Up Your Game: 5 Gamification Strategies For Website UX

Is your online business or company website not generating the results you want? Are you looking for ways to catch the full attention of your customers? In today’s era of cut-throat online competition, incorporating gamification strategies in your website design is a surefire way to add some entertaining vibe to your web portal and turn your users into paying customers!

An emerging technological trend, gamification is the integration of game dynamics into any medium like websites, in order to drive a positive response, participation, and engagement from the target audience. There are various aspects of gaming that can be brought into a web portal. Some examples include win and loss conditions, objectives, rules, achievements, progression among many others.

Coined as the next big thing in UX design, gamification has taken the digital world by storm, and its influence has exponentially risen over the past few years. Integrating gaming elements into a website is no longer looked at as merely purposeless recreation, but as a proven way to increase participation and conversions. The best part about it is the fact that, you don’t need to completely redesign or redo your website.

Furthermore, if your website is already doing well and getting a lot of visitors, adding gamification in your business website can act like icing on the cake. It can boost user engagement by offering a fun experience to visitors and improve interaction, loyalty and drive sales. Add to that, gamification can also help in digital marketing.

Considering the fact that video games are dopamine releasers, a chemical released by our brain when we experience pleasure, using the principles of gamification in your business website is an effective way to get your visitors more invested in your site. Not to mention, it is suitable for very different groups of users, no matter what age or nationality they are. Gamifying your web portal can afford an opportunity to tap into human desires and psychological behaviors like achievement, rewards, addiction, and self-expression. With that said, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for gamification; every brand will have unique factors and unique gamification strategies. Furthermore, it is vital to consider several factors before finalizing on your website gamification idea. Read on to find out five gamification strategies for website UX.

Gamification Strategies For Website UX

1. Make it relevant

Let’s face it. If the gamification elements that you are adding to your website UX are not relevant to your topic, your visitors or the goals of your site, then it’s not going to motivate and engage your visitors in the long. Consecutively, make sure that any gamification that you add to your business website is actually relevant.

2. Utilize social networking platforms

With words like hashtag, follow, unfriend and share entering our standard lexicon, there’s no denying that social networking platforms have etched a prominent place in our contemporary culture. When it comes to adding gamification elements to your business website, social networking platforms cannot and should not be missed. Furthermore, make sure you integrate social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter among others into your game. by integrating social networking platforms, not only users can easily share their achievements, but it adds a fun element to the game. This is one of the most effective gamification strategies.

3. Keep it real

Whether the points or rewards are worth something only online or in real life, points or rewards need to be worth something to give users more motivation to earn. For instance, rewards and achievements such as leaderboard positions, badges, discounts seem more real to visitors and add value to their user experience.

4. Easy to understand and play

Without a doubt, one of the major gamification strategies that you need to take into consideration is making sure that the game is easy to understand and play. It goes without saying, that if the game is complicated to understand, chances of users playing it for a long period of time are little to none. However, you decide to use your game mechanics, make sure you don’t overcomplicate them. Furthermore, it should be really easy for your visitors to get started with your gamification and to know how it works. Generally, video games have a training level at the beginning of the game, where the player learns the basic techniques, buttons, rules, and tricks. You should aim to achieve similar to your gamification. Needless to say, this one of the gamification strategies that you do not want to miss.

5. Test, test, and test again

How are you going to know how effective and fun your game is if you don’t play it yourself? Make sure you test everything before launching your website and once you have done that, test again just to be sure. Besides, testing your game will not only help you in finding out how fun the game is to play, but you can also find out how well the gaming elements integrate with the website.

Summing up Gamification Strategies

While these were some of the gamification strategies, there are many others, such as create an area for the community, make sure it looks good among many others. Game elements create ways of giving recognition to the users for completing tasks, and it’s no secret that humans crave recognition and status symbols. Adding game-like elements to your website and following the above-mentioned gamification strategies, can help make your web portal all the more engaging, resulting in more hits and more users in no time.