Gamification is dangerous, and here’s why.
By: Lorenzo Doremi
Tags: Design, UX, Visual Design, UX Design, Design Thinking

Sometimes apps are boring. You open them, and they just seem another form you have to validate and send to an unknown server. As a designer, you always try to come up with new exciting ideas, hoping to innovate an old and obsolete mechanism.

Now, if you tried coming up with these ideas, I’m sure you heard or know about gamification. What’s the definition of gamification? Gamification is the application of game design principles to a different context, in which you try to transform a user task into a sort of game, with new and different interactions and consequences:

an example could be a fitness jogging app where you have to create fun shapes with your GPS running path, and the most accurate one gets more points in a social leaderboard.

This example is intriguing, but I’ve noticed a very bad trend these last years, where gamification had been used the wrong way, just for the sake of using it.

Let’s see a list of things that explain to us why gamification is dangerous in the wrong hands.

4) Useless “creative” interactions slow down task completion.

Useless interaction appears both in apps and websites. One example is holding down buttons instead of clicking: yes it’s good to show off your developing skills, but it just makes your user frustrated. So be extremely careful when using it: even if you’re going to make a cool trendy website, please make us surf it fast.

No thanks.

Another example I found out is inside my mobile company’s app, where it happened that I had to shake my phone multiple times to fill a sort of bottle in order to get more internet traffic. This is just a useless and embarrassing example of gamification: I often had to use it in public, and I felt a bit dumb to just shake my hand in an ambiguous way like my phone wasn’t working. A simple finger press was enough.

This brings us to point number 3.

3) You need to understand when something fun is really needed.

My first job was to design an institutional app, and my colleagues wanted to gamificate the form data insertion process. In fact, the app was entirely based on an extremely tedious and long form. Their idea was to gamificate each data entry to increase engagement, and guess what: disaster.

It didn’t work for two main reasons:

as we said before: slowing task completion. To fulfill the entire form, 20 full minutes were needed because of useless page changes. Inserting personal data isn’t fun. But moving fancier sliders isn’t fun either.

If you have a long form, consider stacking many questions on each page. And use a progress bar only for small sections.

In this study case, gamification was the wrong idea: Reducing the interaction needed (by putting more fields on each page) and splitting the form into smaller parts was perceived a lot better by our testers. We’ve also reduced the number of redundant questions and brought down completion time to around 7 minutes, which is still much but at least bearable.

In the end, we kept the concept of gamification, but applied it in another context: which leads us to point number 2.

2) Keeping gamification as a fancy outline often works.

Rewards. People like rewards, and since our form was incredibly boring, giving them a reward could make them enjoy the full experience. Two of the most commonly applied persuasive techniques in mobile apps are recognition and social comparison (prizes, badges, and leaderboards for example), and they don’t interfere with the main tasks: these strategies give the user a sense of gamification, but without slowing or forcing him into unneeded actions.

But beware: not everyone wants to be exposed, and being compared to others (especially if not performing well), could lead to frustration and abandoning the application. If you want to ensure that no frustration is induced, just keep positive recognition and bring social comparison away.