Deep: Gamification features explored
The gamification renaissance? How companies are adding gamification tactics to their products in 2024
🔒DoP Deep goes deeper into the concepts and ideas that are covered in the Weekly Briefing to help you learn lessons from the experiences of top tech companies. If you’d like to upgrade to receive these in-depth pieces of analysis you can do so below.
Hi product people 👋,
Building gamification features can sometimes come across as a little desperate and growth hack-y; the modern mantra in product thinking says that it’s far better to focus on building a genuinely valuable experience than it is to shoehorn some gamification features into your product in the hope that this alone will drive up engagement and retention.
This is mostly true but recently, many tech companies have started dipping their toes into gamification UX again.
YouTube just announced a series of new flagship gamification features and Instacart did the same. And with this recent flurry of new gamified UX, it feels a little like we’re undergoing a gamification renaissance of sorts.
In this Deep Dive we’ll explore how top tier tech companies are introducing gamification into their products with some examples from 20+ companies including: YouTube, Instacart, Atlassian, Spotify, Grammarly and more.
Plus, we’ll also look at some cautionary tales from companies who decided to ditch all of their gamification features from their product and understand why.
Coming up:
A deeper look at modern gamification features from companies including YouTube, Instacart, Atlassian, Spotify, Grammarly and more
The psychology of badges and how companies are using them to drive engagement and retention
How one company’s gamification efforts boosted engagement by 20%
The unintended consequences of gamification
Why one company ditched all of their gamification features entirely and how to avoid making the same mistakes
A research study which shows why gamification drove the wrong types of behavior in users
The full list of companies featured
How this analysis is structured
For this analysis, we’ve taken 20+ companies and looked at gamification features they’ve recently added to their products to understand how the feature works along with links to examples of each.
The deep dive report includes:
Product - the product featured in this deep dive, chosen from various different verticals.
Feature - the gamification feature or tactic used. This includes things like quests, mini games, achievement badges, proprietary gamification features, leaderboards and more. We’ll share examples of each tactic used for each product and in some cases, a product will use multiple tactics.
Category - the product category. We’re covering a wide variety of different products in this deep dive, from B2C to B2B SaaS.
How it works - an explanation of how the gamification tactic works in the context of the product featured.
Links to example - links to learn more about the gamification feature.
The types of gamification used in product design
Before we take a look at some of the modern examples of how companies are using gamification features, here’s a snapshot of some of the gamification tactics product teams can use when building.
The companies featured will include examples of many of these types of traditional gamification along with more innovative, product-specific gamification features, too.
Exploring companies in depth
Let’s take a closer look the 20+ companies and gamification features included in this post.