Strategy layer
From business objective to gamification, in six steps.
Most gamification projects fail because they start with the points and work backwards to a goal. Kevin Werbach’s 6D method makes you start at the goal — and a Hatched onboarding wizard walks you through every one of the six "D"s before your tenant is ever live.
Werbach, broccoli, and the chocolate coating
Kevin Werbach is a Wharton professor whose 2012 book *For the Win* — co-authored with Dan Hunter — laid out the first widely-taught gamification design process. Its central warning: most "gamification" projects amount to chocolate-coating broccoli. Glue points onto something boring, hope people swallow it. They don’t. Engagement collapses inside a quarter.
Werbach’s alternative is the 6D method — a sequence that forces you to anchor on business objectives and target behaviours *first*, and only let game mechanics in once those are pinned down. The model now ships in every gamification-design course we have looked at, but most platforms still skip it and start at "points & badges".
Hatched builds 6D into the front door. The onboarding wizard is the 6D method, one step per screen, with industry presets and live previews — so the first thing a strategy or CIO buyer touches is the exact frame the literature recommends.
The six steps — and what Hatched asks at each one
Define business objectives
- Werbach asks
- What measurable outcome do you actually want? Retention, completion, activation, conversion, NPS, viral growth?
- How Hatched asks
- A multi-select with success-metric + current-baseline + target. Persisted on `customer.feature_config.six_d.objectives`. Multiple objectives allowed — many tenants pick "retention + completion".
Delineate target behaviours
- Werbach asks
- Which specific user actions move that metric? Daily lesson? Five calls? A weekly kudos?
- How Hatched asks
- For each objective Hatched suggests a behaviour list (retention → "open widget 3+/week", sales → "log 5+ calls/day"), and asks how each is measured: webhook event, rule-engine match, or manual logging.
Describe your players
- Werbach asks
- Who is your audience, motivationally? Six tiles, six percentages, total 100.
- How Hatched asks
- Hexad sliders seeded by an industry preset (Engineering / Sales / Learning / Customer Success / Wellness). Admin fine-tunes; the optional runtime survey overwrites the estimate once 30+ responses land.
Devise activity loops
- Werbach asks
- What is the engagement loop (trigger → action → reward) and the progression loop (curve, gates, endgame)?
- How Hatched asks
- Two structured config blocks. Engagement: trigger source, action minimisation (1-10 → Fogg ability target), variable reward weight. Progression: level curve (linear / exp / log — default log), mastery gates, endgame enabled (LEAGUES).
Don’t forget the fun
- Werbach asks
- Which McGonigal "fun types" fit your culture — easy, hard, people, serious?
- How Hatched asks
- Multi-select fun-type picker + narrative voice (epic / playful / quiet / corporate). Feeds the Planner Goal-Driven preset engine: pick "people fun" and Kudos + Group Quest + Mentor visibility light up.
Deploy the appropriate tools
- Werbach asks
- Given everything above, which Hatched widgets should be enabled?
- How Hatched asks
- Hatched produces a recommendation set — each row labelled with the objective, player type and fun type it serves, with an opt-in "Show design audit" for the Octalysis CD contribution. "Apply all" flips capability flags and seeds the Planner. The tenant ships with a production-ready config.
Why you don’t have to learn 6D
6D is the structure Hatched uses to guide setup, not homework for your admin team. The wizard translates each step into business-language choices: objectives, target behaviours, audience mix, activity loops, fun type, and the features to enable. Octalysis still runs behind the scenes as a design-audit lens, but the first user experience stays practical: answer operational questions and leave with a production-ready config.
Where 6D fits in the Hatched stack
Werbach 6D drives onboarding strategy. Hexad seats your audience inside the recommendation engine; RAMP/SDT carries the ethics; Fogg + Hook checks the behaviour unit of registry-backed feature surfaces; MDA is the architectural taxonomy; Octalysis runs the design audit. Six frameworks, one wizard, one production-ready system at the end.
Stop picking frameworks. Pick what to build.
The 6D wizard takes ten minutes — and pre-populates the Planner with the features that match your objectives, players, and culture.