Gamification Examples

Gamification is pretty much in nearly all types of content we access or engage in these days. It’s there when we specifically sign up for leaderboard programs, and it’s also present when we are covertly participating in any activity that has a slight inclination towards gaming or reward-earning through competitive criteria. In fact, the roots and tools and uses of gamification have evolved to become so diverse and all-encompassing that many times you may not even realize that you’ve become a part of a gamification venture. 

With that said, some people may begin to think of gamification as a manipulative way of getting more engagement with their product by tricking clueless clients, customers, and users. Well, that could hardly be any less true! Gamification isn’t anything shady or conspicuous at all. Instead, it’s actually a pretty concrete way of developing a strong clientele and customer base along with acquiring a rewarding user experience for your product.

When it comes to sales gamification, the sense or techniques of gaming may not always be straightforward or explicit, but there’s certainly an element of competitiveness and progress in the user’s field of experience. The bottom line is, gamification is an umbrella term with a range of design, ideas, concepts, rewards purposes, and end results. This abstractness of the whole gamification platter allows many companies across different industries and demographics to create gamification experiences to reach their goals and help their audiences have a better experience in all.

Ready to explore the wholesomeness of modern gamification examples? Here are some of our best picks for you to explore!

1. TEDEd

A forum teeming with empowering ideas and inspirational people, TED has always had the attention and admiration of millions in its YouTube videos. Taking advantage of this massive following, TED set up a website for its common followers and audiences to engage actively in spreading knowledge and empowerment.

Basically, TEDEd is a website that allows the audience to create their own mini TED videos through animations, voice-over, and other visual and audio tools. They can add tutorials, attach quizzes, and incorporate other add-ons to make their content interactive and share their knowledge with the world.

2. Snapchat

When you think of Snapchat in terms of gamification, there’s one pretty obvious aspect to it: scorekeeping! Snapchat keeps scores and points for its users depending on their activity on the app as well as how many people are impacted by those activities. However, that’s not all that there is to Snapchat’s idea of gamification.

You can create your avatars using Snapchat’s fairly extensive range of profiling accessories. You can keep track of where your friends are in real-time on Snapchat. The social networking app also offers mini-games to its users in which they can compete with others, too. Snapchat filters are another bag full of gamification elements. Some change your face, others your location, still others have mini guessing quizzes to make the app more fun and engaging. Snapchat streaks are another popular feature with the users of the app. It’s where you and a friend send at least one Snap to each other within every 24 hours to keep a streak score. The higher this score gets, the more active the audience becomes in order to maintain it!

3. Duolingo

Linguistics isn’t exactly fun — especially when you have to learn a new manuscript entirely from scratch. Gamification in this tedious and taxing process, therefore, works like a charm. Duolingo is a pretty popular language-learning platform that employs gamification techniques to get people to learn new languages with more interest and better, lasting results.

What Duolingo does is that it uses highly customized and personalized gameplay techniques catering to different types of learners so that they can achieve their tough goals in a light, cheery manner. The types of gamification that Duolingo uses include flashcards, pictograms, and other mini-games that help users memorize everything they learn with ease. Their difficulty level, frequency, and other factors depend on the learner’s age, the language they’re learning, literacy level, memorization skills, and so on. Simply put, Duolingo diversifies its gamification to suit different levels of players so that they can reach their ultimate goal of learning a language!

4. Home Workout — No Equipment 

There are many people who cannot afford to go to the gym for several reasons. They may not have the resources, the time, the accessibility, or they might think formal gym-going is too much for small-scale workouts. Home gyms are the best alternate for all such gym-goers, but sadly, arranging a home gym is no easy feat.

You may not understand the equipment you may need, the exercises that suit you best, or the type of gym wear you would need for your specific workouts. Special home instructors are another alternative, but they’re also quite hectic to arrange.

In all these situations, the last option you get is a workout training app such as this Home Gym. It’s true that home workout apps are often a scam and hardly ever work, but this one is an excellent exception.

The app allows you to create your own experience of workouts through a series of reward-based challenges and quests to complete tasks and move on to the next levels. These also have a different premium and free plans to help you get the body of your dreams!

5. edX

Educational gamification is another successful example of non-profit product gamification. It uses interactive designs, user engagement methods, UI/UX, reward tools, leaderboards, and other elements of commercial, business-oriented gamification.

edX is one such learning management system that has used the idea of gamification to help learners around the world increase their knowledge at their own pace. The COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down schools and colleges around the world, drove people away from their regular classrooms. This also drove a number of pupils into demotivation regarding their education.

In this case, edX’s gamified educational system brought people back into the educational stream by offering free and paid courses in diverse niches such as astronomy, biology, business, IT, chemistry, physics, mathematics, art, history, comparative religion, anthropology, psychology, nutrition, and any other subject their audience may be interested in. These self-paced courses are accessible for students around the world and involve quizzes, assignments, readings, and sometimes fieldwork as well. They’re offered by Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT, and IBM, so learners can be assured about the standard of the content!

6. My Starbucks Rewards

Starbucks, with its gigantic customer base, has picked gamification to strengthen its public image across the globe. My Starbucks Rewards is a handy app for all those coffee lovers who want more than just a dose of caffeine with the bucks they pay at the Starbucks’ cash counter.

As the name suggests, My Starbucks Rewards is a personalized app for Starbucks customers (both occasional and regular ones can create their accounts). The app keeps track of how much you spend in particular patterns such as the time (days, hours, months), what you order, which outlet you opt for, how much you spend, and so on. The company then uses this database to offer loyalty rewards for their customers, encouraging them to buy more from the brand!

7. Forest — Focus Timer for Productivity

Battling phone addiction through gamification might sound ironic, but this gamified productivity software program has actually made it easy to battle your phone addiction by using the phone itself!

Focus is a timed productivity app that track’s your phone usage and helps you get off your phone to spend more time in reality. It starts with an empty ground where you plan to grow a forest. While you stay off your phone, your trees continue to grow. When you start using it, the trees stop growing. Then, the app shows the time that you take to achieve a full-grown tree in the form of statistics and charts.

8. CrowdRise

What do you get when you combine gamification with philanthropy? CrowdRise! Seeing the rise in competitive, reward-based gameplay, the developers of CrowdRise have combined simple gamification techniques such as points, loyalties, and leaderboards with philanthropic and welfare purposes.

The crux of the whole concept behind CrowdRise is that people may find it harder to motivate others for philanthropic causes than they do for gaming or competitive purposes. In other words, persuading the public to contribute to charity might take more time and effort than it would for convincing someone to take part in small competitions and quests. By combining the two, the developers have been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for different charitable purposes.

Conclusion

Gamification has been around for a fairly long time, but its recent implementations have expanded to include more than just commercial purposes and client engagements. This variety of gamifiable niches has allowed industry experts to not only understand gamification in greater detail but has also helped other industries, individuals, and organizations to reach their goals in a more interactive and fun way!