Can gamification really hack product growth?

Are you trying to hack product growth using gamification based on the basic human psychology motivators?

Today the concept of gaming is vastly changing the dynamics of business products and how consumers interact with them. To judge the success of any product, often the daily and monthly active users provide an insight to how much the product is being used. Some stakeholders might believe that the product has been designed perfectly, keeping all the user segments in view, and all the aspects for a successful user experience have been covered. They might be inclined to believe that low user engagement can be increased using various gamification techniques. As a product manager, it is your job to decide if the product is designed perfectly and all it requires is a little more incentive for the user to engage with the product. Or maybe there are inherent design flaws with the product that might be restricting user engagement.

So, let’s dive into the nuances, which you should consider while making such a decision. Firstly, however, we must explore how human psychology actually works with regard to intrinsic motivations.

Human Psychology

Personally, I haven’t had a good experience with these so-called gamification models. Nevertheless, it has always fascinated me how the products leverage them. So, my preliminary research led me to explore publications that touched upon how human psychology works and how we can leverage the basic rules that govern our psyches to make any product achieve its business goals. I know it sounds evil if you put it like that but, if we look at a larger landscape, it starts to make a lot of sense. To understand it better, let’s analyze how human psychology influences game design.

There are two theories that guide us towards understanding why humans do what they do or better put “what can be the internal or external motivators for human actions.”

Reiss theory

Reiss’s theory details that humans have 16 basic desires that govern what we do. These are a desire for Order, Power, Independence, Curiosity, Acceptance, Saving, Idealism, Honor, Social Contact, Family, Status, Vengeance, Romance, Eating, Physical Activity, and Tranquility. These desires act as intrinsic motivators for a lot of our actions.

Self Determination Theory

Self Determination theory tells us about extrinsic motivators and how they influence our decisions. It is more important to us because it tells us what humans want externally to perform some actions. In essence, if a certain action brings about the following three outcomes’ humans are likely to perform it.

• Autonomy

Independence from conflicting control or influence; the urge to be in control of life (or play-scape) and act accordingly

• Competence

The ability to control outcomes and experience mastery of a task or skill

• Relatability

The desire to interact and connect with others in a caring way

Self-Determination Theory in Gaming

Autonomy

The way humans operate is quite interesting. The goals or tasks they achieve for their personal interest or values make them feel more autonomous in their decisions. So, in this modern day and age where there are too many distractions and they feel things getting out of control, games give them a sense of control. And this control results in an immersive experience. Such that they desire to perform these actions even more. Hence when designing games in general, or gamification concepts in business products, designers can focus on providing a sense of autonomy through:

• Presenting the player with choices
• Rewards such as feedback or encouragement
• Non-controlling instructions

Competence

This relates to a human’s ability to progress through the game. It is quite often observed that both the games that are a) very tough and impossibly difficult or b) extremely easy and not challenging at all are not widely adopted. So, game designers should be quite attentive to the fact that a player must feel like the goals they are seeking inside the game are obtainable either through progression systems or practice. For this purpose, they can deploy the following into games:

• Opportunities to unlock new abilities (Skill Trees)
• Challenging or bonus objectives
• Controls and/or combos that can be mastered

Relatability

Keeping in mind the motivator theories of human psychology, we come to know that relatedness and the feeling of being connected with peers play a key role in the mental well-being of humans. And the explosion of digital devices in the past few decades has left humans unable to interact with each other in the real life. So, there has been an increasing trend in multiplayer games where people can feel connected with their peers.

Business Case

With the above psychology metrics kept in mind while devising the gamification strategies, one can very easily achieve their business goals and keep the users happily engaged with the product or service. At the same time, game designers in business products must maintain a balance while devising the difficulty level, so that the user is neither overwhelmed by the complexity of the game nor feels that the game is too simple for them.

One major aspect to keep in mind is that the game designer should be inherently aware of the core business goals. The reason is that the business wants to achieve certain metrics through their product using these gamification models. The game designer should be aware of how the product works and the kinds of events or functionalities available to the end user. So that he can identify what rewards are given for such behaviors that lead to favorable outcomes for the product.

For example, the following are a few metrics that the stakeholders want to improve in their product using the gamification models:

• Consumer Engagement
• Conversion Rates
• Daily/Monthly active users
• Signups/Downloads
• Referrals

The above-mentioned metrics act as guiding stones for game designers and can yield an increase in the success of the product.

Case-study of TikTok

There have been a lot of studies on why TikTok has gone so viral and how it gives an addictive experience for users. The reason is that it is built keeping in mind the basic human psychology which can be explained by the reward mechanism of the body. Dopamine is released which rewards and motivates us to perform certain tasks, and the small video chunks make us happy with the least amount of energy. This motivates us to keep scrolling and consuming more videos. It adapts to the user behavior and starts showing videos based on human behavior with the occasional short surprises to keep us engaged. The most popular videos on TikTok all have the following things in common:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Immersive
• Emotional

So, it’s a pretty decent example of manipulating human psychology to achieve business goals.

Common Gamification Models

Following are a few methods used in different industries to achieve business goals:

1. Goals / Missions (Monthly/Weekly)

• Daily/Weekly goals to keep the user engaged and give them a sense of achievement.
• Goals are always given to the user in incremental difficulty level so that the user can build habits over time.

2. Leaderboard & Badges

• To create a sense of competition among users, the use of leaderboards is quite common.
• The concept of badges as indicators of achievements is also applied so people use the product to achieve more and more badges, and thus lead the product to a successful roadmap.

3. Online Discoverability

• The user shall be able to share their achievements on social media platforms so that can show off their achievements thus creating a sense of competition.

4. Retrospective Games

• The user shall be able to ponder upon their user flow journey and give critical feedback. This can help to improve the product and uncover hidden flaws that may be overlooked by the product teams.

Conclusion

All in all, we have explored multiple nuances that are involved in taking a decision on whether:

Our product is poorly designed and needs UX improvements.
OR
Our product is designed well; it just needs a little gamification magic to boost user engagement.

So, one can easily use analytics tools (like Google Analytics, Mix Panel, Amplitude, etc.) to get an in-depth analysis of the user behaviors and understand how they are using the product and where they are facing difficulties. And if the stakeholders feel that users are using the system without any issues, they may want to add a little incentive of gamifying experience to increase the user engagement and achieve the business goals much better.

References:

• Reiss, S. Who am I? The 16 basic desires that motivate our actions and define our personality. New York: Penguin Publishing, 2000.
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum Press, 1985.