Do you know the feeling when you find out that there is a game for what you are trying to learn? Like, a game that teaches a language or how to code.
Don’t you prefer it to loooooooong books?
Gamification is the process of applying game-like elements to a product or service to improve user engagement with that product or service.
Now you are probably wondering what does this have to do with user experience?
Well, if you want your site or app to be engaging, captivating, and addictive – gamification might be the answer.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the best gamification tools that will help level up your user experience!
What is UX gamification?
UX Gamification is the way of integrating game mechanics into a non-gaming environment in order to increase user experience. Adding entertaining elements to user interfaces, such as leaderboards, countdowns, badges, and competitions, appeals to people’s natural urge to play games. Ultimately, the purpose of gamification is to motivate people to achieve their goals and overcome any negative associations they may have with the tasks they should complete.
People like having a clear goal to work toward and being rewarded when they achieve it.
Gamification providers assist other businesses in gamifying their websites or mobile apps in order to increase user engagement. Gamification boosts the intrinsic rewards of certain behavior by providing the user with a sense of joy and accomplishment.
You cannot increase the essential value of something simply by adding gamification elements.
The most well-known use of gamification is in airline loyalty programs.
They do not, however, make flying more enjoyable; rather, they promise a future reward in exchange for customer loyalty.
Gamification and game design are often confused, although they are not the same thing. Designing engagement systems to influence behavior is not the same as making a game.
Expertise in one does not imply expertise in the other.
- Gamification is the act of incorporating game-like elements into non-game environments, whereas game design is a subset of video game creation.
- Gamification is a UX design tool that helps increase user engagement for digital products, whereas game design is the use of design principles for entertainment purposes.
Why should you gamify your user experience?
Gamification is a great way to improve user experience by injecting fun elements into applications and systems.
Too often, apps lack immediacy or relevance which can make them seem uninteresting in comparison with other options on the market.
Gamification makes it possible to offer users a more compelling experience that helps you engage your audience much more deeply than before.
Gamifying software does not imply turning interfaces into games, but rather incorporating gamified features such as points, badges, and progress bars into existing programs/systems to make them even more engaging thanks to the addition of some extra exciting components such as those mentioned earlier!
For numerous reasons, gamification is an effective way to increase user engagement.
When done right, gamification motivates users to achieve their goals while also helping them in overcoming any bad associations they may have with the system and the tasks they must perform.
Gamifying an existing system can allow users to enjoy the tasks they would otherwise find boring and monotonous, as well as increasing their desire for continuing with other mundane activities by providing them with some form of reward or accomplishment.
The Best Gamification Platforms in 2022
1- UserGuiding – easiest way to gamify user onboarding 🎮
A 3rd party user onboarding software such as UserGuiding is the easiest and the most affordable way to gamify your user onboarding in a matter of minutes.
With UserGuiding, you can:
✅ Create interactive walkthroughs without coding,
✅ Set up tooltips and hotspots in minutes,
✅ Create in-app checklists to gamify their progression,
✅ And create in-app resource center widgets that offer your users all the help they need.
Using a basic gamification element called an onboarding checklist, the social media management tool Keyhole increased their conversion rates by 550%. Here’s what they’ve done:
You can use UserGuiding to create gamified user onboarding experiences, right now.
2- Mambo.IO
The Mambo.IO platform is feature-rich, with comprehensive behavior tracking, quick notifications, a custom point system, leaderboards, activity streams, transaction tracking, coupons, and many more.
It can be used to enhance staff productivity, increase customer loyalty, and increase the usage of e-learning and training systems.
With so many companies out there, it’s no wonder that customers will look at other options when they’re not satisfied with yours.
However, this doesn’t have to be the case! With gamification through Mambo IO, you’ll see an increased rate of customer loyalty and user engagement over time.
Mambo.IO is an enterprise gamification platform that is both on-premise and extendable.
The platform can be easily integrated into any system to enhance employee productivity and boost customer loyalty.
It also has a full-featured gamification platform that matches those of the industry’s leading platform providers.
The Mambo.IO platform makes it super easy to set up various types of rewards that are connected with your company’s goals and the needs of your customers.
The reward system’s contextual and personalized nature allows it to integrate effortlessly with your existing apps and websites.
You can reward consumers for interacting with certain products, content, or business processes by using context information. Personalization can be used to reward the groups of users that have similar characteristics, such as organizational department or job title.
Features
•Commercial support
•Open source
•On-premise
•On demand
•Powerful engine
•Rewards System
•Notifications
Price
Contact for Pricing
3- Nitro
Nitro knows what inspires people to take action: a meaningful goal, peer recognition, and a good reward.
Bunchball Nitro uses the most powerful gamification engine to help you get actual results combining what you already know about your audience with tried-and-true motivating tactics to get actual results.
Nitro can be used to boost enterprise apps, websites, and social media networks.
The Nitro gamification platform inspires customers, workers, and partners to engage in high-value activities that influence your bottom line by strategically applying game elements within existing systems.
Nitro improves the onboarding of new employees, customers, and partners with simple, introductory tasks, and then expands adoption and usage with progressive challenges tailored to individuals or teams.
With leveling, goal-setting, and meaningful rewards, it also helps to maintain employee and customer engagement, as well as stimulate social activity and collaboration through leaderboards, notifications, and news feeds.
Using the Nitro gamification platform, millions of users have completed billions of tasks.
They give you access to the power of established gamification methods and a well-developed platform. Nitro allows you to easily add pre-built assignments, badges, and notifications, as well as create your own.
You have the option to assign challenges depending on the group, role, geography, previous conduct, and other factors.
