Discover the power of gamification! In this article, we'll explore the best gamification practices that can skyrocket user engagement, making even the most mundane tasks enjoyable and rewarding. Unlock the secret to captivating your audience and driving sustained participation with these tried-and-tested techniques.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification is the application of game design elements, mechanics, and principles in non-gaming contexts to improve user engagement, motivation, and problem-solving, ultimately making tasks more enjoyable and effective.
A gamified experience might take place in various environments, from business to human resources and from education to fundraising. In other words, it was already a part of our daily lives before the recent development in technology.
Additionally, gamification has its roots in human psychology. Competition and reward have been giving people an incentive to pursue an end goal since Ancient times.
I remember that my first teacher had a cartoon apple tree in the classroom, and each one of us had a white paper apple. The more we improved our reading, the redder our apple got, and she rewarded the first red apple owner. Similarly, your coffee shop gives you several stickers depending on your spending, and later on, you can use these stickers in exchange for coffee. At some point, we are all gamers in life.
What Is Mobile App Gamification?
Gamification in apps is a relatively new concept, meaning using game design elements in non-gaming apps.
Learning might be the first category that crosses one’s mind. However, other app owners can confidently benefit from the advantages of gamifying the experience and giving users an incentive to behave in a certain way. Shopping apps, finance apps, health and fitness apps, productivity apps, and social apps can be counted as just a few examples.
Why Is Gamification Important?
Gamification is important because it leverages elements of game design to boost motivation, engagement, and retention in non-gaming contexts, making tasks more enjoyable and effective for individuals and organizations.
Let’s have a quick look at why to use gamification in your app design and marketing strategy.
1) Gamification creates curiosity.
Curiosity motivates users to progress and look for more rewards. If they wonder what will happen the next day, they will keep visiting your app.
2) Gamified apps cultivate competition.
You might be suffering from incomplete events in your app. At this point, creating a competitive context might be the solution to encourage users to complete actions and compare their results with other users.
3) It is rewarding.
A reward might come in different forms: something material, something financial, maybe a coupon, or perhaps just an acknowledgment. While the specifics can change, the undeniable fact remains on the table: Rewards are great motives for human behavior.
4) It improves user engagement and retention.
A well-designed gamification strategy will eventually give you a good amount of users who enjoy your app. Isn’t it the whole point of gamification marketing?
5) It gives you actionable insights.
The game dynamics that you will include in your app will give you a great idea about how your user segments act on the context designed by you. Consequently, it will be great feedback for the next steps of your app.
How Does Gamification Increase User Engagement?
Gamification increases user engagement by incorporating fun and interactive elements into tasks, making them more enjoyable, motivating users to invest time and effort, and fostering a sense of accomplishment and competition that keeps them coming back for more.
Gamification can increase user engagement by:
Adding fun and enjoyment
Introducing game elements makes tasks more entertaining, encouraging users to interact more with the content or activity.
Boosting motivation
Gamification taps into intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, using rewards, competition, and social recognition to drive users to actively participate.
Creating a sense of achievement
Game mechanics like points, levels, and badges give users measurable progress, reinforcing their efforts and making them feel accomplished.
Encouraging friendly competition
Leaderboards and social features foster competition, prompting users to engage more in order to outperform others or collaborate with peers.
Personalizing experiences
Customizable avatars, goals, and difficulty levels cater to individual preferences, increasing user investment and satisfaction.
Fostering learning
Gamification enhances learning by breaking complex tasks into smaller, manageable challenges, allowing users to apply newly acquired knowledge in a low-risk environment.
How to Use Gamification Trend to Improve UX in Your App
The next step is to develop a good app gamification strategy. Indeed, this process should start with the following question: How can you adopt gamification to boost user engagement in your app? It is the point where you have to get familiar with game dynamics and mechanisms.
Game mechanics
The good thing about the concept of the game is that you are limited only with your imagination and creativity. Relying on that, you can use your mind to come up with countless app engagement ideas. However, there is a crucial trick: Gamification is about using game mechanics in your app interface without distorting the flow. Having this in mind, let us introduce you to some gamification mechanics.
