Three Guaranteed Ways To Boost App Retention (Without Gamification)

They work every time they’re tried

I’ve noticed a pattern in my consulting engagements. At the start, the client usually wants to know what gamification features to add to their app, like there’s some gamification lever that you can pull that adds in solutions that will just work — to drive engagement, boost retention, and increase the number of in-app purchases by some absurd percentage.

The truth is, gamification is like any other UX improvement. It needs to be driven by the users and the goals of the developer, and so involves intense, specialized UX research. Get to know the user, get to know what motivates them, understand their psychology and their needs, and then determine how play can affect their behavior.

But that isn’t what they want. They want to know whether adding badges or a currency will help. And I have to tell them “I don’t know yet. It depends on your user.” Of course, nine times out of ten, they haven’t done the user research, there’s no brief, etc. So they leave the conversation daunted. They wanted a few simple tricks to boost engagement and they got a lecture on methodology.

It turns out, however, that there are a few simple tricks that actually do boost retention by double digit percentages! They’re just not gamification.

1. Ask Your User How Long They Wish To Spend On The App

This first one seems counter-intuitive, because it involves increasing friction in onboarding. Most people assume that you want your onboarding to be as brief and painless as possible so the user can dive right into your app. But there are a few reasons you might want to slow down this process. I think this is a good topic for another article, but in this one I want to focus on the most powerful onboarding hack I know of.

A few years ago, DuoLingo made a fascinating change to their onboarding. They added an unskippable screen that asked a simple question: How many minutes per day do you want to spend practicing? The options were basic: 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes per day. Note that they are all very reasonable goals! Everyone has 5 minutes, right?

In order to progress past this screen, the user MUST set a goal. They can’t skip or say, “I’ll choose later.”

And amazingly, the choice you make on this screen has no impact on your app experience. The experience is not customized. It doesn’t tell the user they are short of their 15 minute goal or remind them they said they wanted to practice for 5 minutes a day. In fact, the user’s response is not even recorded.

Yet, when this screen was added (which slowed down onboarding, added friction, and provided no utility to the user whatsoever), AB testing showed that retention skyrocketed.

The reasons are simple, if counter-intuitive, and are rooted in behavioral science.

Reducing Perceived Strain

First, it gives the user a sense of how long they are actually being asked to engage. Lots of people start using self-help apps with the idea that they will be spending 45 minutes to an hour on improving themselves! I know this from my own user research. Five minutes is much less daunting and gives the user permission to do the bare minimum.

This is critical, as elaborated in some detail by B.J. Fogg in his excellent book “Tiny Habits.” The smaller the perceived labor is for the person, the higher likelihood they will perform a given action.

We could also just tell the user “Five minutes a day is all it takes!” But this would not be as effective. Why?

Choice And Ownership

Psychological studies have shown that people are more likely to do something unpleasant if they chose it. For instance, in one famous study done with primary school kids, researches gave one set of students a worksheet, and the other a choice of two worksheets. In the second group, the ones who chose, completion of work was dramatically higher.

This is because of two now well-known biases known as Ownership Bias and Choice Support Bias.

“Choice-supportive bias (or post-purchase rationalisation) is our tendency to defend our own decisions or later perceive our choices as better than they are. Simply because we made them.”

I explain both of these in more detail here.

In short, users make a choice in the onboarding, and then feel ownership over that choice, so they come back to the app to prove themselves right.

Internal Narrative

Last, but not least, during the few seconds when a user is making this choice, they are telling themselves a story in their head. “Well,” they may reason to themselves, “I have twenty minutes between lunch and my weekly standup, I can practice then.” Or “It usually takes 5 minutes for my kids to get to the car when I pick them up at school.” Or whatever.

Point is, they have now visualized exactly when and where they will use the app. And people who make a clear plan that they can visualize are much more likely to stick to it.

Research on getting voters to the polls proves this. Prospective voters who are asked specific questions “Are you voting in person or by mail? [In person] How are you getting to your polling place? [I’m driving],” are much more likely to carry out that action.

Its really just that simple.

