I read about this neat little plugin on Danc's fantastic Lostgarden blog, which talks about game design and game mechanics. Ribbon Hero is a plugin for Office 2010 that uses game mechanics to get users to build up skills in Microsoft Office. It's a series of challenges or tasks, which you complete to gain points.
Visual reward feedback is good, with satisfying little balloons that indicate when you've succeeded - tangible enough to give a nice satisfaction kick - yet transitory enough to make you want to repeat the behaviour again.
What's especially interesting (and what perhaps distinguishes this from just an ordinary learning game) is that the plugin somehow knows when you put into practice a skill you've learned via Ribbon Hero.
And of course, in this world of social gaming, the ability to share your score via Facebook adds an extra incentive and probably doesn't hurt. (Not sure what kind of cubicle-jockey would actually do this, but hey - I'm not a big Farmville fan either).
This is interesting stuff. Is it just me, or are Microsoft becoming more adventurous, more human? And they seem to be getting UX right much more often than they did in the past.
That's VERY good news.