Challenges
Human nature forces us to take the challenges and prove that we can handle them. You can motivate users to complete a task with challenges and reward them afterward.
Points
You can use points as the basic rewards the users get due to their progress in your app. However, points don’t have to imply a rating; they can also show the number of check-ins or video views.
Badges and stickers
These are the visual representations of a user’s accomplishments in your app. You can reward them with these when they complete specific tasks.
Leaderboards / Scoreboards
These lists with player rankings show who performs best in a particular activity. In fact, they can be adapted to non-game apps easily. For example, you can have a board to list the ones who practice most for gamification in education apps.
Performance charts
Unlike leaderboards showing user performances in relation to other user’s performances, performance charts show how the user performs compared to their previous performance.
Levels
Each level shows the progress of the user. Generally, the complexity of the tasks increases with each level.
In-app currencies
You can reward users with in-app currencies to keep them motivated to complete particular tasks and use the earned coins to complete other tasks.
Constraints
Using some constraints such as limited time would push users to reach faster and motivate them to take action.
Journey
Journeys make the user’s interaction with your app easier and understandable. You can use them for onboarding by disclosing features as the user progress in your app.
You can use these game mechanics to adopt gamification according to your app’s and users’ needs and features. You should keep in mind that gamification is not just about design. Use gamification to improve user experience and increase user engagement. If your app has severe problems with conversion or user experience and you decide to use game mechanics, you should support gamification to improve your app’s performance in other areas.
Just like any other engagement improvement, gamification doesn’t respond to every app’s needs. If you are using gamification only because it is popular, you should reconsider this practice. Also, you need to evaluate whether your target audience would be interested in a gamified experience and whether your content is suitable for gamification.
Best Gamification Practices to Boost User Engagement
Boosting user engagement through gamification involves incorporating game-like elements into non-game contexts to motivate and engage users. Here are some best practices for implementing gamification effectively:
- Clear Objectives and Goals
- Understand Your Audience
- Incorporate Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
- Intuitive Design and User Experience
- Balance Challenges and Skill Levels
- Track Feedbacks and Progress
- Social Interaction and Competition
- Personalize the Experience
- Ensure Accessibility and Inclusivity
- Continuously Analyze and Optimize
Clear Objectives and Goals
Define specific, measurable objectives and goals for users to achieve, helping them understand the purpose of the gamified experience and stay focused.
Understand Your Audience
Thoroughly research and understand your target audience to tailor your gamification elements to their preferences and motivations. Consider demographics, user behavior, and psychographics to design engaging and relevant experiences. Understanding what drives your audience will help you choose the right game mechanics and themes.
Incorporate Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
Use a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to motivate users. Intrinsic rewards include elements that provide internal satisfaction, such as a sense of achievement or mastery. Extrinsic rewards involve tangible incentives like points, badges, and leaderboards. A balanced mix can sustain long-term engagement by appealing to different types of user motivations.
Intuitive Design and User Experience
Create an easy-to-navigate, visually appealing interface that allows users to quickly understand the rules and mechanics, facilitating seamless engagement.
Balance Challenges and Skill Levels
Design tasks with varying difficulty levels that cater to users with different skillsets, ensuring that the experience remains challenging yet achievable.
Feedback and Progress Tracking
Provide real-time feedback and progress tracking to help users gauge their performance, learn from mistakes, and feel motivated to continue improving.
Social Interaction and Competition
Foster a sense of community and friendly competition by integrating social features, leaderboards, and collaborative tasks, which can spur users to stay engaged and strive for better results.
Personalize the Experience
Personalize the gamified experience based on user preferences and behavior. Use data to tailor challenges, rewards, and content to individual users. Personalization can make the experience more relevant and engaging, leading to higher satisfaction and continued participation.
Ensure Accessibility and Inclusivity
Design gamification elements to be accessible and inclusive to all users. Consider different abilities, languages, and devices when creating your gamified experience. Accessibility ensures that everyone can participate and enjoy the benefits of your gamification strategy.
