6 Best Gamification Software to Level-up Your User Experience

I love video games.

Not fully because of how fun they are, but from a business perspective as well.

If you don’t live under a rock and have played any video game, even a mobile game, you would know how well they handle their user onboarding experience.

In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and say it:

Video games paved the way for better user onboarding and UX.

Interactive game onboarding sequences proved that hands-on onboarding and contextual user experiences play a huge role in customer retention, and so we started implementing the same UI elements.

What if the product isn’t as interesting as a game, though?

That’s where UX gamification comes into play.

So today, let’s take a look at:

• What UX gamification is and where it is used,
• What a gamification software is,
• Why gamifying UX matters,
• Gamification software for higher user and learner engagement,

Don’t have the time for all that? Here’s the TL;DR ⬇️ 

Let’s start with some definitions:

What is UX gamification?

Gamification, or UX gamification, is a user experience initiative referring to the integration of game mechanics to non-gaming environments like websites, web products, apps, etc. to increase user engagement and coincidentally, retention. Be it for customer or employee engagement, gamification brings in different game design elements like leaderboards, countdowns, badges, and friendly competitions. Ultimately, the purpose of gamification is to motivate people to achieve their goals and overcome any negative associations they may have with the tasks that carry them to the ultimate value proposition of your product or business.

Here’s the thing:

People like having a clear goal to work toward and being rewarded when they achieve it.

That’s where we start talking about gamification software ⬇️

What is a gamification software?

A gamification software is any tool that offers gamified elements for better user experiences and aids game-based learning during the onboarding process. So, a gamification tool can range from a sales gamification tool for B2B businesses to a gamification solution for student engagement like educational games in class. The main defining quality of a gamification tool is that it uses gamification elements to turn a plain product or process into one that engages highly with its target audience.

So keep in mind:

You cannot increase the essential value of something simply by adding gamification elements.

But you can very well use gamification to make your value more clear.

Here’s a simple example to clear it up:

I used to go to this coffee shop and found out they had loyalty stamp cards.

I would get free coffee for every nine stamps and I ended up getting a couple of cards filled out before I started going somewhere else.

Why?

The other shop had better coffee.

It was rewarding to collect stamps for a future reward, but it didn’t change the essential value of the product for me.

In fact, the other shop’s cards were 10 stamps for a free coffee.

I still chose them.

So make sure you never forget: gamification does not define your value, your product does.

Why should you gamify your user experience?

There are many good reasons to start gamifying your user experience.

But let me tell you about the top 3 reasons why:

1- Higher user satisfaction

Gamification naturally turns any user experience into a more enjoyable process, including the learning process of a product or the overall experience with a service.

Especially when incentivized, most gamified applications report higher satisfaction rates.

However, it is important to remember that gamification done wrong can result in lowered user satisfaction as well.

Imagine LinkedIn gamifying its connection function by announcing that there will be leaderboards for accounts with the most connections.

This would essentially make LinkedIn’s value proposition of connecting with the right people and make the experience unsatisfactory for many users 😬

2- Enhanced user engagement

Higher user engagement is one of the main purposes of gamification.

So, it is only natural that a gamification project implemented the right way can greatly help engage your audience.

If you can’t see where high engagement links to, let me draw a mental picture for you.

High engagement means 👉 higher exposure to the product & more usage which means 👉 habit making which then means 👉 higher retention which ultimately means 👇

More loyal customers bringing in more revenue to your business!

And that’s what gamification can start.

3- Better user onboarding

Gamification done right gives you a wide range of user onboarding options.

Be it for higher employee performance or the initial onboarding process of a customer, gamified elements help ease the process greatly.

Quick example:

UserGuiding’s first-time user onboarding!

Using a user onboarding checklist, the UserGuiding Panel becomes highly gamified and makes it easier for users to go through with the process.

With other gamification elements like progress bars, badges, and leaderboards, it is possible to enhance the quality of user onboarding sequences as well.

Wanna get started right away with the benefits of gamification?

Let’s take a look at the very best gamification apps and tools you can find in 2023 ⬇️

The Best Gamification Platforms in 2023

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.

Example on point: Keyhole’s case.

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:

Interested?

Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.

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.

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 addition PBLs (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

To Wrap Up

If you want to take your user experience and engagement up a notch, gamification is the way to go. 

And with the right tools, there is no stopping you.

Just remember that gamification or any gamification software cannot define or change the value of your product; it it the product itself that defines it.

Gamification only makes it easier to consume.

I hope this post helped you learn about some of the best tools that will help you level up! 

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.