Gamification and How Users Get Hooked onto Apps in Today’s Digital Era
Have you ever been tempted to watch more than what you originally intended on your favourite Over the Top (OTT) or video streaming platform? Have you ever preferred using a specific e-payment mobile app for the lucky draw scratch cards it offers? Well, if the answer is yes to any of those questions, you have been played. Or rather, you have been gamified to choose those options over the others.
Yes, the countdown clocks at the end of a video on any OTT platform & the surprise gifts/ vouchers on completion of a transaction on a payment app are all designed using the mechanics of game theory. As harmless as it may sound, the applications of gamification can be found aplenty in today’s digital-first ecosystem that we interact with every day.
What Is Gamification?
Gamification is the application of game mechanics in non-game scenarios. Simply put, “gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun”. Gamification or game theory in consumer marketing (B2C) has its origins in the early 1900s when Kellogg’s cereals started offering a picture book when a customer purchased two boxes of its product in a bid to boost sales.
Gamification is the application of typical elements of game play (e.g., point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other activities, typically as a marketing technique to encourage user engagement with a product or service.
Gamification uses gameplay elements such as quests, challenges, levels, and rewards to motivate and engage product/service usage among consumers. Given the engagement that consumers feel during gameplay, it is sensible to include elements of game design to motivate them to take certain actions in a digital or physical ecosystem.
Designing a gamified experience with clear goals, and carefully selected rewards for app usage, through the transformation of activities into quest challenges can have a dramatic impact on consumption.
Gamification in Use Today
Some common gamification elements in popular mobile apps used by urban millennials in India today are:
Headspace
It is a leading mobile app which has helped millions of people across the world with their meditation journey. It has helped them make meditation into a regular and rewarding habit. While meditation may be considered boring and a waste of time by many, Headspace has made this practice more mindful for its users and something to look forward to thanks to gamification strategies.
As this app operates on a freemium model, every action of the user on the app is tracked and incentivized to improve their engagement and get them wanting more, while nudging them to go in for a full paid subscription. As a result, users tend to consume more content on the platform as a result of various gamification elements built-in to the app.
This app has been downloaded by 62 million users across the world and has earned recognition as the editor’s choice on Google’s Play store in mindfulness and mental training. The app effectively makes use of the 8 principles of gamification i.e., Octalysis framework described Yu-kai Chou in his book - Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards.
Flipkart
This popular online shopping app encourages its user to shop more by luring them with subscription-based freebies by gamifying the shopping experience.
● With almost every purchase on the app, users earn super coins
● Higher the purchase value, more super coins earned
● Super coins can be redeemed for a variety of offers and deals exclusively on Flipkart
● Promotes more spending and loyalty for shopping on Flipkart with shipping fee concessions for loyal customers
● Various puzzle and roulette-based games along with quizzes are periodically available on the app
Quora
This online portal provides user sourced answers to questions on literally any query on the internet. In a bid to maintain content quality and give its users relevant information, it employs some clever gamification elements.
● The right side of the login page on the desktop site has a checklist of items new users are required to perform in order to set up their account and gain credibility
● More items tick marked, more authoritative a user’s profile becomes, giving them a sense of accomplishment
● Users get to explore all features on the portal by indulging in this ‘game’
● This has resulted in a highly engaged set of users on Quora, with 100s of millions of users actively using the platform every day.
Cure.fit
This revolutionary full-stack fitness and wellness ecosystem has gamification as its core philosophy. This helps the app seamlessly deliver a wholesome health and fitness experience to its Indian users. It employs gamification every step of the way, right from onboarding new users who just want to explore the app features, and even keeping it’s brand loyalist constantly engaged on the app. Here’s how:
● Simplifies a healthy and active lifestyle among users with daily to-do’s
● More a user uses the app, more they progress through the levels giving them a psychological boost with results validation
● A sense of pride & competition among app users to level up with points collected for completing daily to-do’s
● More features/benefits get unlocked as users level up
● Loyal users are awarded special shareable badges as they take part and compete in fitness-based contests on app, each tailored to suit a different genre of users
● Increased app usage as members tend to experience all facets of the app through this quest
● International Day of Yoga (21/6) 2020 gamification campaign resulted in its users completing approximately 5.6 million Surya Namaskars (Sun Salutations) on the app
This professional networking platform is popular with a large number of working professionals actively using it for business networking and job searches.
