In April, I spent about 2 hours a day on Duolingo. Yes, on average, I spent about 2 hours a day learning a new language. Safe to say the bird’s intimidation worked!
Sure, some part of me wants to say that it was because I wanted to fast-track my learning and speak a new language; whatever. But I know myself, that was not 💯 my motivation. My No. 1 motivation was that I felt two other learners were competing with me, and I wanted to win!
How would I know they were competing with me? Duolingo has weekly league competitions, in which users from around your vicinity/ globally compete to be in the top 10 and keep climbing. You drop to a lower league if you fail to be in the top 10 that week. I didn’t care much for the leagues until this month, because they felt like they’d never end. There were no finals. However, one night, by accident, I played on Duolingo for three hours and was at the top of my league by a mile. It was exhilarating. I did not know I could get that many points in one day, and so I set to push how many points I could get in a week, every week, in every weekly league.
After week 1, I realised that the two learners who were 2nd and 3rd consistently remained on my tail for the first week and then the second. If I wasn’t winning, it was they who were winning. Enter competitive Murage! My new aim isn’t to learn the language but to beat these other learners. Learning the language was a nice side effect. This competitiveness led me to the Diamond League, the final league, where I was in the top 10! Finally reaching the peak and winning.
This is just one story of the many gamified solutions I use daily. E.g.;
I have an app that tracks my daily steps and lets me know, if I were a hobbit (don’t judge), how far I would have walked from the Shire to the mountain of fire? I’m ashamed to say that Lord Sauron is winning 😭 with my arrival in 2029.
I track my daily activities and corresponding resting heart rate to see how well my heart performs. For example, am I trending towards a Serena Williams RHR or a smoker’s RHR? No participation on this question, please 😂!
I have gamified my wake-up and sleep schedules, productivity, entertainment, and even worked on a gamified product. I love gamified products and solutions! When done well, these apps/ platforms see great success, but why?
Why gamified solutions can do well…
…because they tap into our psychology and behaviour and align that with personal and business goals. It’s as simple as that! But for those who might think this is too simple, here are more reasons why gamification can be effective.
Rewards, feedback loops, and positive reinforcement can be huge motivation points. Our monkey brains love that dopamine.
They are a great way to create new and better habits through features like streaks!
In a world of isolation behind screens, gamified products can give users a community and enhance social interactions.
They tend to make mundane tasks more enjoyable rather than tedious.
Gamified products are personalised to the user, adapting to their experience and behaviour. For example, difficulty depends on performance.
From a business perspective, gamified elements can lead to high retention, engagement rates and exponential growth.
In essence, gamification succeeds when it aligns deeply with user motivation, leverages social dynamics, and provides clear, enjoyable paths for user growth and achievement.
Next, we’ll dissect how product builders, i.e., PMs, designers, and engineers, can build consumer-facing, excellent gamified solutions that succeed. Let’s do a deep dive into the anatomy of a gamified solution, when to gamify, pitfalls of gamified solutions (it’s not always glamorous) and how to build it right.
Anatomy of a gamified solution
As I mentioned, I have multiple gamified solutions and products, and a few recurring themes run through them. These themes can be broken down into seven core elements. For simplicity’s sake, I will use Duolingo examples to clarify each aspect further.
They serve a purpose; clear and achievable goals, e.g., fluency in a new language in 2 years.
It allows you to track your progress visibly, e.g., monthly challenges.
With progress, there must be rewards, ideally claimable, such as virtual tokens and badges that boost your progress, such as monthly or daily XP badges.
Leverages social dynamics, allowing for adequate competition and collaboration, e.g., weekly league leaderboards.
They have feedback loops that allow instant gratification or responses to actions, such as the little Duo fly by when I get 5 or 10 correct answers in a row!
Maintaining a decent challenge curve that balances out the difficulty, e.g., Duolingo throwing in a couple of easy wins in an advanced stage or challenging tasks in an easy level, to fast-track learning.
Lastly, it’s personalising the experience to a region, demographic, or user profile, e.g., the Duolingo death messages that are just too hilarious and feel personal!
To gamify or not to gamify
Not every solution would benefit from gamification, as seen by all the non-gamified products in the world! *Gestures to millions of non-gamified products 😂
When used in the wrong context or for the wrong reasons, gamification can feel forced and even drive users away. So, when does it make sense to add gamified features to a solution, and what strategic goals can gamification help achieve?
Strategic Decision Checklist – “Should We Gamify?”
(You can use this checklist to evaluate if gamification features are a strategic fit for your solution)
When to gamify:
When you want to influence user behaviour, e.g., forming new habits such as daily learning
Solving an engagement or retention problem
If your app’s core value emerges from regular usage over time, gamification can provide the motivational scaffolding to encourage that regular use.
To motivate mundane or otherwise tedious tasks, e.g., learning Chinese with no Chinese speakers around, lol
Simplifying complex systems. If your solution has rich functionality that might overwhelm newcomers, a game-like tutorial and progressive achievement system can guide them through the learning curve.
When community growth is essential for your solution’s success
When you need a lot of data to improve your solution, e.g., recommendation engines
When not to gamify:
When the game does not align with user motivation or goals, e.g., having a leaderboard of your most visited locations on maps products.
If you do not have the resources to maintain a gamified system, e.g., content updates, moderation, storytelling, etc.
In high-stakes environments where gamification can feel scammy or manipulative, e.g., loans/ financial apps.
Highly transactional solutions, with low-friction experiences, where a user doesn’t need encouragement to perform the desired actions, e.g, adding a reward system before check out counters in supermarkets to encourage payments.
