Using Gamification To Increase Website Engagement

Engagement is the first thing you will need for your product. Without engagement, you won’t have returning users, and you won’t monetise. One of the easiest ways to make your site more engaging is to gamify it. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s the best way to engage your users.

Using Gamification to Increase Website Engagement

Games tend to be fun and stimulating, which is why we like them, but they are often cheesy and out of context when directly applied to consumer or business sites. So, instead of mindlessly throwing game mechanics at your app, what you really want to do is design the right engagement loops for your site and optimise them

What is engagement?

Engagement can mean different things depending on your site. For example, on Facebook, engagement with your post means a click, share, like, or comment - social interactions. For websites or games, it can mean time spent on a page. Google considers engagement as a search query. On YouTube, engagement is time spent per session, videos played per session, and secondarily, events such as comment, like, share, search, etc.

Once you’ve identified your target users, use cases, and key problems you are solving, you can start building your user experience and engagement loops.

What are engagement loops?

Engagement loops are things users do over and over again when they’re properly engaging with your app. There is motivation, action, and then feedback. In games, engagement usually follows a progression of increasing difficulty called cognitive flow.

Our engagement framework

Once you figure out your engagement loop, you can use this engagement framework for optimizing it. Our technique is based on experience in analytics, social gaming, and product management, with human-computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) concepts; and Google product design principles.

Basically, it’s six strategies that increase engagement called SHIRES. You can use SHIRES to help you remember: Show, Human, Incentivize, Reduce, Explain, and Supersize. Google SHIRES to get the full breakdown, it is more than this blog article to explain!

Building Social Proof

This is more marketing than product, but it’s smart to build social proof into the product. For example, show how many people have performed the action, create expectations or obligations from a real person or friend, or reference a person’s face or name.

The benefits to the user are that it allows him to determine if that product is cool among his peers (facilitates buying decision), and it effectively bookmarks the product in his social media stream. The benefits to the business are that you get to increase product awareness and traffic, get insights on the product, and increase your conversion for the original buyer.

Imagine if there was a new product startup with pre-orders that you think you might want to buy. You might be hesitant because it’s a big risk (no reviews, no showroom, no guarantee, etc.). But if a friend could take that jump with you, you’d be more comfortable about spending money on a crazy idea. So how about creating a feature that helps users ask friends to buy along with them?

Teach them

People learn by having things shown to them. They do things when they are incentivized or motivated in some way such as with rewards, alignment of interests through explanation, or simply fun. They prefer something to be easier rather than harder. They are social. They respond to personal attention.

By building more engaging apps, you’ll activate more users and create more positive user experiences. Building the right engagement features will also naturally help with your retention rates.