Gamification in Product Design
What is a Game?
When you take off all the technical parts of a game, you are left off with four elements: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and a story
Goal
A specific outcome towards which players should work. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose.
Rules
Rules limit how players can achieve the goal and, with such limitations, unleash creative ways of fixing a problem.
Feedback system
It tells players how close they are to achieving their goal. It can take the form of points, levels, progress bars, etc.
Story
Without any story involved it is sometimes (actually pretty much often) hard to understand. Try to dig somewhere deeper into your mind and imagine a situation where you are having a walk, facing a young guy trying to fight a huge oak with a small stick.
First Impression? That might look awkward. It is only because you have no idea that Peter (the guy not the oak) is the last samurai standing to protect his village from the hellkite invader (the oak), fighting him with the most unique, -1000-year-old crafted katana sword (the stick).
So what is Gamification?
“Gamification is about taking something that is not a game and applying game mechanics to increase user engagement, happiness, and loyalty!”
When we say the word “gamification” in the context of design, it can be easily mistaken with game design. Indeed, these terms are hardly related to each other, let alone opposite in many aspects. In the tech world, “gamification” stands for a technique of exerting game mechanics into a non-game environment, such as websites and mobile applications. For example, if you want to encourage users to interact more with your application, you can add game elements such as challenges. They can be challenged to check in every day during a week and get rewarded if they manage to do so. The thing is, people like having a clear goal, and rewards even more, so such a challenge would doubtfully pass unnoticed among the users. This way, designers are able to influence users’ behavior and motivate them as “players” to do the expected actions.
Typical Game Mechanics in Product Design
“The main task for designers applying gamification is not to turn the product fully into a game.”
For this reason, we have distinguished some of the most effective game mechanics commonly used in design
Challenging
There should always be a challenge. Challenges make people feel the value of their achievements.
Every challenge starts with a goal. Those should be visually presented in your app. Goals can be personal (customizable), predesigned, or community-generated. While creating predesigned goals be sure to work on their variety and complexity to avoid the boring “more and more of the same” stuff. Anyway, goals on their own do not make that much sense.
Just imagine you are playing pool — the goal is to bring certain balls into the pocket. While having only this information — you can simply come and put all the balls where you need. There is no fun! There is no challenge! Challenges should be interesting! Here is where rules come into play. You are given a special stick. You need to hit the white ball with a stick to hit another one and sink it into the pocket etc. This process may sound weird at first, but we all know there are people enjoying that weirdness. Why do they enjoy it? Correct — they think it’s fun. Make your challenges fun.
Make sure to keep the balance over complexity of tasks, as under-challenging makes people bored, while over-challenging might leave them frustrated. Find the balance between these two ends of the spectrum to provide users with experience they would enjoy. Let users learn from failures. Attaining success after a couple of trials and failures gives more satisfaction.
Points
To measure players’ success, many games use a point system. The gamified product can apply the same scheme that helps users: each time the user is done with a task, we provide them with a point to show their success.
Using Rewards
Never do we act without a reason. If you helped your friend build a house for the sake of friendship, you would either, at least, expect some help from your friend in the future, or like to spend some time in that house later.
Any accomplishment should be rewarded. A badge, a like, a place on the leaderboard — that depends on the type of your app. The main idea here is that rewards should provide value. For instance, you may include a loyalty program into your food delivery app to retain customers, honorable rank into wiki-like-app to motivate people to write more, and put some ego-touching rewards into a social app to satisfy users’ desire to stand out, etc.
Immerse into a Journey
The user should feel like a real player starting a personal journey of the product usage. For example, on the onboarding page from which the user starts, they can be offered an introduction to the features, so that users won’t be afraid that they might make a mistake.
When the journey continues, it is recommended to use the method of “scaffolding”. It means to disclose features progressively as the users become more accustomed to using the product. Such an approach allows people to avoid errors and makes the product pleasant to use. Also, the journey element may be supplemented with progress features. Providing information about the users’ progress throughout their journey, we can inspire them to continue.
Benefits of Gamification in UX design
“The appropriate use of gamification and well-chosen game mechanics can become a valuable tool for UX designers on the way to increase user engagement of the product and conversion rates.”
First of all, gamification brings the element of fun to the websites and applications. People enjoy the interactive process full of fun, challenges, and competitive spirit similar to video games, so they are encouraged to go back.
Furthermore, game mechanics are powerful motivators for the users. Game elements set the tasks, and rewards are promised for those who accomplish those “missions”. It is the curiosity and excitement that drive them to continue performing various tasks and spend more time on the app.
In addition, nowadays, gamification has already become one of the major design approaches. Plenties of designers have caught the hype and have actively applied this method in various projects. That’s why many users might have already had experience interacting with gamified products, which means they will expect the same or better entertainment from newer apps like yours.
To sum up, gamification is quite new a technique that is now on the path of active proving its reliability as an effective design method. Nevertheless, its popularity is growing rapidly, and stands no better chances to become a leading approach within a short time.
That’s for today. Thank you for reading!
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