An observant reader might be and thinking, “Yes, I could ask them how long they intend to use my app for. I could also ask other questions or insert other screens that trigger the above psychology.”

And you’d be right.

2. Ask For A Commitment

It might not make sense to do this in the onboarding for the app, but it’s well demonstrated that a concept known as a “Commitment Contract” is a powerful way to hold people accountable to themselves.

You don’t need a literal contract, but you do need to ask somebody for a promise, and it needs to be presented in moral or ethical language. It should be in an affirmative tone and in the voice of the user. “I will commit to X,” or “I promise to do Y,” or maybe even “I swear.”

People don’t like reneging on promises. It makes us feel icky. We know it’s wrong. And even if we make those promises to ourselves, we don’t like to break them.

The more ceremonial or high-faluting you can make the commitment the better. The best one I’ve come across is in an app called Fabulous. Not only is their commitment feature strong, it is pleasurable to use.

Fabulous asks you to commit to a specific action, and then asks you to hold your finger to the fingerprint censor on your smartphone’s screen. From there, a colorful shape grows from your touch until it fills the entire screen, at which point you are rewarded with sound, haptics, and a confirmation message. You are committed.

As you can see in the image above, the language is very formal, almost like a marriage vow. Each piece works together to create the feeling of a strong promise.

3. Remind Your Users. A Lot.

Most people say they hate to receive reminders on their phones. Notifications, popups, hounding emails etc. can make us steam, sigh, habitually dismiss these messages, and start ignoring them as they become a mess of background noise. Many people have told me that they’ve uninstalled apps because they send too many notifications.

However, what people say and what they do are often quite different, as any good product designer knows. Truth is, when it comes to sending reminders, there doesn’t seem to be an upper limit that causes people to disengage. There can be diminishing returns, and after a point if your fifth notification doesn’t get people to re-engage, your sixth won’t either. But the truth is, the message itself and the timing of the notification is far more important that the sheer volume.

So how do you re-capture users with reminders?

Send it at the right time

Timing isn’t everything, but it’s most of the puzzle. DuoLingo extensively AB tested the timing of their messages and discovered a nugget of insight that seems obvious in retrospect: the best possible time to send a notification to a user is 24 hours after the last time they used your app. If they were free at 2:25 on Tuesday, the chances that they are free at 2:25 on Wednesday are pretty high.

Give Them News They Can Use

Reminders are less likely to be ignored if their content is salient. Just hounding a person and telling them “Hey, don’t forget us!” won’t do the trick. In email, you can include useful summaries of their progress and activity. In notifications, you can inform them of events coming up in the app, sales on your economy’s currency or in-app purchases, or warn them they are going to lose a streak. Note that the above are all good reasons to include gamification in your app! Gamification creates awesome occasions to communicate with your users without annoying them.

Use An Emotional Message

Forming an emotional bond with your user via a character, relatable copywriting, or built-in social networking can really improve the impact of your notifications.

For instance, when DuoLingo’s product designers realized that no matter how many notifications they sent, some people would never come back, they made the decision to turn off notifications after a certain number of failed attempts. But they decided to send one last notification to let the user know that this was happening. This notification said “We’ve noticed these notifications aren’t working. We won’t send any more.” This was accompanied by a picture of the DuoLingo Owl looking sad.

Startlingly, they saw that users tended to re-enter the app from this notification at much higher rates than the ones that came before! The final notification actually did it’s job, which was actually triggering feelings of guilt and loss aversion, driving users back to the app.

Maybe this is not-so-nice, but it is effective.

A Light Lift

There are many more techniques that you can use to boost retention, but I included these three because they are effective, universal, and relatively easy to implement. They don’t care if you’re educational, self-help, digital therapy, gaming, mental health, etc. And they don’t require significant back-end development. If you’re already sending notifications, have an onboarding flow, and have the ability to insert screens into your app, there’s almost no lift whatsoever. None of them even require you to record or log the user’s inputs.

Give these techniques a try and measure the results, and you’ll be surprised at just how effective they are.

Sam Liberty is a gamification consultant and game designer. He was the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health, and teaches game design at Northeastern University.