#GamificationApps | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

saoirseann · 5 years ago

Text

Gamification Apps

When creating my app Bookmark, I decided that I wanted the app’s primary focus to be to encourage users to increase their reading habits on a daily basis. So before sketching out screens for my “Goals/ Statistics page and Achievements page,” I wanted to research the best gamification apps on the market.

I came across this great article from Medium - 10 Best Gamification Apps for 2019 which helped put most of my research into the one area.

The best of the 10:

Fitbit

Fitbit is a Physical Activity Tracking app and watch that I’ve used for a few years now. It’s a type of fitness and wellness tracking software. These tools have become popular in recent years as people become more mindful about the power of data to shape personal behaviours to a specific goal.

Fitbit is especially helpful as it’s not just designed for business, even though it can be used as part of a business’ employee wellness and fitness program to gamify the employee health process

In the screens above you can see how easy Fitbit make it for users to be able to track and view all their progress. Fitbit provides this sort of feedback by showing the number of steps and calories burnt on the device, and by providing daily and weekly dashboards and reports.

Fitbit Challenges & Badges

In the screen above you can see an example of a badge awarded for walking over 500 miles. Fitbit ensures that hard work is rewarded and allows users to easily share their achievements.

This is exactly what I want to incorporate into Bookmark! As I want to motivate users to build up their reading habits by rewarding them with different rewards, so in total, I think there will be 10 available for them to achieve. The first few will be for really simple tasks, like “Congratulations you’ve set your first Bookmark Reading Goal.” or “Well done, you’ve read 30 pages today!”

How Fitbit has made Fitness Fun

It goes without saying that, games should be fun. A game without any fun, isn’t much of a game. The same is true of gamification. Fitbit introduces elements of fun through competition, through interesting challenges, such as virtually walking around a city, and through the clever use of copy as seen in the screens above.

I like the idea of doing very detailed achievement icons like Fitbit’s first screen above and having the same colour scheme incorporated throughout the app as well

From an article I read on how Fitbit nailed gamification they concluded that Fitbit has achieved this so well as, their challenges are kept simple and straightforward, such as completing at least 10,000 steps in a day (harder than it sounds) or competing with a friend to see who can walk further.

So like Fitbit, I should aim to keep any gamification elements as simple, and as straightforward as possible in my app.

Fitbit provides encouraging reminders to hit daily goals

Nudge, but don’t nag is a key takeaway from how Fitbit have bailed gamification. They don’t bombard you with notifications. As gently nudging, someone to carry out a desired behaviour is a key part of gamification.

For example, a reminder to get-up and go for a walk every now and then, or a notification that a competitor has just stolen the top spot of the leader board. However, there’s a fine line between nudging and nagging. Therefore I need to really think about how I can gently nudge, remind and encourage Bookmark users to meet their daily reading goals.

Fitbit does this by providing little reminders and notifications. For example, reminders on the hour to complete some more steps, and encouraging notifications when someone is close to their daily step target!

#ixd501 #majorproject #user research #gamificationapp

0 notes