Gamification meets the cloud

Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset, has provided the cloud infrastructure to enable Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics to roll out their game-based, interactive, digital staff training programme across Europe.

The mobile and online learning game, called Lush Quests, introduces new staff to Lush’s brand and products with challenges and rewards throughout the digital gaming interface.

Memset has provided five Miniserver VM® virtual servers to host German, French, Italian, Spanish and English versions of the training programme.  To date, over 2000 employees have undertaken this exciting new online training programme, based on gamification, which is quickly becoming a successful and favoured trend in marketing and branding campaigns.

Lush Quests takes the form of an interactive story, told in a fast paced manner over the course of about 20 minutes.  Following the game’s completion, employees complete a 10-minute quiz to confirm their understanding of the material.

The programme is delivered from the cloud and is compatible with almost any device. Behind the scenes, the application is delivered by leveraging the capabilities of Memset’s public cloud platform. These capabilities include:

• Compute: Common REST-based web services powering the user interfaces and the game's HTML5 user interface itself, both with the ability to scale up and down, allowing several hundred employees to download, install and play simultaneously.

• Storage and Data: Ability to store assets such as images and video leveraged across user interfaces with a centralised SQL database service for storing application data, as well as training results.

• Content Delivery: Increasing performance by delivering international versions to locations around the globe.

Richy Baxter-Freeman, International Support for Lush cosmetics who was responsible for the IT set up of the training programme said: “Using Memset’s cloud service has enabled us to quickly roll out the programme to other countries faster than we anticipated. We’ve been able to take snapshots of the Miniserver and recreate it quickly in the other languages required.”

He continued, “We can monitor traffic and performance via Memset’s control panel and easily scale up or down as load patterns fluctuate, which means we only pay for what we need in terms of compute infrastructure. In addition, we benefit from the maintenance, support, and deployment automation provided by Memset to reduce our operational costs.”

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset, said: “We’re delighted to be able to team up with Lush to provide the necessary platform to deliver their gamification training programme.  As a keen gamer myself, I understand how important the reliability, security and responsiveness of the infrastructure is, to ensure the optimum interaction with the programme. We’re very excited to see how Lush Quests benefits Lush staff across the world.”

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About Lush
Since establishing 18 years ago, Lush Cosmetics has been driven by innovation and its ethics.  Creators of pioneering beauty products such as the fizzing bath ballistic, shower jellies and solid shampoo bars, Lush places emphasis on fresh ingredients like organic fruits and vegetables.  Lush operates a strict policy against animal testing and supports Fair Trade and Community Trade initiatives.  Lush leads the cosmetics industry in combating over-packaging by developing products that can be sold ‘naked’ to the consumer. Lush has over 850 stores in 51 countries.