With extensive analytics and expert reports, you can learn what drives your audience, and you can make earning badges, leveling up, and redeeming points for all kinds of rewards as simple or as difficult as you want.
Set up challenges using the Nitro Studio design console, send them out, and watch your audience getting busy. Nitro is the most popular and powerful gamification engine on the market.
Jive, Salesforce, IBM, and other partners trust this proven cloud-based service, which has driven over 20 billion actions.
Overview
Features
•Design and push challenges
•Seamless experience
•For everyone
Price
Contact for Pricing
4- Gametize
Gametize is the world’s most simple gamification tool for rewarding and motivating people using game mechanics.
Gametize provides plenty of challenges designed specifically for users to quickly launch their game on social media platforms, both on the web and on mobile devices, all of which are white labeled. Gametize’s sleek interface, automatic feedback, and rewards, along with the user’s narrative plot, allow users to redefine the learning experience.
It has a very strong analytics platform that will give you an in-depth understanding of your audience and lead to increased user engagement.
Gametize has streamlined the experience so that users can focus on the content and you can create a game in only 5 minutes. Speaking of game creation, you can also create a game on a mobile app and preview it right away.
You can choose from a variety of fun challenge types on Gametize.
You can even choose when and how you want to reward your audience as they progress through the stages, unlocking new challenges and rewards.
It allows users to play across multiple platforms – from the web to mobile to Facebook – at any time and from anywhere.
Photo challenges, quizzes, surveys, and QR code challenges are among the games available. Users can build virtual products for their users to unlock when they reach certain milestones. Gametize also allows you to give extra points to those who have performed extremely well.
Features
• A Variety of Challenge Types; Photo challenges, quizzes, polls, QR code challenges and more.
• Achievements; Create virtual items for your users to unlock when they reach key milestones.
• Awardable Actions; Award points for specific actions performed by your users (eg. posting a comment).
• Bonus Points; Award additional points to users who have done exceptionally well.
• Teams; Let your users compete against one another as part of a team.
Price
•Free plan $0 per month 1 topic
•Light Plan $50 per month 5 topics
•Regular Plan $100 per month 10 topics
•Premium Plan $500 per month Unlimited number of topics
5- Funifier Studio
Funifier Studio is a Gamification platform that is safe, versatile, and easy to use. Gamify your business in a matter of hours, all from the comfort of your own device.
You can quickly develop, test, and deploy your own gamification strategy using Funifier Studio.
It offers pre-made gamification components that may be easily integrated into apps, websites, and social media platforms.
Profiles, challenges, levels, badges, leaderboards, alerts, and news feeds are just a few of the features available to users.
Motivate your clients, employees, or teams with a variety of rewards to keep them engaged and help you meet your company goals.
You can also create a custom dashboard, set up business KPIs, monitor real-time user activity, understand their behaviors, and fine-tune your gamification strategy with Funifier’s proven solutions.
Funifier places a strong emphasis on security, allowing users to control who and where they can access their gamification, not just by geolocation but also by time zones, other apps, IP addresses, and many others.
In additionPBLs (Points, Badges, and Leaderboards), Funifier studio lets you combine over 90 other game techniques to create the ideal Gamification Strategy for your company.
Users can also create their own incentive program customized to the motivations of their users or use Funifier’s prebuilt rewards card network to choose from 300+ different incentives to add to the Rewards Catalogue.
Features
• Widgets
• Win-states
• Dashboard
• Security
• Game technics
• incentives
Price
Contact for Pricing
6- Influitive
Influitive is driving the shift from company-centric marketing to advocate marketing.
Through the voice of their consumers, Influitive’s advocacy software assists the world’s most successful B2B companies in sparking, building, and maintaining a movement behind their brands.
Customers that are happy with a company are eager to tell others about it.
This love is nurtured through Influitive’s advocate-centric strategy to gather, monitor, and reward referrals coming from satisfied consumers. This can drive an acceleration in your sales funnel since referral leads close faster and more frequently.
Client advocates are more likely to recommend high-quality leads again and again because of automated recognition at important milestones and total transparency about where referrals are in the sales process.
Your advocates need more than just another technical support forum.
They want to have a feeling of belonging to a peer group where they can share their best practices, create social capital, and keep up with industry trends.
Influitive’s AdvocateHub enables you to communicate with your advocates. Build lifelong bonds with your advocates while learning a lot about them.
That’s why Influitive’s AdvocateHub includes an integration API that lets you integrate Influitive’s advocate software right into your existing processes and track the results.
Influitive integrates with CRM, marketing automation, and reference management software, among other things.
Features
• Widgets
• Win-states
• Dashboard
• Security
• Game technics
• incentives
Price
Contact for Pricing
Conclusion
If you want to take your user experience and engagement up a notch, gamification is the way to go.
I hope this post helped you learn about some of the best tools that will help you level up!
Have any of these gamified features been incorporated into your own website or app? What are some other ways you use gaming principles in digital marketing strategies?
Let me know!
Frequently Asked Questions:
What is gamification software?
Gamification software is any tool or platform used to integrate game mechanics into a non-gaming environment in order to increase user engagement.
What are the elements of gamification?
Gamification elements include rewards, points, timers, badges, and leaderboards.
What is an example of gamification?
Starbucks is well-known for investing a lot of money in employee and customer engagement and loyalty. Starbucks showed how to make a boring loyalty stamp card system more rewarding and enjoyable. When you give your customers real benefits, you encourage their loyalty to your company. Adding a reward system to your business can help you maintain customer loyalty while also increasing revenue.
