UX Gamification: Increasing User’s Contribution through Accomplishment
Our brains have a natural desire to feel progress, to experience growth. How can we use it to increase user contribution?
Gamification: Accomplishment
I always have a sweet spot in my heart for Gamification. The way it could manipulate user to do the task we wanted while they think that they are having fun. That’s super powerful. If you haven’t know gamification before, to put it simply,
Gamification is the craft of deriving all the fun and engaging elements found in games and applying them to real-world or productive activities.
— Yukai chou
As a human, we are driven to have and accomplish goals. In gamification theory, accomplishment is one of the most motivated core since it makes the user feel like they are improving themselves and actually making progress.
For example, the progress bar in Tech in Asia profile page. The progress bar encourages the user to complete their profile and submitting data. It motivates people because they feel like making progress. Our brains hate incomplete things dangling in front of our faces. Our brain also releases endorphins when we finish a complex task. Incompleteness causes stress so that we do things to resolve the tension. When we see a progress bar that is taunting us as only being 35% it gives us that extra push to finish the actions and feel complete again as a human being, and feel relieved when the task is finished.
Applying a sense of accomplishment to increase user’s Contribution
Now we know the basic, how can we make people feel accomplished while using the app?
Let’s start with the problem.
A fitness studio booking app is trying to increase user’s posting a picture after they’re working out. How can we utilize a sense of accomplishment to improve their user’s contribution rate?
1. User badge and Level
User badge and level set goals for the user. This helps the user feel like there is always progress, and one achievement is coming after another. To maximize user level, we have to keep the user in their optimal state, the challenge has to increase relative to the level of skill that the user possesses at that time.
Increase difficulty along the way. Just like the level in games, if the challenge exceeds the abilities of the current skill level, it can lead to frustration. If the skill level is increasing faster than the challenge, it leads to boredom. Both of these will normally end with the player leaving the game.
So, we have to tiptoe from frustration to boredom and find a balance in which user level can motivate the user to contribute more.
2. Quest List
If you played games before, you must notice that screen. By providing increasing points it gives the user urge to open the games daily because they don’t want to miss the big prize. Creating a simple quest list makes the user feel rewarded when they finished the action. After all, who doesn’t love feeling like a winner? Quest also make the task more fun. Quest list should contain the mission, how to complete it and what is the rewards. Adjust the difficulty of each task. Just like user level, too easy and it will be boring, while too hard can makes the user abandon the task altogether.
To step up the game, add CTA button to cut the user journey.
3. Progress bar
Providing progress bar after a user create a post motivates the user to post more. It gives them an extra push to finish the actions and complete the mission. It also can be used as a reminder of how much they have accomplished, and a motivation to complete the task. A progress bar can also let the user track their progress. If a progress bar popped out after the user creates a post, this could make the user feels like making progress and create the urges to post more.
If you want to make progress bar to the next level, add simple animation to bring out more interaction a given user more delightful experience towards the product.
