Tips for Gamifying Your Mobile App

This approach seems heavy-handed. The crucial aspect of gamification this post mostly misses out on is the challenge-to-reward ratio. You can't just give users points and badges and level them up for every action they take, that gets old fast. The user needs to feel they are accomplishing things, or the feedback will not be rewarding and engaging. And it should be a user accomplishment, not your accomplishment. Downloading the app is an accomplishment for you, but not for the user, they just pressed a button. Giving them a trophy will cause a lot of eyes to roll.

Gamification can be used to promote your marketing efforts, but this should be a secondary function. If your app is used for task management or exercise tracking, reward users for their real-world accomplishments, and have some secondary rewards for getting others users on-board. If your app is used for listening to podcasts, don't give them a "Playlist Creator" badge, nobody cares about that.

I'm also not sure how well gamification is going to address the problem of "users don’t use many apps for very long and in fact only 25% of the apps survive after 3 months." How often do people play full-fledged video games for longer than three months? In the long run, motivation from gameplay is a gimmick, and I don't see a lot of people caring about their level or trophy collection on some app enough to change whether or not they continue using it. In fact if the gamification managed to give the user a lot of reward early-on, but doesn't manage to keep it up (which is really hard to do—again, think about video games growing tiresome) the user could actually be pushed away from continued use. The proposed solution compounds the problem.

1 tip for making a good app: gamify as little as possible.

Users don't want to feel rewarded for something that's probably wasting their time. They want to know that the action itself is useful. If your app can't do that, how will you retain users? I guess there are still a lot of people are willing to use pointless apps that track which Wikipedia articles they read and give them a gold star, but most people aren't.

Interesting article, I need to work on that in our apps too.