Gamification
Why You Need to Be Careful about Rewarding Your User
A dive into the mishaps of the most commonly used gamification pattern.
“A designer must not only see the way a player engages with the system, but also how he leaves it and — perhaps even more importantly — what brings him back again. “ Cunningham & Zichermann
Gamification has been around for a while. People like to treat it as a golden ticket to user engagement. There are a lot of great resources to figure out in what ways you can add gamification to your current app’s system. It’s used as a tool to motivate and keep the user engaged in applications.
One of the most used gamification patterns is rewards. They seem like a no-brainer. People love using reward systems because they’re easy to implement and tend to work with a variety of users.
When implementing they don’t necessarily need to add other logic to the application. Just reward the user for doing what they are already supposed to do. It’s easy to want to jump on the bandwagon.
But there’s also a lot of pitfalls a designer, or even just someone looking to elevate their app…
