In the last two decades, video games have become enormously popular and are currently being played by more than three billion people worldwide. As a result, many of their elements and their overall style have been copied by great designers, who are now gamifying their apps to make them more engaging.
Why Gamification Is a Good Idea
When we see positive numbers going up, we get excited. When we achieve something, we want to put in more effort to achieve something even more spectacular. It creates a cycle of reinforcement that’s hard to resist.
Few people are motivated by purely abstract notions. Most of us like to see our progress, like the person who goes to the gym and is motivated by seeing in a mirror how their body improves.
When our progress is measured and then presented to us in visual ways, we understand it much better and can actually feel it. That’s why the famous Steam platform asks game developers to create lots and lots of achievements for their games and to tell players what percentage of a game’s player base has unlocked a particular achievement.
Seeing that you’ve accomplished something that only 10% or 1% of a million people were capable of achieving gives you a sense of pride and confidence in your own abilities.
Gamification allows designers to turn their products and services into games. In the customer’s mind, such a product or service is more enjoyable and has better “replayability”. This is a term used among gamers to describe a game that can be played multiple times or for many hours without losing its charm.
Types of Apps That Can Be Gamified
Systems based on points and rewards, leaderboards, progress bars, levels, achievements, badges, and challenges are now everywhere you look. Whether it’s table games apps or well-known instant messaging apps like Discord, gamification is cleverly used and it’s working.
Here are three of the most common types of apps that can be gamified:
Education Apps
Education is all about making progress. To educate yourself means, to some extent, to gain new knowledge and skills. Improving each of your abilities is profitable in the long run, but it can be challenging and painful in the short run.
To assist students in the process of learning new skills, apps like Duolingo are using XP points and league rankings. These tools encourage users to dedicate more time to study.
When you feel like you’re no longer isolated in your learning but actually playing a multiplayer game, even a little bit of competitiveness will carry you far.
Motivation is a very powerful driver of behavior, sustaining it when the going gets tough. Through gamification, the best education apps are successfully motivating users, becoming highly engaging in the process.
Financial Apps
Finance feels different when an app gives you the impression that you’re playing Capitalism. This domain is full of numbers, which can be represented and contextualized in a gamified way.
Platforms like eToro incentivize traders to trade more often and invest more money by offering skill or prestige tiers. You usually start at a low tier and climb your way up. This process, of leveling up and making money is highly addictive.
Fitness Apps
It’s motivating to know how many steps you’ve walked today or how many calories you’ve burned, but it’s even more motivating to know that today, you’ve done better than yesterday.
When you see your daily results in a contextualized manner, you’re no longer trapped in the present with no connection to the past or the future. You’re on a journey and every new day is a wonderful opportunity.
Some people may want to increase their strength by putting on more muscle. Others may want to lose 10 kilograms. Based on the situation, a fitness app that uses gamification will allow users to see their results and how fast they’re making progress toward their big objectives.
Conclusion
In a world where the gaming industry has higher revenues than the film and music industries, the implicit language of video games is rapidly becoming understood by billions of people. Because of this, apps that make use of it achieve a higher level of engagement.
