Skip to main content

Optimizing Game Mechanics to Motivate Learners

  • April 13, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 43 views

pmo
Docebian
Forum|alt.badge.img+4

Hi everyone — I’m excited to be presenting Optimizing Game Mechanics to Motivate Learners at Inspire 2026.

This session is for L&D leaders, LMS admins, and enablement teams who are curious about gamification, but maybe don’t want to jump straight into a giant points-and-prizes strategy.

We’ll be exploring a practical approach to gamification in Docebo that starts small and focuses on a few core questions:

  • How do we make learner progress more visible?
  • How do we recognize meaningful engagement instead of just completions?
  • How can badges, points, and leaderboards help us both motivate learners and measure what’s working?

In the workshop, we’ll look at a few low-lift mechanics you can actually pilot:

  • building an engagement ladder with badges
  • structuring badge codes so reporting is more useful
  • designing a cohort-based leaderboard for onboarding
  • using these mechanics as experiments that help you make the case for broader investment later

One of the biggest ideas behind the session is that gamification is not just about rewards. It’s also about feedback, visibility, and helping learners understand where they are, what they’ve achieved, and what comes next.

If you’re attending Inspire, I’d love to hear from you here before the session:

What’s one gamification feature or strategy you’ve been curious about using in Docebo — but haven’t tried yet?

2 replies

emily.mccarthy
Guide II
Forum|alt.badge.img+4

I know the prompt is for implementations we haven't tried, BUT we have only built this on a small scale so I think it still meets the criteria.

We have begun to create badges based on internal certifications to assist with recognizing gaps or targeted locations where we have resources meeting the needs of our organization's demands to assist customers. This is certainly a multi-tier approach as we are only able to export the data from the badges and utilize it to create additional reports externally.

With that said, I would be curious to know if others are utilizing badging to execute a tiered approach to users onboarding and levels within job titles. If so, how are people bridging the gap when there is data missing due to users onboarding higher up in the ladder and possibly forgoing some steps to reach certain possibly implemented badges?

Additionally, if you are creating an organization focused on point accumulation through training completion, how do you ensure users complete courses with purpose rather than just for the sake of earning points? Certainly, you can limit course access by limiting catalog visibility, but that can lead to a very complex platform development which goes beyond general access restraints very quickly. Is there a way to limit users to only a certain number of non-mandatory courses in the catalog per a certain period of time? Just general thoughts and concepts I have been pondering.


pmo
Docebian
Forum|alt.badge.img+4
  • Author
  • Docebian
  • April 14, 2026

I know the prompt is for implementations we haven't tried, BUT we have only built this on a small scale so I think it still meets the criteria.

We have begun to create badges based on internal certifications to assist with recognizing gaps or targeted locations where we have resources meeting the needs of our organization's demands to assist customers. This is certainly a multi-tier approach as we are only able to export the data from the badges and utilize it to create additional reports externally.

With that said, I would be curious to know if others are utilizing badging to execute a tiered approach to users onboarding and levels within job titles. If so, how are people bridging the gap when there is data missing due to users onboarding higher up in the ladder and possibly forgoing some steps to reach certain possibly implemented badges?

Additionally, if you are creating an organization focused on point accumulation through training completion, how do you ensure users complete courses with purpose rather than just for the sake of earning points? Certainly, you can limit course access by limiting catalog visibility, but that can lead to a very complex platform development which goes beyond general access restraints very quickly. Is there a way to limit users to only a certain number of non-mandatory courses in the catalog per a certain period of time? Just general thoughts and concepts I have been pondering.




This is super interesting and there’s some overlap with the talk that you’ll find interesting but I’d be curious to hear more about your strategies around point accumulation. How are you using points as the anchor for that experience? Are there evaluations that the learner is expected to take? Are you rewarding users for the highest score?