6 Reasons Why you Need to Gamify your Product

Gamification has become mainstream across a variety of industries. According to ReportLinker, the gamification market is all set to grow by $27.77 billion during 2022–2026, with a CAGR growth rate of 29.15%. Many great brands, including Starbucks, Nike, and others, have introduced gamified apps to improve customer experience in their respective industries. Now you must be wondering what Gamification is. Gamification is the process of adding game-like mechanics to a non-game environment to encourage user engagement or create appealing experiences for a service or a product. 

Without much ado, let us dive deep into the article to know all about gamification, its benefits, and why gamification is the best choice for your business. 

A Brief History of Gamification

The term "gamification" was coined by British computer programmer Nick Pelling in 2002 while designing a game-like user interface for commercial electronic devices such as ATMs, vending machines, mobile phones, etc. This is where the history of gamification truly began. 

Gamification has a long and interesting history. Although it might seem like the word "gamification" is a recently discovered concept, businesses have been using its principles since the 1990s to engage their customers. Let us go back to discovering some early instances associated with gamification: 

History of Gamification:

1900s: 

The Boy Scouts of America awarded their members with special badges to celebrate their achievements. Scouts won badges for being the best at a particular activity or for showing appropriate behavior according to Boy Scout Principles. 

The Game of Work, published by Charles A. Coonradt, recognizes the issue of declining productivity in America. The book emphasizes the fact that having fun and playing games can help with employee engagement concerns. 

The world’s first-ever multi-user dungeon game, MUD1, came to life. The game was developed by Roy Trubshae and Richard Bartle and used a text-based interface that lit the spark leading to the explosion of online social gaming. 

People started to recognize the importance of "having fun." Stephen W. Drapes published a paper suggesting user enjoyment should be a mandatory requirement of all software design. 

In fact, it was during the 1990s that classrooms began to experiment with gamification for educational purposes. 

2000s: 

With the above-mentioned brief timeline, Gamification undoubtedly has an exciting future ahead of it.

6 Reasons Why you Need to Gamify your Product

Benefits to the users

Gamification provides learners with the advantage of instant feedback. With the use of leaderboards, employees can easily compare their current performances to the benchmarks they have set in the past. Hence, feedback is one of the most important elements of gamification, as it spreads awareness among users about how well they are doing and what they need to improve. 

Gamification acts as an extreme source of motivation when executed perfectly. It is more than just adding game elements to the training. When training and game elements are properly developed and implemented, learners perform their jobs more effectively. 

The implementation of gamification is considered highly effective when it comes to retaining valuable customers. You can offer exciting rewards to players who achieve desired milestones. This will ultimately encourage user engagement and high conversation rates. As a result, businesses benefit from fun and interactive experiences in the best way possible. 

Employees performing multiple tasks at once often lead to unexpected conflicts. For example, a human resource professional needs to hire top talent for a specific role, but at the same time, they need to keep track of the employee attrition rate in the organization. Through gamification, it becomes easy to monitor multiple tasks and predict the best ways to balance them all, thereby increasing productivity and boosting the overall performance of an employee. 

Benefits to the App Owners

Users love to engage themselves in activities that are interesting and involve a fun element. Regardless of the industry, gamification helps learners achieve their goals by walking them smoothly through each stage in a real-world-like environment. Users' positive experiences and word of mouth lead to increased usage among other users. 

More app usage directly points to high-quality business insights. A brief analysis of the data achieved through the gamified app can help app owners study the overall behavior of the app users. This can be based on their likes and dislikes that resonate with business requirements and their specific needs. 

Gamification benefits app owners by keeping users engaged with their brand by providing a fun app experience. Creating a customized experience based on your brand requirements will encourage users to stick more with the app. Relevant insights from users related to the app will increase the overall performance of the app and brand acceptance in general. 

How different industries have used gamification to boost usage

The game of gamification has begun! Several industries are using gamification to encourage more usage. Here are those diverse industries: 

To Conclude

With all the interesting insights mentioned above, gamification is a powerful strategy and can prove to be a game-changer for your business. 

Want to Gamify your product? Hire FGfactory to ensure successful gamification for your product with their wide range of game development services and great expertise.