Gamification and UX
Challenging users and making them feel like they are in a game makes solutions more interesting.
Challenging users and making them feel like they are in a game makes solutions more interesting.
Every one of us will stay a child deep inside our hearts, and therefore we all love playing games. Due to that, gamification in any product, software, or service, plays an essential role. I'm your host, Chris, and this is the UX Globals Podcast!
All right so gamification can increase the user experience of a solution, especially software significantly. In a game, you will be rewarded most of the time for doing something correctly or for making progress. You appreciate it, and it shows that you are ahead of your competitors, which creates some kind of competition which most people also like. You can easily adapt that to digital solutions. Let's take an education platform. The moment a user has completed the setup of his or her account, give him or her some credit for that and push him or her to immediately start with the first lesson. Once they complete the first one, give them a second batch and make it clear that the next reward is only two more lessons away. These badges or awards will make them push harder, and the results of the education platform will be much higher than other platforms as the motivation increases.
You can even go one step further and give users a certain status. Let them start with the status of being a beginner. Once they have completed the first 10 percent of your lessons, they will become an advanced learner, and after 50 percent they can become a professional. Make it possible for users to share their status with others, both on social media and on your platform. That way, friends can tease each other and push each other by making their learning process a competition.
What will motivate your users, even more, is if they can lose a status again. Let's say they can earn a "daily-learner" badge if they trained for at least 15 minutes every day of one week. Make it clear that they have to keep up with it to keep that status. Maybe even link it to some features. Perhaps they can read an article every day only if they also train every day. The fear of losing that privilege will make your users stay focused to keep learning.
You can, of course, also implement a character and a story. Let's say your platform is for learning languages. You can introduce a person traveling to a new country for the first time together with your users. Make these two a team, and they have to challenge multiple stages by learning new vocabulary together. If the user does not know a word, the character can also help out with makes the entire system more human. The significant advantage of creating a story is that you can add multiple chapters to it, and in the case of the learning platform, they do not necessarily have to be in a specific order. Maybe the users can start with checking in to the hotel or with arriving at the airport. There are endless possibilities of how a user can place these chapters after one another.
But be careful. My advice is to make this entire gamification not a must use for users. Some might not want to have a context and would rather focus on just learning some grammar and vocabulary without a context around it. They should be allowed to use your solution, too. The gamification should preferably be an addon than compulsory.
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