How gamified user experiences can help the planet?
Learning from Duolingo’s success to foster sustainable habits
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
