Gamification Makes Users More Self-Disciplined and Healthy
Lifestyle apps are mostly designed to help users achieve their personal goals related to health, fitness, productivity, study and other lifestyle areas to make users more self-disciplined and healthy. These apps have become increasingly popular in recent years, with many apps achieving significant success in user engagement, retention, and revenue.
However, the app stores are filled with lifestyle apps, making it challenging to stand out from the competition and attract users. Recently, we have seen that the user growth rate of Lifestyle Apps has slowed down or even shrunk in some regions, such as Brazil(-1.6%), Thailand(-1.7%), India(-0.5%), and the Philippines(-0.6%). Getting users to adopt a new lifestyle app can be difficult, especially if it requires changing their habits or routines. Once users have downloaded the app, keeping them engaged and using the app regularly can be another challenge. What’s more, monetizing lifestyle apps can be difficult, as users may be reluctant to pay for access or may prefer free alternatives that offer similar features.
To overcome the above challenges and keep growing, gamification techniques can help a lot by motivating and incentivizing users to stick to their habits and routines.
Use Gamification to Enhance User Engagement
By incorporating gamified elements such as challenges, rewards, social interaction, personalization, and feedback, lifestyle apps can create a more engaging and motivating user experience that encourages users to achieve their personal goals.
Challenges and Competitions: Lifestyle apps can use challenges and competitions to encourage users to engage in healthy or productive behaviours. For example, a fitness app can create a challenge for users to complete a certain number of workouts in a week or month, and award badges or rewards to those who meet the goal.
Progress Tracking and Rewards: Gamification can also be used to track user progress towards their goals, and reward them for their achievements. For example, a productivity app can track how many tasks a user completes in a day or week, and provide rewards or recognition for reaching milestones.
Social Interaction and Collaboration: Lifestyle apps can also use gamification to encourage social interaction and collaboration among users. For example, a healthy eating app can create a social network where users can share recipes, give feedback on meals, and compete with each other to see who can prepare the most healthy and delicious dishes.
Personalization: Gamification can be used to personalize the experience for each user, by adapting to their preferences and needs. For example, a meditation app can use gamification to create a personalized meditation program that is tailored to the user's goals, preferences, and level of experience.
Successful Examples
Forest
"In order to establish new, better habits, it's helpful to engage with tools that make it easier to reinforce them. For anyone looking to curtail their phone usage, the Forest app might be for you."— Business Insider
The app leverages game-like features to make the process of task management more enjoyable and rewarding. For instance, users are encouraged to stay focused and resist the temptation to use their phones by planting virtual trees in the app. The longer they avoid phone use, the more the trees grow, which in turn contributes to a virtual forest. In addition, users can earn rewards such as coins and badges for completing tasks and staying on track. These features not only provide a sense of accomplishment and motivation but also foster a sense of community through social sharing and leaderboard features.
Overall, Forest's use of gamification creates an engaging and rewarding experience for users, which increases retention and encourages users to continue using the app to manage their tasks and boost productivity.
Duolingo
“…Duolingo is cheerful, lighthearted and fun…” - Forbes
As a popular language-learning app that has gained significant attention for its gamified approach to language learning, it uses gamification to make the process of learning a new language fun, engaging and motivating.
Duolingo uses a point system to track users' progress and motivate them to complete lessons. Users earn points for completing lessons, and they can track their progress on a leaderboard. This feature creates a competitive atmosphere that motivates users to complete more lessons and achieve higher scores. And it rewards users for consistently completing lessons by maintaining a streak. Users who complete lessons every day for a certain number of days in a row receive a reward, such as a lingot (Duolingo's virtual currency). This feature motivates users to log in and complete lessons every day, which helps build a habit of language learning. Moreover, Duolingo offers a range of badges and achievements that users can earn by completing lessons and reaching milestones. These badges and achievements provide a sense of accomplishment and recognition, which motivates users to continue learning.
Gamify Lifestyle Apps with OKSpin
Gamification is an ongoing process, and gamified lifestyle apps require ongoing support and optimization. OKSpin has prepared to provide ongoing and customized services to ensure the success of your lifestyle apps. You can know more about OKSpin’s Gamification here. To help create engaging and motivating lifestyle apps, just contact us.
