Gamification and Why It Shouldn't be an Afterthought !!

Unlocking the Power of Gamification: Integrating User Respect, Data Collection, and Psychological Insights

May 20, 2024

What is Gamification ?

Gamification is an art and science of engaging and retaining customers by tapping into their psychology and forming habits that stick. These habits can have positive and/or negative effects on the customer. It should not be a surprise that gamification is used by many companies focusing on increasing retention/engagement of the app.

Example : LinkedIn utilizes the user’s urge to reach full potential and 5 star profile rank and it urges the user to fill their details on the app. It also gives away “top voice of “ a particular field by urging users to engage with questions that LinkedIn posts and if you get votes, you get labeled the voice of the particular field.

Is respect what the user needs ?

A popular example of successful gamification is Duolingo. Interestingly, the app has a character of its own and the user finds himself/herself engaging with a cute owl and a girl, Lily, amongst others. This makes it particularly engaging for users. Duolingo gets a lot of things right from the perspective of gamification. Like all others, Duolingo sends notifications but with measured pace and pauses it when the user refuses to engage with it. There appears to be a fundamental thread of respect for users. I particularly was fascinated by the fact that it gives you reasons why the app shows you advertisements. It isn’t apologetic but at the same time, lets the user know that it’s necessary for running the app for free. This is refreshing when compared to giant social networks that take the time of the user for granted.

Gamification as a means to collect data

The often ignored aspect of the gamification is the clickstream data that gets collected. Clickstream is a series of actions, such as clicks, cursor movement etc, the user takes on the product. This data opens an interesting possibility to understand the users of the product. Not long back there were number studies focusing on device usage that showed distinctive behavior of Apple users as compared to Android users. Similarly, actions of the users can be used to segment the users into various user profiles to judge which ones are power users, active users, and passive ones.

In Duolingo, the users are shown a lot of advertisements of games such as candy crush saga. Maybe the google algorithm, targeting the duolingo app users, identifies that users of this app are more likely to play other games too. Similarly, LinkedIn’s attempt to introduce small games onto the platform, might improve their ability to segment their customers into interesting cohorts, with questions such as do gamers find it harder or easier to switch jobs? Or, do gamers stay longer at jobs or switch jobs faster than non gamers? Or, Are people exploring games are in fact stressed at work and are likely to quit in coming months, making them an appealing candidate for jobs outreach by talent acquisition.

What underlying Psychological drives of user’s does Gamification tap into ?

Gamification can be seen as an interplay of habits that either contribute to user’s well-being in economic, professional or health, etc or ones that negatively impact these facets. Often cited, some of the drives that impact habit formation of a product are curiosity and unpredictability during discovery phase, the achieving a sense of competence during onboarding stages, and finally users might want to continue using the product due to inability to lose their achievements. An important thing to note here is that the user should have worked hard and tried actively to earn those achievements. If I were to take my own example, I am a user of Myntra app (i.e. a predominantly fashion clothing and accessories app). Myntra gives away gamified points whenever the customer makes a purchase. But since users like me have never worked to achieve those points in the first place, users (at least me) don’t get bothered if they say that they are losing their access to an exclusive online club if users no longer continue to do a required action such as purchase on the app. In general, gamification should be pursued with careful consideration and slapping on gamification as an afterthought doesn’t really help with increasing customer engagement.