Beer Cards – Creating a real-life Facebook 'Like' button.

This is a follow up to my previous blog post on “How we gamified our help desk with ‘Beer Cards’ and fuel productivity.” You can read more about it here.

‘Beer Cards’ is our attempt to introduce social prods in our workplace. Social prods are actions that require minimal effort to create a social interaction, like the simple click of a Facebook ‘Like’ button.

We often find it difficult or awkward to appreciate someone for a job well done in a quick, basic interaction. What if we could replicate the Facebook ‘like’ button in real life to recognise effort?

What would that look like?

We decided to take an iterative approach in developing the idea. This blog post is about our journey in creating ‘Beer cards.’

Beer Cards Prototype

Unique Number, colour coded feature

The prototype was printed on normal printing paper and cut to size. This low-fidelity paper prototype is easy to create and allows us to quickly make changes as we gather feedback.

The 6 circles on the bottom right hand corner is a colour coded feature to help managers track working relationships of members in cross-functional teams.

At the back of each card we added a unique number which is used for the raffle at the end of each round.

How it works?

  • Each team member starts with a set number of cards.
  • They are required to gift each other ‘Beer cards’ as tokens of appreciation.
  • At the end of 2 weeks, there will be a raffle and someone will pick up a mystery prize.

Rules?

  • There are no limit to the number of cards you can gift at a time.
  • You cannot use your own cards for the raffle.