Continuously Analyze and Optimize
Regularly analyze user data and feedback to assess the effectiveness of your gamification strategy. Use insights to make data-driven decisions and continuously optimize the experience. Adjust challenges, rewards, and other elements based on user engagement metrics and feedback to keep the experience fresh and engaging.
Great Gamification Examples in Mobile Apps
Duolingo
The advantages and disadvantages of gamification and game-based learning are something that pedagogs have worked on for decades. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, they started to focus more on gamification in online education. At this point, it is a great idea to revisit one of the best-gamified learning apps: Duolingo.
When it comes to e-learning and gamification, Duolingo (a language learning app) has done a great job at user engagement. Duolingo uses gamification at every stage and in every lesson with many gamification elements from points and hearts to streak counts.
Duolingo uses performance charts to show streaks and daily goals to keep users motivated. Users can also earn internal currencies called lingots from the activities they complete, and they can use these lingots to buy extra features such as Power-Ups.
Duolingo users need lives to complete quizzes, and when they fail, they lose their lives. They have to regain their lives to continue.
If you want to perform actionable gamification beyond points badges and leaderboards, we recommend you to have a look at this app. In addition to most common game elements, Duolingo allows users to interact socially via Facebook integration and also create language clubs in the app.
Habitica
We all want to have the best version of ourselves. Still, it is easier said than done most of the time. Secondly, we love playing games because it gives us an opportunity from reality. Relying on these two insights, Habitica leverages game elements to help its users achieve their goals. In the end, lifestyle gamification is getting more and more popular.
In brief, Habitica is a gamified productivity app. In the app, users create their characters and their guilds to build teams, and they defeat monsters by completing their objectives/tasks. So, they set tasks, meet them, and defeat the enemy.
Fitbit
Since competition and achievement are two crucial elements in games as well as in sports, it is easy to use gamification in fitness apps. Therefore, Fitbit does a great job to gamify the user experience and increase mobile app engagement.
In summary, Fitbit is a fitness wearable connected to an app. It awards users with badges, such as a 26 miles Marathon badge for completing a particular activity. It also enables people to connect with their friends and compete with them.
In the end, it ranks among the best-gamified fitness apps.
Snapchat
Snapchat is the inventor of the mobile story format and has an innovative role when it comes to gamification. Accordingly, Snapchat users share stories that disappear after 24 hours.
Stories are not the only thing that Snapchat takes an innovative action. The app used to have Trophies given to the users based on their engagement. However, Snapchat later removed Trophies. Snapchat users now have Charms that show their relationships with their Snapchat friends.
Snapchat gamifies the relationships of users by adding emojis such as 💕 for Super BFF, ❤️ for BFF, 💛 for Besties, etc.
Apart from game mechanics, Snapchat also allows users to play games with their friends in the app. It is among the top uses of gamification in social media.
LinkedIn is a social networking platform for business people. Completed profiles, hence, are essential for LinkedIn to serve effectively. To increase the profile completion rate, LinkedIn uses a progress bar. The progress bar also shows the strength of a user profile. LinkedIn guides users with what they need to fill in to complete their profile.
LinkedIn also boosts activity between users by encouraging skill endorsements and reviews. It also provides users with profile statistics such as “Who viewed your profile.” Since free accounts do not have access to the information of everyone who visits their profile, they utilize curiosity to encourage paid subscriptions.
Starbucks
Finally, Starbucks has a mobile app that uses gamification to boost user engagement with a reward system. The app allows in-app payment and enables users to earn stars for their spending. In other words, the app rewards them with free drinks or food that they can purchase through these stars.
Does Gamification Work?
Gamification ideas have the potential to boost user engagement when executed right. They might work well to collect real-time feedback or to improve user loyalty.
Nevertheless, you need to remember that the UI should respond to your users’ needs and wants. Swarm/Foursquare collected negative comments from users about its gamification and had to redesign the app. Or, if you have a finance app targeting senior people, then gamification might cause your app to seem loose.
User experience and engagement are always about testing and finding the right balance and path for the users’ best interests.
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