Author: Elizabeth Ballou

Elizabeth is a content writer and marketer at Clutch, a B2B research firm in the heart of Washington, DC. In her spare time, she writes and designs video games for Green Willow Games. Find her on Twitter at @ebethtargaryen.

How to Use Gamification in Mobile Apps: A Case Study

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Gamification, or the addition of game-like elements to anything that isn’t a game, pops up all over the design world.

In my last post for Boxes and Arrows, I focused specifically on gamification in mobile app onboarding. The moment when users first open your app is critical to the app’s success, and you can use gamification as a tool to get a new user through the learning curve.

But gamification doesn’t just fit with onboarding. It’s possible to apply gamification to any part of app design, or even design an entire app—that is not a mobile gaming application—around it.

I’ll examine Forest, a productivity app, as a case study of gamification embedded so deeply into an app’s framework that gamification becomes the entire reason to use the app in the first place.

Continue reading How to Use Gamification in Mobile Apps: A Case Study

How to Use Gamification in Mobile App Onboarding

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Playing games is a human impulse. People get a kick out of competing, collecting things, and finishing tasks. You can apply game design elements to anything, which is called gamification.

Mobile app onboarding is a useful place for a touch of competition or goal-setting. Whether as small as a progress bar or as major as a tutorial for a mobile game, these elements help users finish onboarding and come back to the app again.

As a content developer at Clutch, I got the chance to delve into a research survey on the mobile onboarding process. The results support gamification as a resource UX designers can and should turn to. According to the survey, 44% of app users download an app “for fun,” which is more than any other reason. Designers should play to that desire and make onboarding itself fun.

In addition, 72% of respondents said that completing onboarding in less than a minute is important in their decision to keep using the app. Users aren’t willing to spend much time on onboarding, so designers should add elements that convince these users to stay.

This article explores the origin and definition of gamification and provides three specific UX elements you might include as you’re designing a mobile onboarding experience. Continue reading How to Use Gamification in Mobile App Onboarding