As the world continues to gain mobility, the natural tendency is to be distracted.  The news takes us from crisis to crisis, as does our experience.  These days many of us chronicle our lives with blogs, status updates and tweets about what is happening.  

Focusing on maintaining consistent communication is hard work, which is why companies are looking to learn how to do it better.  Specifically, they are looking at the lessons of gamification as a way to maintain customer attention.

Games have several components that go into making them valuable to the participant. Participating in games matches our natural desire to achieve, compete, demonstrate, and socialize.

Now it is unlikely that we are going to make every effort on the web a game, but by incorporating game theory to business the goals we can better match the workflow with reward system.

The concept is to keep the experience engaging and something that is attractive to do again.  Like rewatching a movie, you enjoy the familiar rather than being bored.

So there is a delicate balance that has to be made to make the experience easy enough to be enjoyable but productive enough that work gets accomplished.

A key ingredient is also to make this experience as seamless as possible which is where HMTL5 shines.   

Nothing is more engaging these days than a smartphone these days.  You cannot walk around a group of people without seeing many engaged with their apps, games and text.  

The Bring Your Own Device experience, then, not only answers the question of how people will engage, but also what are the obstacles to engagement.

Getting customer attention then requires a good story as a baseline. Engaging the customer has to foster cooperation in a user friendly manner with the ability to match the skill set of the people engaged.  

Often visual experiences like status bars that show the level of completion can be a form of gaining the customers trust they can accomplish the goal easily enough. Other times tutorials can be used to explain the effort and objective. Competition in gaming works but only when it associates similar skill levels, otherwise the customer gets discouraged.

Companies that are providing gamification to HTML5 environments include Badgeville, Bunchball, DNN Software, Gameffective, Gigya, and Lithium.   

Many of these companies show specific focus either on game-like environments and virtual worlds for team building, or on integrating experiences with workflow that reduce the cost of training.

The bottom line is that gamification on a smartphone may make the difference as to whether games help or hinder your business.