LinkedIn’s Profile Strength Meter is a good example of gamification. The goal is to get users to fill out their profile completely. Linkedln shows you a graphic that indicates a users profile completion rate and also tells you them how they can level up, all the way up to All-Star.
· Gamification elements assign a rank to a user’s profile as they complete it & explore more features
· Users tend to have a better well-rounded profile as they follow & implement specific suggestions
Cred
Cred ads on TV & digital were surely the talk of the town when they first aired during the IPL 2020 season. While this fintech venture helps users make credit card payments while providing exclusive rewards for using the app, it uses gamification elements to improve user loyalty.
● Loyalty rewards-based credit card bills payment with exclusive merchant deals
● The more users transact with this app, the more offers they unlock
● Gamified app interface to get users to spend more time on the app & explore its features
● Cred’s business model is built primarily on consumption patterns influenced by gamification
SSG App — Step Set Go
This is a health and fitness mobile app which helps its users count their daily step while earning exclusive rewards. It motivates its users to lead a healthy and active lifestyle with the help of gamification by rewarding users for the steps tracked by the app on a daily basis.
The app features exclusive merchant benefits, deals and leaderboards. The more a user walks in a day, the more they benefit. It was the second most used fitness app in India by UVA after the Arogya Setu app during April 2020 according to ComScore MMX.
The Facebook-owned social media app had a few special features when the world went into lockdown with the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic. Most prominent were the ‘At Home’ or other regional alternatives (Ghar Pe) stickers that users could apply on their story feed. User stories with such stickers would feature more prominently on the app’s stories section (ephemeral content), thereby encouraging them to stay home in a bid to flatten the curve of the virus transmission during April-May 2020.
Later, Instagram also added a ‘support small business’ sticker to the stories section in a bid to encourage its users to shop from local businesses, which were adversely affected due to the pandemic.
Google Pay
This payment app upped its game during November and December 2020 with its Go India contest. When users paid using this app, they unlocked tickets and events associated with various popular locations across India. Further, they also received vouchers and badges from various online businesses for completing milestones. They could track their journey and compare themselves with other users they transacted with on a leaderboard. This coupled with the brand’s social media campaigns helped create great recall for the app in an already cluttered space.
Some other commonly used gamification elements in mobile applications include in-app recommendations like dynamic message pop-ups, timer, spinning wheel or a 3rd party survey form.
Healthy and mindful living during the pandemic
Gamification has played a vital role in the online fitness and wellness industry during the coronavirus pandemic. It has encouraged users to download fitness apps and workout to reach specific goals with various game theory elements. Fitness trainers and enthusiasts have taken to social media with gamification based challenges for sustained efforts from participants.
Social media gamification strategies for brand building | Tip sheet
So, is gamification working out?
Yes, search queries for home workouts and yoga routines have increased dramatically in India during the lockdown according to a Think With Google report. While there aren’t many studies that dive deep into the impact of gamification in fitness and wellness apps of late, with the sheer number of people showing interest in this category during the pandemic, it is definitely an indication that gamification is here to stay.
For today’s digital first brands to be considered by their users, they need to make a strong case for themselves especially on mobile devices. Gamification does just that.
References:
- ANTHROPOLOGY OF AN IDEA: GAMIFICATION by Ty McCormick — https://www.jstor.org/stable/24575963?seq=1
- Gamification in Marketing: An Empirical Study of Differences in User Psychology Among Services Using Gamification by Shunya Hamada and Yasunaga Wakabayashi — https://www.jstor.org/stable/24898541?seq=1
- Hamari, Juho & Koivisto, Jonna & Sarsa, Harri. (2014). Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification. Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 10.1109/HICSS.2014.377. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256743509_Does_Gamification_Work_-_A_Literature_Review_of_Empirical_Studies_on_Gamification
- Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham
- Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards By Yu-kai Chou
