Gamification is one of the best techniques user-centric designers apply to promote user engagement in apps and other digital assets. It helps solve most of the problems that caused poor user involvement. This post examines how it benefits user experience and interface design. It also shares tips on successful gamification incorporation into UI/UX. Keep reading to learn more.
What Is Gamification?
Let’s start by defining gamification. In design, gamification isn’t game design but rather using game-like approaches to boost user engagement. In short, gamification is the integration of game mechanics into non-game environments like apps or websites. A UI/UX designer can include a game-like element to promote usage and interaction, for instance, by encouraging users to participate in challenges and rewarding them for their participation.
Benefits of Gamification in User Engagement
Integrating gamification into a product and app design has many benefits. This section examines some of these advantages before proceeding to see how to use this technique to build a product roadmap.
Fun
Gamification introduces fun into products and apps. It makes people enjoy interacting with your solutions because they have much fun, challenges, and competitive environments, just like games. This way, users find more reasons to keep resorting to an app or website.
Enhanced User Engagement
Game mechanics motivate more usage. These game elements set tasks and promise rewards for those who accomplish them. This way, gamification leverages human curiosity and excitement to drive continued app or website use.
Increased Sense of Progress
The competitive and rewarding gamification established in apps or websites creates a sense of progress and purpose. It boosts achievement and motivation that ends in user self-motivation.
It Increases Healthy Competitiveness
Gamification creates healthy competitiveness by allowing users to compete with their friends and outperform contenders.
Strategies for Leveraging Gamification for User Engagement
Now you know how gamification benefits user interface and design. But how do you implement it successfully in your design projects? Here are eight strategies to incorporate game mechanics into your designs.
Instill Ownership into Users
All humans are naturally wired to possess things. Moreover, they always want to protect and improve their possessions. This increased ownership instinct makes users want to return to a gamified app with tokens and rewards and interact more with it.
Make It Social
Creating a social atmosphere in game mechanics is another way of succeeding in your gamification strategy. The ability to challenge friends to beat their scores awakens users’ social instinct, boosting more interaction.
Instill Unpredictability into Your Apps
Your gaming tactic will succeed if you instill unpredictability into it. It enables users to exercise their natural curiosity to explore more app sections and functions. For instance, Uber utilizes suspense in its app in fare costs. Users may encounter surcharges, discounts, or free matchings with premium services. Looking at this example, you can see how tension makes users want to explore more to discover what the app holds for them.
User Appraisals
You can also make your app’s gamification more successful by using appraisals. These elements provoke users to want to go on without losing hope. Appraisals can come in four ways.
- If your users’ challenges are complicated, consider ways to help them do it better. You may help them at the task’s end or allow them to repeat the harder parts. Additionally, you may display motivating messages like, “Never give up.”
- Continuous praise. For long tasks or steps, you can display messages that keep the user going. For instance, displaying messages like “Keep moving” keeps the user going.
- Hard work. You can give progressive and positive feedback when the task seems too hard.
- When challenges are easy, you should also be candid with your users to inform them about an easy challenge level.
Utilize Scarcity
Don’t forget to use scarcity in your design. When playing games, set a fixed number of challenges in which users can participate within one session. Thus, users may be urged to unlock more challenges using some “currency” form or fuel. This unlocking “currency” can be achieving a certain number of points or participating in various games.
Determine Your Value Proposition
Building a reward system that encourages users lies at every gamification effort’s heart because it makes users feel they’re progressing. Therefore, identify the user’s primary behavior and what the app is trying to encourage. You can do this by identifying the key milestone towards the primary goal so that you can incentivize the participants.
Additionally, understand the reward type you are providing for users. Your reward should also have added value to users to make them want to return.
Handle Errors Correctly
Your gamification should handle errors correctly because users can fail while trying to reach their goals. The learning curve will be quicker if your product helps users undo some tasks and realize their mistakes. For instance, Duolingo shows error messages explaining what a user did wrongly. The app also repeats the questions users answered incorrectly at the question session’s end. This way, your app won’t have a “game-over” effect that encourages winning while discouraging learning.
Maximize the Mechanics
Lastly, successfully incorporate gaming into your apps and products by maximizing gamification mechanics (tools or assets). The four common types of mechanics in non-game apps are as follows:
- You should include a way to measure success by awarding points they can redeem later. Ensure that rewards are valuable to your users. Otherwise, they may not motivate users to progress.
- Badges and stickers. Awarding badges and stickers are great ways of instilling a sense of satisfaction and bragging in your users’ minds. They can unlock these virtual rewards upon reaching given milestones.
- Missions or challenges. Addition missions or challenges to your app’s gamification is another big reason a user would like to return to it. The sense of winning motivates users to use your app more frequently.
- Including leaderboards instills a sense of completion that encourages motivation.
Conclusion
Gamification is a great way of improving user engagement with your apps and products. That is why this post delved into its benefits and explained how you can incorporate it into your UI/UX design. The ball is in your court to use these insights to leverage the gaming functionality in various software projects.
