LevelUp for Photoshop - Gamification of Learning Complex Software

Let’s say you’re an amateur photographer who has just purchased a fancy new camera and now you want to be able to manipulate all the photos you’ve taken. You download the massive Photoshop 30-day trial from the Adobe website, then run through the install process, and then finally, launch Photoshop. And what do you see? A blank white canvas, and an overwhelming assortment of menus and panels. It’s daunting, to say the least.

Many people will stop right there - not knowing what to do, not gaining any understanding of what Photoshop is capable of, and most importantly, not buying Photoshop when their 30 days is up. And that’s where LevelUp comes in: 

LevelUp for Photoshop is a game of missions — and points and rewards — that guide you along the way of learning basic Adobe® Photoshop® CS5 software skills. If you are a photographer and are just starting to use Photoshop, this is the game for you.

The hypothesis being that if you can get new users exposed to 5-10 key functions of Photoshop (red eye removal, smoothing, object removal, etc.), and feeling a sense of mastery around those functions, that more people will buy at the end of the trial. So LevelUp walks users through a set of missions that expose users to those functions, and gives them goals to work toward (levels, points, badges) along the way. Any points earned can be redeemed for a chance to win a copy of CS5.5 Master Collection and several other prizes. 

Adobe is current split-testing LevelUp amongst trial downloaders who have self-identified as amateur photographers, but if you follow this link, you can download the LevelUp plugin yourself. Try it out! You will need to have Photoshop CS5 installed, and you can always download the free trial. 

We’re very excited about this application of gamification to the onboarding and mastery of complex software. Dry tutorial content isn’t cutting it anymore, and it’s time that software makers took a cue from games and how they onboard users.