The UX industry has been expanding over the past several years immensely, people start to understand the importance of focusing on user needs and coming up with solutions for them. With this expansion and the growing numbers of products and concepts of products out there, the user’s practical needs are starting to get more and more understood and fulfilled.
But how about people’s emotional needs? This is where our long-on-the-user-satisfaction-market friends, videogames, come along and teach us how to cater for user’s intrinsic desires.
How do games make users feel?
Games have been around for a long time, and during this time they have perfected the art of making their players feel good. Irrespective of their story, goals or mechanics, we play games because it makes us happy in various ways.
People in the gaming industry have been analyzing people’s needs and behaviors for long now, looking at what triggers positive emotional responses from users and what engages their motivation to keep playing a game. Therefore, we, as UX designers, need not reinvent the wheel, but we should look at their findings and practices to learn how we can spice up the experience of our users.
Octalysis Framework
The most well known researcher in the industry of gamification is Yu-kai Chou. He and others in the industry have been analyzing the impact games have on players and how these trigger their behavior. By gathering all the facts he has come up with in his years of research, he put together the Octalysis Framework, a comprehensive guide to understanding what gamification entails and how its practices could be introduced in other types of products to engage users and trigger different emotional and behavioral responses in their interaction with the products.
What is gamification?
Gamification is a set of design practices, derived from the gaming industry, that focuses on the “human” aspect (emotions, psychological factors, instinctive behaviors) of design, rather than the “functional” aspect (actions, scope, goals).
The Octalysis Framework looks at 8 Core Drives, representing the intrinsic needs of the user, motivators and activators of pleasure. We all have them, we are all guided in our behaviors by them and how we feel about a certain interaction with a product is also determined by how the product touches upon them.
In short they are:
- Epic Meaning & Calling aka “Feeling like a hero”
This Core Drive refers to instilling in the user a feeling that they are serving for a greater purpose, that they were chosen to complete a mission that would aid in “the greater good”. This motivates the user to keep interacting with the product to contribute to that greater good.
Example: Telling users that writing posts on a social platform contributes to other people learning.
2. Development & Accomplishment aka “Overcoming challenges”
This Core Drive refers to giving the user challenges and using it as activation for the emotional response of an internal drive for progress, which is a human characteristic. The challenge should be matched to their abilities to overcome it, since a task that seems impossible instills fear and doubt more than motivation.
Example: In a plant care app, giving the user a challenge to keep their plants in peak condition by taking care of them for a set number of days motivates the user to perform those actions since they will feel accomplishment in the end.
TIP: reward the users upon completing a challenge; this gives them more motivation to perform the actions, knowing they will also get something in return for their efforts
3. Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback aka “Create it yourself”
This Core Drive refers to engaging the users in a task that gives them freedom to explore their creativity and see the result of their expression. Being creative and finding alternative ways to problem solving or goal reaching is a human drive, we want to express ourselves in various ways and show our abilities.
Example: In a learning platform, allow users to show how they would solve a problem (such as a math exercise) and spread it with others to gain recognition and feedback for their way of thinking.
4. Ownership & Possession aka “That’s mine”
This Core Drive is about motivating users by giving them something they own, that they are then activated to explore and develop it, make it more of their own and show it off to others.
Example: Allow users to create and customize a virtual avatar that represents them digitally on a platform. It is something they own, they can alter in any way they see fit and can also show to others what they have created.
5. Social Influence & Relatedness aka “You’re not alone”
This Core Drive refers to a behavior similar to peer pressure, copying or aspiring towards something that others around have, makes the user motivated to keep going and reach that same goal. The same is achieved by having people compete with each other, comparing ourselves with the ones around us is a natural human instinct.
Example: Show a user what other people they are related to or linked to are doing stimulates the user to go after the same achievements. People are social creatures, we want to blend in and have similar traits as others around us.
6. Scarcity & Impatience aka “Now or never”
This Core Drive refers to the human behavior of wanting what they don’t have, motivating them to keep trying to acquire that something. While this Core Drive stimulates more negative emotions for users, it reaches a positive behavior of motivating user’s actions.
Example: Giving users a limited time content that disappears if they don’t claim it or perform a certain action / complete a challenge.
7. Unpredictability & Curiosity aka “What next?”
This Core Drive refers to the need for people to discover what is next, be and stay curious until they find out, which keeps them engaged with the task of trying to discover what is next for them. For most people, predictable and repetitive means boring, we need a level of mystery to trigger our curiosity.
Example: When giving the user rewards, tell them they will receive something but don’t show them directly what they might earn, keeping them curious to reach that point in the interaction and discover it.
8. Loss & Avoidance aka “Go after it”
This Core Drive refers to the human behavior of trying to avoid losing something they have worked at, trying to prevent a negative event from happening. When people feel they might lose something if they don’t act, they are more willing to go after it.
Example: Keeping the user interacting with the product by having them lose progress or bonuses if they miss a certain time of interaction (most common feature is daily streaks).
Let’s put those insights to good UX use!
Now that we understand the human behaviors and emotions that games and the gamification practices are targeting, it is time to take that knowledge and improve the experiences we design for our users.
There are two main behaviors we want to trigger in our users irrespective of the products we design:
A. Excitement to try out the product
We design great product with tailored-made experiences for our users, but the key to transforming those great solutions we designed into successful products is to get our users excited to try them out and start using them. In order to do that, we have to understand how users feel outside of the product and how we want them to feel when using the product.
