How to gamify a mobile app

Gamification – the application of game mechanics to everyday, or non-gaming contexts – is a strategy that can massively improve the user experience (UX) of a company’s mobile application. Effectively utilised gamification in a mobile app can not only help to retain users, but can help to grow an audience.

Gamified mobile apps are effective communication channels for businesses across all age groups, but especially millennials and generation Z, who grew up as developments in mobile technology exploded and became highly accessible. Gamified apps will not only be effective for communicating with generation Alpha, who have been raised and educated on this kind of technology, but will probably prove essential for securing their attention due to their extensive screen time, and mental conditioning to quick feedback cycles.

What elements of gamification can be applied to a mobile app?

Applying gamification to mobile apps is a method of boosting audience engagement by adding key gaming features to improve functionality. Most commonly, this takes the form of game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards to motivate users. Think about mobile apps you use that reward and congratulate you for performing desired tasks. If you use Strava for example, you’re congratulated for hitting your weekly running or cycling goals, and you can enter weekly or monthly challenges to earn badges or trophies. On Duolingo, you’re congratulated for keeping streaks going (or hassled by a big green bird for letting them slide).

Gamification adds competitive elements to apps, as well as social elements too. Think leaderboards, and-in app encouragement from other participants (Ride Ons and Kudos in the fitness space, for example). These elements create a sense of community within an app, as well as promoting healthy competition to maximise user-engagement. These aspects are added to apps to try and tap into the natural motivations people have to compete, to interact, and to discover. By appealing to these motivations, which are ingrained in the human psyche, apps can give a more nuanced, personalised user experience, which in turn encourages conversions, customer loyalty, increased sales, and upgrades or subscriptions to paid or premium editions of apps (in-app purchases).

The challenge gamification rises to meet

Why is this necessary? It’s hard to pinpoint precisely, but essentially, there are some areas where people have historically struggled for motivation. The workplace, in education, in healthy eating, in adhering to fitness goals – these were never easy aspects for most people, and when you consider how busy people are today, it can be incredibly difficult to fit everything in. This is today’s great challenge, and it’s put to more or less every working person: how do you fit everything in? Can you have it all? Gamifying apps is the most effective and innovative way to tackle the mini obstacles that make up this challenge. It can give users structures to work in, help them to define manageable goals, and provide little incentives to not only keep them on track, but to serve the business goals of the companies behind the apps.

If your app isn’t gamified, and isn’t interactive and enticing, it’s going to look like an old textbook converted to a PDF living (and dying) unopened on people’s phones.

How to successfully gamify a mobile application?

1. Clearly define your needs and objectives

Identifying the needs and objectives that are driving you to consider using gamification for your mobile app is a necessary first step. This will help you establish a gamification strategy and broader marketing plan, and determine the best game elements to use to appeal to your online audience. It will also help you to be clear from the start about what you want to achieve with your app, which will make other, unforeseen decisions far easier to make down the line.

In order to define your needs and goals, it is important to ask yourself the right questions. What will gamification do for me, and how do I implement it? Should I prioritise user loyalty, or the acquisition of new prospects in my strategy?

2. Identify your target audience

This step is particularly essential in the mobile app market. It is imperative to identify your company’s target audience, to identify the dominant age group, their interests, and their behaviours and preferences. Is your application aimed at customers and prospects, or at your employees? Are you trying to make sales and foster loyalty, or are you creating an effective corporate training app?

User data and analysis is very important when developing a gamification strategy and your application, as it allows you to put in place game elements and mechanisms that are more likely to meet audience expectations and preferences. A starting point could be to customise a Survey, to share across your social media channels, to get an idea of what sorts of features your audience would enjoy being added to your app. Any subsequent online games you created through the Drimify platform to integrate in your app would provide further user insights, so you can identify what works, and what could be improved upon in subsequent projects or features.

3. Keep your gamified content simple and relevant

Gamification is not about completely transforming or redesigning a mobile application, but rather about adding playful features to increase customer interest in your product or service.

The game elements and overall design should be simple to understand and intuitive for users, so you can guide the user through each task and step of the game. Only add tangible and relevant elements to the theme of the app, and the industry you’re involved in.

It’s always worth looking at examples of what your competitors are doing. They might be doing something really innovative that could work for your audience, but not quite have perfected it, creating an opportunity to improve on their approach, or they might be doing something that doesn’t work at all, but it gives you context. Competitor research is extremely important when setting up and developing your apps, as there’s so much nuance between connecting with your audience and failing to attract users.

4. Be creative to keep the user experience dynamic and evolving, and foster social connections

The goal is to add creative gameplay elements that fit your image and empower your app to engage users as much as possible. Think of creative rewards and innovative features that fit with your goals and business. To further cultivate customer interest in your brand, you can also imagine different degrees of complexity to your game’s features, to encourage learning new skills and acquiring new knowledge. Creativity at all levels can encourage users to interact more with your application, and make their relationship with your app more long-term, as can incorporating social elements.

One of the most valuable features of gamification is its ability to encourage and facilitate interaction between users through games. It brings groups of people together around common interests and encourages collaboration. To help this, gamified mobile applications should be designed to encourage in-app sharing and social networking to increase your user base.

5. Set up an easy and effective reward system

A reward system is a simple method of improving and guiding the behaviour of your app’s users. This gamification method allows the user to feel more motivated by the results of their actions.

For example, instead of promising a big reward at the end of the game, distribute rewards regularly as the users progress. This will help to keep participants engaged and returning in the long term.

6. Regular user feedback to improve the user experience

Regular feedback is essential as it is through this that developers can learn what users think of their application. If you regularly look at user reviews and comments, you will be able to properly update and optimise your gamification strategy based on the real expectations and reviews of your online audience. You will score points with your users by showing them that you are paying attention to their opinions and expectations.

Bring a new dimension to your mobile app with gamification

There are various ways to gamify your mobile application that can achieve considerable results on conversion rates and user engagement.

With advances in mobile technology and the profile of the modern, hyper-connected user, more interactive, more fun, gamified apps will be the only way to stand out and be competitive in serving most user functions.

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