One thing about me is that I enjoy playing games… to the extent that they have become an inseparable part of my life.
It's not only gaming that I am talking about, though.
It's now getting badges in Duolingo, earning discounts through my favorite food delivery app, and even climbing virtual leaderboards no matter what the task is…
So, I can surely say that these interactive game onboarding sequences play a huge role in customer retention—because I always come back for more.
Now, let's see how UX gamification comes into play by taking 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 engagement.
Don't have the time for all that?
TL;DR
- Gamification software leverages game design elements like points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges to enhance non-game environments.
- It boosts engagement, motivates desired behaviors, improves learning outcomes, and increases user participation.
- By making tasks more interactive and rewarding, gamification software taps into users' intrinsic motivations, fostering loyalty and improving performance.
- The best ones that you should consider are UserGuiding, Mambo.IO, Nitro, Gametize, Funifier Studio, Influitive, Drimify, and InAppStory.
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.
Here are my stamp cards I found in my wallet just now
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!
The UserGuiding Panel where you can start creating onboarding UX in a matter of minutes 💪
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 ⬇️
The Best Gamification Platforms
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?
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
Pricing
Mambo.IO doesn't reveal its pricing; thus, please contact Mambo.IO's sales team for more information.
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 get 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
Pricing
Nitro doesn't reveal its pricing; thus, please contact Nitro's sales team for more information.
4- Gametize
Here you can see the process of creating a multiple-choice poll for new hires.
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
👉 Challenges including photos, quizzes, polls, and QR codes
👉 Achievements
👉 Awardable actions
👉 Bonus points
👉 Team competitions
Pricing
Here are the pricing plans of Gametize when billed annually:
- Light Plan: $100/month, offering ad-free services before 100 players.
- Regular Plan: $200/month, offering ad-free services before 200 players.
- Premium Plan: $500/month, offering ad-free services before 5,000 players.
- Premium Plus Plan: $1000/month, offering ad-free services before 10,000 players.
5- Funifier Studio
Check how HP used Funifier to design their customer center!
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 to 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
Pricing
Funifier Studio doesn't reveal its pricing; thus, please contact Funifier Studio's sales team for more information.
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
Pricing
Influitive doesn't reveal its pricing; thus, please contact Influitive's sales team for more information.
7- Drimify
Here is an example to win a trip to the place where your wheel lands via Drimify!
Drimify is a gamification platform that supports you once you decide to build a gamification journey for your customers.
Through this platform, you'll be able to create an interface of your choice and share it with your audience—of course, with gamified media and content.
This specific content will not only boost engagement by motivating the users to accomplish more but also make the whole process interactive for your users.
Let me elaborate on the content with game-like elements, which you can create by using Drimify:
- interactive quizzes,
- surveys,
- video and photo contests,
- voting gallery,
- landing pages,
- spin the wheel,
- instant win and more.
These elements can be utilized in many sectors; for example, spin the wheel is a common theme that phone operating applications use to give out free gifts to their users and bring them back to their mobile applications.
Offering a cross-platform experience, Drimify can be a great tool if you don't wish to move forward in-house for gamifying UX elements.
Features
👉 Games and quizzes
👉 Easy integration
👉 Customization options
👉 Engagement metrics
👉 Multilingual support
Pricing
Here are the pricing plans of Drimify when billed annually:
- On Demand Plan: Starts at $35/month for an unlimited number of applications but 7 days of use.
- Pro Plan: Starts at $49/month for an unlimited number of applications with monthly or yearly use.
- Premium Plan: Custom quote; please contact Drimify's sales team for more information.
8- InAppStory
This is an example of a puzzle game that appears through your Stories!
InAppStory differs from the other tools since it offers its services to mobile applications only.
Aside from that, what this tool achieves is basically bringing gamification to your application to improve retention.
How it manages that is also slightly different: InAppStory utilizes Stories for any gamification element.
These stories can have any game-like element, but it's like you're watching your friends' stories on Instagram. Let's dive even deeper into what elements you can add to your stories:
- ranking boards,
- games like puzzle, maze chase, and bubble shooter,
- polls and more.
This type of incentive with reward systems can easily motivate users to spend more time using your application, so… you know what strategy to prioritize if you're suffering a low user engagement rate.
Features
👉 Interactive elements
👉 User segmentation
👉 Templates and design tools
👉 Push notifications
👉 Multilingual support
Pricing
InAppStory doesn't reveal its pricing; thus, please contact InAppStory's sales team for more information.
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.
