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.

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:

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

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.

This criticism doesn’t preclude gamification as a core feature: one good example of gamification as a core feature is the world of E-learning apps, where you play puzzles, games, et cetera: practice and approaching a topic in different challenging ways is useful. On the other hand, completing a form shouldn't be challenging. It should be fast and painless!

After this analysis, we can now so define some things to ensure when designing a gamified task:

1. Gamification can fully substitute the task. the full process should work around the game. Adding strange buttons isn’t real gamification.
2. Gamification shouldn’t slow down the task, and if it does, it must enhance the experience a lot. Make the user approach in a completely unique way. Again, fancy animations aren’t gamification.
3. If you didn’t make accurate user research, beware of forcing the user into social comparison.
4. well…let’s find it out now.

1) Gamification is expensive, both in time and cash.

Everything revolves around time and cash, and gamification is expensive. When we spoke about useless interactions that slowdown tasks, we forgot to say something about buggy interactions. Since gamification should be more engaging and creative than the standard way of communicating, it requires more complexity and development time: If you don’t give that development part enough resources, the result is going to be not only slower but buggier and frustrating too. A lot more frustrating.

In fact, the fourth point we had to assure, is that we have more than enough resources to design and develop.

when designing something this complex, many problems could arise and destroy the user experience. (you certainly don’t want a random exception that bricks the app don’t you?)

The last thing we have to consider is that games are a different breed of apps, and being a game designer is a full-time job that requires different sets of skills than UX: this doesn’t mean a UX designer can’t design gamification, but if the project is going to grow in complexity, probably consulting an expert is a better idea.