in many years. Storytelling was thoughtful. Characters were incredible with kids. Santa nailed it! The experience almost fell completely apart. Let’s take a look at the lessons.

Rob Alvarez (00:18)
This was actually me yesterday, the day before recording this episode, not of it going live, but the day before I actually recorded this. There’s not a theory. There’s not something I’m bringing you from the internet. This is actually something I experienced the December nights in Madrid. I actually really wanted to make sure it worked. My daughter was there. She’s three years old. You you can imagine all the beautiful things that can happen in such an age. So I really wanted to make it work. I’m Rob. the host of the number one podcast in the gamification world.

I’m also a consultant at the leading consultancy in the world of gamification and behavioral design The Octalysis group where I’m the head of engagement strategy in Europe. I’m also a professor at top business schools like IE business school. Also the EFMD, which is actually behind all of the successful and top business schools and many others around the world. So let’s actually look at what the pain here looks like. You’re, getting there. It’s December night. It’s in Madrid.

I don’t know about you, but December usually means cold. This was really cold, at least for me being from Venezuela, as you know, there was stress, it was cold. Usually when you have kids, some tardiness is involved and there was a lot of confusion and kids, you know, they’re seeing all these things are excited. That excitement can be very fragile. The emotional trajectory can easily derail by a single small or big mistake that you made. Because when you’re building a magical experience for kids,

Confusion is definitely not neutral. It can be really, really destructive. And if you build product services or experiences, this will change the way how you think about them forever.

We will talk about this experience also through the lens of the stages of gamification. I’ll dive right into that. We’ll talk about the poor, the world, and of course the ugly. will still not give you exactly what that was, part of that stage, but these are the points that we’ll be talking about today.

Rob Alvarez (02:04)
Oh, and if you want to make sure the ugly doesn’t happen to you, let’s have a quick chat. You can just go to the link below in the description and let’s have a chat and see how this can be avoided in your product, your service, your experience.

Rob Alvarez (02:20)
So let’s get started right in with some of the good of the experience. The pull it was beautiful. Marketing for this experience called Manantial de Sueños here in Madrid, still on by the way if you’re interested, it was compelling. We found it online, we realized it was in a botanic park, so surrounded by nature, very nice setting. It was very compelling. It is seasonal of course for Christmas, it is related to everything that’s going on, all this magic that surrounds Christmas.

was emotional, clearly positioned as something that is and can be very, very special. And you got young kids, you wanna have these kinds of experiences It’s the season, it’s Christmas. This is the kind of thing you want to do. It sets expectations correctly for the families looking to attend. This is what we call in gamification terms, the discovery phase. You have not entered the experience.

You are just finding out that it even exists. like, there’s this thing. Here it is. Wow. And it ends precisely when you fully commit. In this case, purchasing the tickets. Good marketing doesn’t just sell the tickets. It creates that emotional readiness. This discovery phase can set you up for the things that are to come. But the question here is, does your marketing, does your delivery actually fulfill the promise?

that marketing made or does it actually contradict it?

Rob Alvarez (03:45)
So we just talked about the good. In this case, I’m not going to talk now, instead of about the bad, I’m going to talk to you about the better. The world inside. It was alive, the storytelling. It was working. You were inside and the experience per se worked. The characters, you randomly saw some elves running around, dancing with some music. They interacted with the kids. They were consistent. It was thoughtful.

We even saw when we found Santa, Santa was asking consent before holding a kid. I mean, imagine about this when we were kids, you know, nowadays this is especially important, the whole consent thing. You know what I mean, if you’re a parent, you know that these things are happening and this is part of how nowadays looks. This is a huge trust signal. At least for me, I saw that and I was like, okay, it feels safe. The kids, they feel seen. It’s not just something happening in the background and they’re observing, they feel seen.

They’re not processed one after another, just in a queue and they process people like meat, not at all, not at all. You are there, they interact with you, it’s thoughtful, it’s meaningful. This is what we could call in gamification, the scaffolding phase, It is done right. Everything in there, all the interaction loops that you get and reinforce and you want more of the experience.

You get the elves, you get the fairies, you get all sorts of characters interacting, all sorts of internal experiences that are actually working the right way. So the experience in the scaffolding was phenomenal. It was fantastic. You had plenty of chances also to explore. You could find surprise and delight. You can imagine a kid, runs into an elf, the elf talks to them.

does a high five to them or lets them hug them or whatever it is that your kid is thinking about. And they were thoughtful, respectful. They were nice. They were in character. Everything in that sense was working. So what could go possibly go wrong when I’m explaining it to you this way?

Rob Alvarez (05:47)
What could possibly go wrong? Well, here it goes. You walk in, literally have your tickets, which you purchased during marketing. And this is before the scaffolding of the experience. You walk in and you immediately start hitting unwanted and unnecessary friction. Person at the door. I understand there’s a queue of people. They don’t have time for suporting every person who comes in, but of course,

They offer no guidance, like absolutely none. Literally we asked them, ⁓ this is what we’re here for. What do we do now? And they said, yeah, it must be somewhere around there. Not even exaggerating this, this gesture. If you’re watching it in video, they actually did this at the entrance. What now? So we go And you start looking around like, what now?

And don’t get me wrong, there were beautiful things happening, but the problem is you purchase a ticket and it has sort of purchased in experiences, which already starts. I understand the whole monetization behind it and it has different things, yada, yada. I can get that, but you purchase tickets and you purchase separate tickets. Like it’s the ticket to get there and there’s tickets for separate things. And they also have a schedule. So you have to get there at a certain point.