To assess and understand that, we could use a method called Behavioral Lenses to map out the behavioral journey we want to take the users through and visualize the target behavior they should have. Once we understand that, we can use gamification practices to model the user behavior and cater for their intrinsic needs, the Core Drives from the Octalysis Framework.
One thing that you should keep in mind is that there is no singular way of triggering the behavior you want for your users, nor is it one practice that works for all cases, so you should research what makes sense for your target audience and your product.
Examples and ideas
- Onboarding showcase (Show your users what you have for them)
The first impression a user has on your product sticks with them in the long run. If you manage to get them excited and engaged with what the product has for them, they are more likely to try it out and start using it. Therefore, you could show the features that specifically target and solve their needs, as well as give them a glimpse of what they will achieve by using your product.
This will trigger their curiosity and desire to discover the product, while making them feel understood and taken care of. This is what games are doing in the first portion of the journey where the player progresses fast and gets a glimpse of what they are able to do inside the game.
2. Personalized experience (You own the product)
Give the users the ability to personalize the product, whether it is about setting up the interface environment to their liking (fonts, colors, structure) or items that they can customize (avatars, rewards, content curation). This triggers their drives for creating and ownership, making the user perceive the product as their own. When we own something, we are less likely to give it up or feel at ease about losing it.
If you provide content for the user (to inspire them or teach them), give them the ability to filter that based on their interests and choose what they see first. Create elements that can be customized and that represent the user choices (avatars, items) and place them at the center of the experience, so that all the effort the user puts in the product also reflects on them.
3. User as main character (Hero of the story)
Being in the UX industry, we know that our user are at the center of the product, their needs dictate the experience. But for them, this is not so obvious. Give the user the explicit main role in the product, whether you show them how their interaction impacts the product or give them a fictive important role, they have to understand they are valued. This triggers their drive for meaning and social influence and the sooner you establish this position for them the better are your chances of getting the user hooked on your product.
If your product is subscription based, give the money your user spends on the product a higher (and true!) meaning, such as contributing to the product being able to evolve and therefore be available for more people to enjoy. If the user can post content on your product, make it clear to them that their contribution matters to other users and make it so that it enhances their interaction with others (such as gaining feedback from users or getting rewards from them).
B. Motivation to keep using the product
Once your users are excited to discover your product, their experience only begins and we should design with that in mind. People generally get bored really fast of repetitive actions and experience that don’t trigger their curiosity to go further. One thing that games do very well in that aspect is keeping their players engaged on the long term, whether that is to level up, see how the story unfolds or challenge and better themselves, the key is that all of these aspects instill pleasure in the players and cover one or multiple Core Drives.
In order to design engaging experiences in the long run, we have to look at what motivates the users, what their long term needs are and to cater for them. Testing is an important factor here because data on how user needs change determines what their next actions inside the product will be, whether they will keep using it, change their behavior on the platform or drop out completely.
Examples and ideas
- New content (Give your users more)
Having an experience that doesn’t evolve with the user can only get their progress and interest in it so far. If users can’t see something meaningful or exciting for them ahead, they are likely to drop out if they don’t absolutely need the functionality of your product (and even so, there are always alternatives for them to jump into).
Give your users new content without overwhelming them, there is a fine line between knowing when to deliver more for the user to explore and discover within your product and overdelivering up to the point that the user feels confused about what to do next. Giving relevant content based on the user’s needs and abilities triggers their curiosity (Core Drive) to explore more of the product’s experience.
2. Value their progress (Keep it or lose it)
People value their efforts (sometimes overvalue) and don’t like seeing it being misplaced or lost. Keep track of the hard work and time they have put in engaging with your product (through progress indicators, levels, chapters and milestones) to show them how far they have come. Another way to achieving this is by showing them what they will lose if they stop their journey (daily streaks with bonuses, leaderboard positions, limited content), making them less likely to drop out. While this practice instills a more negative feeling in the user, the fear of losing, it achieves powerful and positive results.
TIP: use this method scarcely, otherwise the user will be overwhelmed by the fear of losing so much that they will drop out. Nobody likes being afraid and the instinct is to get away from fear as quickly as possible (Fight or Flight Response).
3. Reward efforts (Make the user feel accomplished)
As I previously mentioned, users value their efforts and you should too when designing for them. A more powerful way of showing that is by rewarding their efforts with digital or physical bonuses and meaningful content. Give your users rewards for their time on the platform, their efforts of showing their interest in it and their personal achievements.
Be careful with how you reward your users, the reward should be relevant for their needs and meaningful: there is no value in showing a badge or a score if there is no value the user can benefit from. Give users new content, limited access to resources, items they can use to customize their experience or unlocking features inside the app they can gain more value from, all of these are relevant to the goal of the user and the reason they have started using your product in the first place (Core Drive Accomplishment).
Key Takeaways
Gamification is a valuable set of practices derived from the gaming industry, that has been evaluating people’s behaviors and intrinsic needs that determine pleasure. As UX designers, we can take their efforts and insights and implement them in the experiences we design for our users to make them more engaging for our users and create more powerful emotional responses.
The most important aspect when designing with gamification practices is to keeping the implementation of these relevant to your users needs and interests and not throw them in with hopes that they will change users’ behaviors for the better.
