How Gamification Affects Your Product Design (UI/UX)

Games are nature’s most beautiful creation.— Leonard Cohen

Gamification makes #ux design stronger by tapping into human behavior and emotions. When done right, it makes users more engaged and increases the chances of a product being a huge success. Gamification has become a bit of a buzzword lately, but its basic ideas have been around for hundreds of years.

For example, how have parents been getting their kids to eat their food for generations? To turn it into a game! By pretending that the spoon is an airplane landing and taking off, or by giving them a treat like a dessert.

Gamification is both powerful and flexible — it can readily be applied to any problem that can be solved through influencing human motivation and behavior. —Christopher Cunningham and Gabe Zichermann

In this blog post, we'll talk about #gamification and its role in UI/UX design. This article gives a brief overview of the best techniques and gives some real-world examples to help put them in context.

Gamification is the process of using game design concepts to engage users in ways that aren’t traditionally considered game environments. - Ross Unger and Carolyn Chandler, A Project Guide to UX Design

Gamification is just using game mechanics or elements in places that aren't games. Most games have fun ways to play, like challenges, levels, rewards, and badges. We'll talk more about this later. It's not about making a full-fledged game. Instead, it's about putting in design elements that are often used in games. In his book Gamify, Brian Burke says it this way. "Games mostly amuse players by making them do silly things... Gamification makes players feel something to get them going.

Here are a few activities where gamification has worked well in the real world:

?? Sales competition at work every month (a challenge)

??Frequent-flier program tiers (levels)

?? Weight Watchers team (group)

??Free coffee after buying 12 cups (reward)

?? A platinum card from American Express (badge)

There are a lot of examples, especially in the last few years when gamification has been tried out in many different fields.

Volkswagen did something interesting by starting a project called "Fun Theory." In this project, they tested gamification techniques in the real world. In Sweden, they used speed cameras and just called it the "Speed Camera Lottery." In a nutshell, the experiment put all drivers who passed the speed camera into a lottery. Drivers who obeyed the speed limit were entered into the lottery and could win money from the speeder's fine. This added fun in the form of competition and rewards slowed down the speed by 20%.

The Piano Staircase was another successful gamification project. It turned a regular staircase into a piano that plays music. The goal of this test was to see if more people would take the stairs instead of the escalator. Because of this, 66% more people used the stairs!

Using gamification techniques in UI/UX design has become very popular recently and for good reason. It is now an important part of many great products, from platforms for learning a new language to products for health and fitness to digital banking.

Our brains are wired to crave puzzle-solving, feedback and reinforcement, and the other experiences that games provide. Study after study has shown that games activate the brain’s dopamine system, which is associated with pleasure - Kevin Werbach.

The challenge of gamification is getting it right.

But gamification is a complicated subject, and not all of its parts work well. It's not enough to just add avatars, badges, and leaderboards and hope that it works.

Like chocolate, gamification makes a lot of things taste better. Not everything, though. And the key is to know what works, when, on what, and how.

Also, each game mechanic is different, and some may be more useful than others. This is shown by things like leaderboards. Some people may not want to use leaderboards because they can be demotivating, especially if the top spots are impossible to reach. Duolingo's leaderboards are interesting because you can turn them on or off, depending on whether or not you want to participate.

Game thinking asks a different question: why do people buy or use your product or service in the first place? And it asks the question in a certain way: What do they want? What makes your clients want to buy from you? Once you know this, game thinking asks, "Can you make it more interesting, fun, and compelling?

Gamification is not a one-size-fits-all solution; it needs to fit the product and meet the business's goals and needs. As a simple example, gamification probably wouldn't work for a funeral home.

Also, adding game mechanics to solve fundamental and core business problems might not work. For example, it can't fix years of bad customer service with a wave of the hand. This is why it's so important to understand the business and user needs before adding gamification techniques. You need to know the why before you go crazy with confetti.

Once you know what your users want (the why) and what you want to accomplish, you might be able to use gamification techniques. You can start putting them in place gradually by testing and changing things quickly. "Unlike video games, gamified solutions should change over time to add new features, keep them fresh, and engage the audience in new ways. (Brian Burke).