And I don’t know about you, how do you manage these kinds of things with your family? If you have one, I can tell you in my experience, it is occasional almost when things go as you plan. So arriving at the time that you expect it almost never happens. even either arrived like super early or a little bit or very late, right? So tardiness is almost a part of that experience. So there’s no what now. And in this case, we were a little bit like not terribly late.

We’re not actually late. were there, on time, like if we knew exactly where we were going, which we clearly didn’t. It doesn’t say it anywhere. It’s not in the discovery phase. It’s not on the ticket. They don’t give you a map. Nothing happens. Signage was hard to find already. And since all these tickets were sold separately, you start creating artificially that rush, that anxiety. They could have just let you like, the schedule for this thing is…

these times and then it’s like, yeah, they don’t want too much cue, everybody coming at the same time. Yeah, but it was, you know, this happens at six. You have to be here 15 minutes before that literally was part of the wording. So they start making you anxious. We arrived there within those 15 minutes. So we, like, you know, maybe they’ll be flexible with five minutes, but it doesn’t even sound like that. So when you finally find somebody who helps, first off, there is a long cue. My kid,

was excited about lights, looking around, so my wife goes and tries to get some support. After you get through the long queue, this staff here, as I said before, you can pre-purchase those tickets, but you can also purchase tickets in there. So this person is more focused, of course, in selling you extra experiences on top of that, more than being the guidance. So this is not really an information post. This is a place where you purchase more tickets, which, by the way, this is one of the bad things on the inside. These experiences, this was literally like a circle.

where you could go around, right? And the paid experiences were in some different places. In theory, and they had the physical infrastructure there, you could purchase the tickets right there, right now. None of them had personnel. So in reality, every single ticket you had to purchase went back to the center stage, but nobody tells you this, right? So it’s not part of your onboarding. And this is where it starts getting nasty. When you start a game,

Instead of reading a manual nowadays, especially with video games, you dive into the experience and little by little starts guiding you so you understand what to do. Here was the exact opposite. It’s like they had a huge manual and they didn’t even give it to you. It’s somewhere and you have to look for it. And it’s not like it’s an exciting part of the experience at all. It is, as I said, you’re in a rush, you’re starting to get anxious, your kid is excited, but that’s limited. So this happens and we finally get support. And you know, in the end we did finally get there.

When we’re again, we’re stressed, we’re rushed, they give you into a queue. Okay, I kind of get it. Then you get there. I this is the onboarding. This is one of the first things you see. You get into this queue and there’s like a separation between the queues and you’re like, oh, you know, these people are kind of waiting here for something. So let me just pass. Person was not the most supportive. Oh, you have to go to back the line. I was like, oh yeah, I get it. I understand if you tell me. And if it’s clear, if there’s signage, if I understand what is going on, but nobody was letting you know what was going on.

Onboarding was not happening was it as easy as having instead of you know, having you know 100 elves you had 99 elves and one of those people was at the entrance guiding people’s like oh welcome What are you looking for that way this way? There you go. That’s it. There’s a signage There’s the map if your experience says this you have to arrive there and you have to go there you have to do this you have to do that as simple as

In general, what we’re talking about is the classic onboarding failure. I’m not saying the core of your experience is the onboarding, but before you get to the core of your experience, you actually experience, whether you design it or not, that onboarding. The world, once you’re inside, can be magical. Problem is, the entry point can be hostile.

Honestly, again, kid is very young. Eventually we just got into it. We kind of, you know, washed our upsetness and anxiety and just went in with it. Because what we were looking for here is not a set of instructions or maybe it was even small amount of instructions right here. What you’re looking for, especially in an experience with kids is emotional regulation. They talk about this with psychologists, how emotional regulation is so important, so on and so forth. The idea is you go in there and you want.

to answer, among other things, one very important question. Am I safe? Am I doing this right? Am I in the place where I should be? Think about it. Even if you’re not designing for kids, what does the experience you are creating feel like in the first three minutes? Do your users feel confident or do they start panicking?

Rob Alvarez (11:44)
Honestly, what makes this extremely painful is that everything after the onboarding was really, really good. It failed because of the details when you get started. This is easy to forget because details are where your trust either is gained and strengthened or where you can start losing.

that trust and regaining it. Honestly, it took a while for me to internalize it. It’s like, well, you know, onboarding was terrible, but this seems a, you know, a good, nice, safe, call it as you may experience where I can actually be in and enjoy with my family. Do not put yourself there. If you’re building any kind of product service experience this next year, don’t just design

the world, the onboarding. Make sure you make discovery onboarding scaffolding. And I didn’t dive into this because this comes way later and not all experiences let you get there and not all users in my case get to what we call the end game. Also designed for that design, the door design, the pull or the marketing, the discovery, make an amazing experience, the scaffolding for sure. Make sure

The onboarding is also great. Don’t forget about one of those four stages because it could end in a dramatic disaster. The magic doesn’t start when people are inside. It really starts when you get through the door, right when you arrive. Keep all the stages in mind and you can be a lot better set up for a very successful experience.

And if this is something that you are looking towards building, let’s make sure to have a chat to see if there is a way in which we can help you make that better. Just click on the link below in the description and let’s have a quick chat.

 

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