So one of my responsibilities at work is to build an internal tool that helps the workers enter in all their information. It's an enterprise application that is similar to a Windows forms database tool.So it's not much different than like developing a Word + Excel combo application, but the average person in this workgroup is a 20-40 year old woman or a random chatty male type. Plus I know all of these people are heavily involved with Facebook on a daily basis.How bad would it be if I styled my new interface to be similar to what Facebook does. People could get award points and stuff when they fill out different types of forms and basically compete against each other like it was a game. When people had completed one, it would be posted on their wall and everyone could comment/like stuff just like in Facebook. And it would be like they are doing peer reviewing for fun. The rewards would be outstanding I would imagine. These people are so into Facebook and Facebook games that productivity would rise due to them trying to compete and earn points and achievements.Would this be taking advantage of the people by 'tricking them into working harder by giving them a game' or would it be viewed as something that would improve happiness at work?
Would adding award points or game features to workplace software be viewed poorly amongst the programming community?
user interface
What you are talking about are game mechanics and there has been a lot of talk in the past year or so about how widely they can be applied in software (inspired by the success of sites like FourSquare that added a game twist to location tagging).Game mechanics can be especially useful in a corporate environment, where employees have to work with software that is boring or uninteresting, but necessary, and can provide more benefit the more use it sees (like project management software).Experiments in this are pretty new, but here is some reading that can help get you thinking about how this would work for you:Scobelizer - The social behavior incentive (how your app can be as addictive as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare)Can Game Mechanics make Serious software 'sticky'?Game mechanics for thinking usersEight Tips for Using Game Mechanics to Design Fun and Functional Software Applications (includes a video from a tech talk about this)I would make sure you get buy-in from the stakeholders (management, project managers, whatever) for your software.  And interviews with real users will help get you thinking about what kinds of activities will be best for social or game functions.