How gamified user experiences can help the planet?

Learning from Duolingo’s success to foster sustainable habits

Luiz Avanço
Bootcamp
4 min readOct 27, 2024

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A woman is depicted with a smartphone, surrounded by a range of icons that denote critical elements for addressing carbon emissions and offsetting, such as organic waste, water, soil, and plastic containers.
Illustration by Pablo Peiker

Last week, Google recommended a BBC article about Duolingo, Luis von Ahn’s endeavor that’s become a model of gamification and user engagement. At the same week, I read another article stating that society has now crossed 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries, with 2024 on track to be the hottest year recorded. Crossing those two articles on the same week got me thinking: could we apply Duolingo’s engagement strategies to something just as urgent — our environmental impact? How many apps truly help us live more sustainably? Beyond a few carbon calculators, I’ve found little that offers real behavioral change.

The Missing Link in Environmental Apps

Take Klima, for example. The app starts by having you calculate your carbon footprint — a useful step in understanding your personal impact on the planet. However, after that initial insight, Klima’s main action point is suggesting that you donate to green projects to offset your emissions. While supporting these initiatives is undoubtedly valuable, this approach doesn’t encourage users to adopt long-term sustainable habits or reduce their footprint directly. The strategy centers on outside solutions - paying to address the damage, instead of nurturing internal behavioral modifications that could have a more permanent influence.

A collection of four rectangular screens showing parts of the app at Google's Playstore. They show graphs of personal carbon footprint calculation, footprint shrinking when taking environmental classes and carbon offsetting by funding worlwide projects
Some of Klima’s screens at the Playstore

We can also examine Greenly, another application that follows a similar model to Klima. It evaluates your carbon emissions linked to your daily behaviors, assisting you in visualizing how your choices impact the environment. Just like Klima, it delivers significant insights, but its central aim is carbon offsetting rather than promoting sustainable behavioral transformations.

While these apps provide valuable information, they fall short of creating a movement. What if we could turn sustainability into an engaging challenge?

A collection of four of Greenly’s screens at Apple’s Appstore with dashboards of personal carbon emissions divided by categories, cards of seasonal challenges and quizzes, and carbon shrinking graphs after supporting green projects.
Some of Greenly’s screens at the Appstore

As a Product Designer at Smart Citizen, a brazilian software lab, I began exploring with co-workers how gamification can drive sustainable actions. Since joining in 2021, I’ve been also part of the Agentes do Meio Ambiente team, where we’ve applied gamification concepts to inspire eco-friendly behavior. Through features like participating on environmental surveys, and geolocated image-sharing on a community feed, users earn points and rank for activity engagement. In 2023, AMA was awarded internationally Best Bootstrap company on SXSW at Austin, TX.

Four rectangular screens of the app Agentes do Meio ambiente, showing features like carbon footprint calculation, leaderboards and a list of accredited stores for reedeming points
Some of AMA features and screens

Expanding the Power of Gamification

But as Duolingo has shown, there’s potential to go even further. What if we start to imagine features that can track your daily eco-friendly actions — whether it’s biking to work, reducing plastic use, or composting. Just like Duolingo, it could motivate users to keep their streaks alive, rewarding them with badges, levels, or even tangible benefits like discounts on green products. Users could compete with friends or within their community to see who can achieve the lowest carbon footprint each week, turning sustainability into a fun, social, and rewarding challenge.

Three rectangular concept screens made by designer Luiza Tagliatela linking recycling actions with earning and reedeming points. First screen shows a input asking what user wants to recycle, second one user selects the type of recyclabe product he wants to recycle and last one shows a call to action button that redirects the user to Voluntary Delivery Points options.
Luiza's Tagliatela flow concept for a plastic discard (Found on dribbble) with the possibility of reedeming points

By turning sustainability into a game, we tap into what makes platforms like Duolingo so successful: consistent engagement. Daily cues, incentives, and a light-hearted competition can help users foster enduring environmentally friendly practices. Consider the excitement of achieving a 30-day streak of biking to work or leveling up after a month of cutting back on plastic. The sense of achievement from small, consistent actions would encourage users to stay committed, making sustainability a natural part of their daily lives. As James Clear explains in his Atomic Habits principle, the ‘1 Percent Rule’ shows that even slight improvements, maintained over time, can add up to a major advantage. By consistently being ‘just 1 percent better’ each day, users can generate a powerful ripple effect where their steady, incremental progress leads to disproportionate rewards and reinforces lasting, impactful habits.

The Ripple Effect of Collective Action

Suppose that a considerable fraction of people would adopt a gamified approach for taking up the cause of the environment, the effect would be phenomenal. Just as Duolingo has made learning languages available to a lot of people, this sort of app could make the whole idea of living sustainably fun and easy for everybody. Afterwards, the increase in environmentally friendly behavior exhibited by the people may lead companies and government bodies to pay attention to them and perhaps allow for some larger scale structural changes.

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Luiz Avanço
Luiz Avanço

Written by Luiz Avanço

Product designer at Smart Citizen and mountain hiker in my spare time.

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