In his book Gamify, Brian Burke talks about the three main reasons why most gamified solutions fail:

• It's not clear what the business results will be.
• The gamified solution is meant to help the organization reach its goals, not the players'.
• People are more interested in the solution for what it can do for them than how it makes them feel.

Successful gamification is the process of making something interesting for a specific audience. Plan to spend a lot of time getting to know the players and what drives them and what their goals are.

In the end, making games and making them more fun is hard. Even big companies like EA and Sony have spent millions of dollars on games that didn't do well. But, as we've talked about before, if you do research, test, and iterate, your chances of success go up by a lot.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to see that fun motivates people. Gamification is the process of manipulating fun to serve real-world objectives. — Kevin Werbach

Bonus tip

The book Gamification by Design says it very well. Instead of thinking about your user or customer when designing for gamification, use the word "player" from now on. By thinking of our customers as players, we change our focus to how they use our products.

Examples of gamification

Duolingo

With more than 37 million active users, the learning app Duolingo has become a big hit. It looks like a lot of fun, which is very different from other language-learning platforms of the past. It has also used almost all of the things that were mentioned above.

Duolingo encourages players to learn languages using a slew of gamification techniques, like points, achievements, leaderboards, strong feedback loops, content unlocking, and social engagement. ”… “Its success, by now, is obvious — it offers 94 different language courses in 23 languages, and has over 300 million registered users (Kevin Werbach).

Even LinkedIn , which is used to find jobs and isn't the most fun thing you can think of, has used gamification. LinkedIn was able to get up to 55% more people to fill out their profiles by using a progress bar and badges. This way #Linkedin encourages users to fill out their profiles so they are more likely to be hired.

Here's how we added gamification to the mobile banking app.

FitBit

Fitbit, an app that made the idea of walking 10,000 steps a day popular, is another great example. It has been very successful at getting people to exercise more, and this is mostly because it is set up like a game. The Fitbit (now part of Google) app keeps track of what you do and gives you a score based on that. The app also gives you daily challenges, rewards you with badges, and lets you compete with your friends by showing you super-visual leaderboards. Nike+ and Zombie Run are two other great games that have helped make fitness more popular.

Most of the time, these game mechanics are very obvious, but gamification can also be used in a more subtle way. It can be a deeper pattern that changes behavior in a big way, like when rewards are unpredictable or change over time, or when competition is hidden or not obvious.

For example, a feed that keeps going and going, like the ones on Instagram , Pinterest , and TikTok . People keep coming back to these feeds because they never know what the next scroll will show. The user stays hooked because he or she never knows when the next payoff will come. This is like slot machines, which are the most popular thing to do in a casino. It's easy to keep playing if you think you could win at any time. Even after playing for hours, you still have a small chance that the next one or the one after that will be the jackpot.

When you try to level up on social media sites by getting more followers, likes, or reposts, you can see how competitive it is (this can be seen whenever #design tries to quantify something). You want to keep your score up or even make it better than it was before.

Players get a dopamine surge when it happens, a little like hitting a jackpot on a slot machine. This mechanism is called a “variable reward schedule. – Kevin Werbach

There are a lot more examples, but this should give you a good idea of what gamification is and how it has been used in #uiux Design.

Conclusion

To finish. Gamification mechanics have become very popular in #uiux design, and it's easy to see why. These fun and interesting techniques work, as long as they're done right. Gamified solutions are about rethinking what motivates people in a world where we're getting more and more connected digitally and less and less in person. It's about building motivation in a world where people spend a lot of time online, and we're just starting out on this journey.

By 2025, millennials will make up three out of every four workers. Many of them have grown up with video games all around them. As digital natives, we may even expect some of these features because we want to be constantly engaged and have experiences that are made just for us. This shows how important it is to add game elements to your product to make sure it will be useful in the future. Even more so as new technologies like gesture controls and augmented reality (AR), are inherently game-like, mature, and become easy to use in our everyday lives. Whether you like it or not, gamification is here to stay. Since, well, the beginning of time, people have used game-like techniques to get them interested and motivated to reach their goals. It will continue to make most people happy, just like chocolate does.

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