Stop being so serious with your design

How to master gamification with those serious tech apps

Gamification in app design is used to bring a little bit more joy and fun for your users. It both helps you increase your users engagement and brand loyalty.

The most popular way of introducing gamification into your app is by implementing reward systems (giving scores and trophies). We can meet these types of gamification strategies in many health apps. But what if the reward system is not for you and what if you have a serious tech app that you want to make a little bit more fun, but not overdo it.

There are few ways that could help you bring gamification into your strategy, that fits any app and will help you increase users engagement. Both ways includes implementing easter eggs in your app.

Build easter eggs in your app

The concept of easter egg is really simple. You hide some sort of fun item in your app for users to find it. Easter eggs have been really popular in video games and after time it appeared to be compatible with different apps.

Easter Egg could be some cool exclusive feature, maybe a discount or just a funny picture. Anything you can come up with and anything your target audience would love.

For example: Speedtest has hidden a very sinister cat in their app

Build Easter Eggs with new features

Building easter eggs together with new features is one of the most successful ways to bring gamification into your strategy and increase users engagement with those features.

There are few very successful example I have found:

Messenger dark mode

When messenger introduced its dark mode in the app they didn’t want to do it in a boring “here is our new feature” way. They decided to hide it under the moon emoji. When you type in moon emoji in any chat you can enable their dark mode.

Cyber security app introducing dark mode

One of the VPN apps introduced their dark mode and together built a hidden easter egg. When you find the egg you are able to enable one more special mode — Star Wars one. To find the egg you need to enable the dark mode first. This both increases users engagement with the new feature and of course Star Wars fans excitement.

This was a smart move of the VPN since they also used Real Time Marketing strategy since the easter egg was all about Star Wars and they released it few days before the official launch of Star Wars 9th movie. Good job I would say.

This brings us to the second way you could build easter eggs in your app.

Build Real Time Marketing Easter Egg

By Real Time Marketing I mean building Easter Eggs that are all about the events happening right now in the world. The Star wars easter egg mentioned above is a perfect example.

Few more examples:

Spotify Star Wars Lightsaber

This is an old example but it perfectly illustrates my point. And it is again about Star Wars, I guess everybody loves them that much.

Few years ago you were able to access Spotify Easter Egg that first of all matches you with certain Star Wars character based on your Spotify playlists and music you like and also changes your progress bar with lightsaber.

Google Search

It is no surprise that Google Search is the master of Real Time Marketing and Easter Eggs. Of course their Easter Eggs are really obvious, but they are sure fun and on point. They honour different celebrations, different characters, movies, books, causes. Anything that people find trendy and worthy.

To sum up

• Use gamification with the introduction of new features. This could be a dark mode or maybe an introduction to a live chat in the app.
• Use real life game examples. Forget the easy way — giving medals for your users. You can use the games maybe you loved in your childhood like hide and seek. Try to get inspired from other apps stories, but find your unique angle and way to gamification.
• React to current events. Implementing real time marketing together with gamification in your strategy will bring an increase in brand awareness, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty.
• Know your audience. Know your audience, what they like, what easter eggs they will appreciate and what occasions you want to celebrate together with them.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment and play a little bit yourself.

Stop being so serious and let your inner child play a little bit with the users. They will love it.