Pitfalls of gamified solutions
Gamification can yield excellent results, but it’s not without risks. Many platforms have tried to use game mechanics and failed, e.g., how Pokémon Go didn’t last as long as we’d expected. Let’s examine some common pitfalls, with examples.
Ignoring user motivation, e.g., building for competitive users only, when most of your users are looking for collaboration/ to work together. Solution: Provide multiple modes of engagement.
Overcomplication. Users will likely not get past this step if the solution is not simple enough or has a high entry barrier. Solution: Simplify by breaking down your solution to its core elements and aligning each element with user goals.
Lack of purpose or connection to the app’s core value. Solution: Always tie rewards to real value.
Unintentional streak anxiety or stress can trigger perfectionism, burnout, or unhealthy competitive vibes. Solution: Carefully calibrate the solution to prevent user burnout and eventual churn.
Overemphasis on extrinsic rewards rather than intrinsic motivation, i.e., when users focus on the rewards too much and lose sight of the benefit of the solution. Solution: Alignment with intrinsic user value.
Content stagnation. Solution: Maintain fresh and consistent content, while evolving complexity or challenges to prevent boredom.
Missing social context. Without community recognition, winning is hollow. (If you win and no one sees, did you win?) Solution: Build a community as you set up your solution.
Technical and scalability issues, e.g., laggy games/ hackable games/ scalable architecture/ cheat prevention. Solution: Employ product and technical best practices to build it right!
Engineering the gamified stack/ building it right
Now that we understand the anatomy of a gamified solution, when to apply this strategy and what to be wary of when building the product, let’s put on our product hats and get a wee bit technical! Here we’ll blend UX best practices with technical strategies, creating a playbook for successful gamification solutions.
User experience best practices:
Conduct insightful user experience research and iterate on feedback.
Find out what motivates your audience.
Align engagement hooks with core solution values.
Keep users in the loop of Trigger → Action → Reward → Investment (and repeat).
However, the key is to ensure these hooks are tied to what makes your app valuable.
Self-regulation and fairness tools, e.g., streak freezes.
Build in features that let users regulate their engagement.
Technical strategies:
Highly scalable backend systems include action logging, player states/ levels, achievement logic, logging and tracking, and performance tracking.
Maintaining uptime for real-time feedback systems allows for instant feedback after actions.
Embedding personalisation systems based on a couple of data set criteria, e.g, location/ user profile or their performance
Provide advanced notification systems, i.e., smart and contextual nudges relevant to the user.
Where possible/ depending on the market, accommodate offline support. Allow users to continue basic actions offline, e.g., through queueing completed challenges on the device and syncing them later.
Setting up analytics support, tracking meaningful behaviour & activities
That’s a wrap!
Building a gamified solution is about helping your users playfully achieve their goals, not making them play a game! Following the above processes can increase your solution’s stickiness using gamification.
What are your favourite gamified products? LMK, you know I’d love to try them…
Footnotes
Wanda Thibodeaux (2023). From Concussion to SuperBetter: How One Designer Built a Game for Healing. Strixus (Innovation), May 26, 2023. Describes Jane McGonigal’s story of creating SuperBetter after her concussion and the concept of post-traumatic growth.
Lazarina Stoy (2021). I Led a 3-Month App Gamification Project, Which Flopped Spectacularly . Better Marketing on Medium, Aug 16, 2021. A first-person postmortem of a failed university app gamification campaign, emphasising the importance of understanding user needs.
Zan Gilani (2017). Gamification the key to Duolingo success, says product manager Gilani. (Reported in The Drum, Oct 26, 2017). Gilani highlighted how Duolingo’s use of gamification (badges, streaks, etc.) was crucial to its user engagement and retention.
Will Lam (2020). How Duolingo A/B tested their push notifications to retain users . Taplytics Blog, Aug 2020. Case study discussing Duolingo’s experiment with streak-based push notifications and how framing messages around user goals improved retention by ~5%.
Scott Nicholson (2015). “A RECIPE for Meaningful Gamification.” In T. Reiners & L. Wood (Eds.), Gamification in Education and Business , pp. 1–20. Nicholson argues for aligning game mechanics with intrinsic motivations and giving users meaningful choices (the RECIPE framework) to avoid shallow gamification.
Sarah Diefenbach & Annemarie Müssig (2019). Counterproductive effects of gamification: An analysis on the example of the gamified task manager Habitica.International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 127 , 190–210. Academic study finding that many Habitica users experienced the app’s gamification (rewards/punishments) as demotivating or stressful rather than helpful.
Andrzej Marczewski (2014). Gamification: Overjustification Effect and Cheating Gamified UK blog, Jan 6, 2014. Describes a case where a user exploited a gamified system and became overly focused on extrinsic rewards, illustrating the overjustification effect in gamification.
Marita Alonso (2024). “We haven’t seen you in a while”: Duolingo’s passive-aggressive strategy for keeping users hooked EL PAÍS (English Edition), Dec 22, 2024. Reports on Duolingo’s use of guilt-inducing notifications (sad owl messages) to maintain streaks, including user reactions and the anxiety this tactic can create.
Emily C. Weinstein & Robert L. Selman (2016). “Digital stress: Adolescents’ personal accounts.” New Media & Society, 18 (3), 391–409. A study analysing thousands of teens’ posts about digital stress; identifies social media pressures like maintaining Snapchat streaks as a source of anxiety and obligation among youth.
Desislava Hristova & Anders Køhlert Lieberoth (2019). Snapchat Streaks: How Adolescents Metagame Gamification in Social Media (GamiFIN Conference paper, 2019). Qualitative research (focus groups) with teens in Austria on Snapchat streak behaviour, finding that streaks are perceived as measures of friendship strength and losing a streak is seen as personal rejection, leading to stress and elaborate strategies to maintain streaks.