Avoid These Fatal Gamification Mistakes At All Costs
Since 2012, I’ve helped dozens of clients make their products and processes more engaging. I’ve also seen companies struggle to understand why no one uses their app more than once, no matter how much “gamification” they add.
If you want your product to be disengaging, forgettable, boring, and dreadful to use, by all means do the following. Otherwise, avoid these mistakes like the plague.
1. Design The Product, *Then* Gamify It
The number one mistake that people make is thinking of gamification and product design as two completely separate processes. If you spend a lot of time and effort designing a product to do a specific thing, and build a good user experience around that thing, adding gamification at the end will only disrupt that user experience.
Interrupting the user flow with interstitials that are not well explained and seem disjointed or tacked on is a surefire way to confuse users and stop them from doing what they’re on your app to do in the first place.
If you find that users don’t like doing what your app does, your problem is one that UX research needs to solve, not gamification.
Instead, think about fun from the very first design meeting. Make sure each interaction on your app is pleasurable and coherent. This requires thinking ahead, but it’s more than worth it.
2. Add Badges, Points, And Leaderboards To A Boring Process
The simplest expression of gamification, and the one people usually think of first, is also the least useful. Of course I’m referring to badges, points, and leaderboards.
Of course people enjoy being rewarded and praised. But if the rewards are not meaningful, they can’t motivate anyone. Imagine some one has asked you to do something you don’t want to do. For instance, alphabetizing a book shelf in somebody else’s house.
You’re not motivated to do this, because it is tedious and will not benefit you. If I offered you a sticker with a picture of a book on it as a reward, this would not increase your motivation much.
So what would motivate you? Here are some actual reasons you might do this:
- It will benefit the community. People who need access to the information in the books cannot access it because the books are not organized. This is why people edit Wikipedia with no expectation of compensation.
- Some one your care about asked you to. Imagine your mom asked you to do this as a favor to your elderly aunt. Social pressure or a desire to do something good for your aunt and mother motivate you to do this tedious task.
- It’s a game. There’s a hidden code printed on the spines of the books, and when you put them in order, they spell out a message meant just for you. This is similar to an escape room. It’s become a puzzle: a challenging contest that offers surprise you and tests your skill.
Of course, there are many other reasons you might organize a book shelf, but the three concepts above are share something in common: They are intrinsically motivating. You aren’t doing something for a reward, you’re doing it because the process itself yields something meaningful.
Adding points and badges might be fun the first few times a user receives one, but these things quickly lose their luster. They’re not engaging long term.
3. Over Design, Over Explain
A big mistake that many companies make is over-designign their product. By this, I mean the product aims to do too much. Too many features, too many benefits, too many tabs, too many gamification techniques.
The most popular gamified apps (DuoLingo, Tinder, TikTok) tend to do one thing very well, and then use all the tools in their toolbox to emphasize that one thing.
Over-design happens for a lot of reasons. Maybe your team isn’t willing to let go of ideas from their brainstorm. Maybe some egotistical executive has a vision for the product and insists on including extra features that they came up with last night in a dream. Maybe your UX research brief yielded a ton of insights and you wanted to give the users everything they asked for. Or maybe the problem you’re trying to solve is massive (like all of human health), so you designed a massive intervention. Or maybe you designed a boring product and then dumped a ton of “gamification” onto it to make it “fun,” but now no one understands how the economy of your app works.
You’ve got a boat load of features that no one is using. You could cut these features. But that would mean you messed up and designed something people don’t like. That can’t be the case, can it?
Maybe the users just don’t understand your product.
Problem is, you can’t fix a product that’s too big by adding more stuff to it!
Long tutorials, screens full of text, extra menus and tool tips… all of these make sense to the product team, but won’t make your users want to use your app any more. Instead, you need to make your app simple, intuitive, and fun.
4. Never Talk To Churned Users
You have a problem. Your app is not engaging. Users are churning. You can even see *when in the process* they are churning.
You take the screens that people bounce off of, and start to redesign them. But how should you do this?
First, you send out a push on your app asking for feedback. A bunch of users respond, and you talk to them. They tell you what they want in the app, what they like about it, what they don’t like. It turns out, they like it very much already. So you must be on the right track…. A slight tweak should fix the problem. Maybe you need to reword the instructions.
Did you catch the mistake above? If a user is getting a notification from your app, then by definition, they haven’t churned. They are the users that are already engaged by what you are doing. Maybe they’re the rare person who will try to get every badge just to do it. Or they are so motivated to do what you’re asking them to do that nothing would ever make them churn.
I’ve seen many products continue down a path of ruin because all their users tell them what they are doing is great, despite the fact that the app has an 80% churn rate.
Meanwhile, the people who bounced off your app will never respond to a notification because they hate your app and never turned notifications on.
If you are really determined to find out why people are not enjoying your product, you need to find people who deleted the app.
This means you have to capture their emails during onboarding, craft a great email headline to make them open it, and then you need to pay them to talk to you.
This is time consuming and expensive, but if you skip this you will never get the feedback you need. Everything else is a guess.
Sam Liberty is a gamification consultant, serious game designer, and professor of game design at Northeastern University. He is the former lead game designer at Sidekick Health.
