The best way to grab a user’s attention is to gamify your product/app and making their experience fun and engaging. Read why and how.
If you ever tracked your credit card points, hotel rewards, cashback vouchers or fantasy football score, you’ve been hooked by gamification. The best way to grab a user’s attention is to gamify your product/app and making their experience fun and engaging. Millennials feel like they are a part of a conversation with your brand, because of the interactive gamification.
Let’s understand the science behind, “when humans achieve new levels in a game, the brain releases dopamine which prompts excitement, encourages exploration to try new things, and helps combat the stagnation caused by failure”.
Achieving new stages in a game creates excitement and an urge to explore subsequent steps. This in turn brings a reward-motivated behavior out of a user that is the key to engagement.
It is important to maintain a balance between the gamification elements and your website. You don’t want to alienate your site users from actual site content. So here are a few smart tricks and strategies to gamifying your product:
Make sure your gamification strategies fulfil the needs of the user. Creating and sharing status on social platforms is a daunting task for any user. This is basic of a gamified product.
Millennials are an impatient generation, providing them instant gratification is a great way to make them stay. Quick progress bars, rewards on sign up, and unlocking site features urges users for site discovery.
“Know your customer” is one of the most necessary part for any business and of course the most difficult one. The best way to do this is to add a pinch of gamification rather than boring way of asking series of questions. For e.g. A boring form can be changed to interesting surveys with progress bars.
It becomes exciting if a little time play is added to gamification. It increases urgency to complete the task, jump to next stage and thus encouraging user engagement.
Everybody loves to play with points. It is a great way to show user’s progress and where is he lacking. It also helps the users see where they stand amongst their peers and boosts them to contribute more.
Make sure your gamified system provides lot of shareable content – millennials are avid users and active posters on social media, constantly curating their own social presence and building their professional reputations and social status.
A generation, who grew up playing super Mario brothers and taking game boys, gamification is an effective way for them to keep connected.
Autodesk is one such software provider that decided to include gamification for their user trials. They created a leaderboard for every trial users, where they could see the number of points gained, badges, achievements & completed missions.
The game-like character of the trial version was very successful – 10% more users decided to download it and trial usage itself rose by 40%.
Another example that comes in my mind is “NikeFuel”. They built a community where users compete, the app would note all the activities and give certain points. In fact, the users would unlock special trophies and rewards, generating a feeling of competition and motivation in not just keeping sporty but also sharing the results on social media, increasing the prominence of the brand. Engine Yard: an intelligent application of gamification, increasing the “social factor” amongst people.
They incorporated gamification tactics to foster more participation and generating rewards for users contributing more to the community.
Don't just do gamification because it's fun. Identify your user's pain problems, use gamification to solve them and increase engagement.
Reach out to us to know more about millennial user engagement through gamification.
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