Gamification in apps: A complete guide to using motivation to drive real value

Confession time: I had a two-week addiction to the mobile game Township. This isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to admit, but I fall victim to these apps too. The ad popped up on Meta, and it made me nostalgic for the days I played Age of Empires and Zeus. So I figured, “It’s free, what’s the harm?” That’s when things started to go downhill…

For those of you who haven’t fallen for the trap, aka a mobile game that’s part of a $2 billion gaming empire, the way it works is simple: you are the proud owner of a little plot of land. You farm to earn money, and you use that money to expand your town by buying houses, expanding your territory, unlocking more farmland, and so on. The catch? You need to wait for your crops to grow before you can earn money. So there I was, obsessively harvesting like a maniac, desperate to scrape together enough to expand my little empire.

I was growing digital corn, carrots, and wheat like there was no tomorrow. The gamification was next-level. It threw everything at me: the usual streaks and badges, sure, but also internal currency (hello, Township Cash), leadership boards, and even mini-games within the game. And it worked. 

I’d already banned myself from using it during work, but somehow my mornings, evenings, and, fine, lunch breaks were suddenly dedicated to farming. There I was: a full-on corporate girlie living her best online farm life.

Then the offer came, an enticing amount of virtual currency in return for just a few pounds. But, wait! This offer is only available for a few hours. I quickly did some girl maths: this game is free, and I’ve spent hours on it. What are a few pounds when I spent so much more buying Hogwarts Legacy? 

Obviously, I fell for it a few times. With every new level, everything gets more expensive—and we thought real-life inflation was bad, it’s got nothing on the economic chaos in Township.  Honestly, Donald Trump’s tariffs are hitting that community harder than anyone expected. 

At a certain point, enough was enough. Bye-bye Township. It’s time for real life. It was so bad that the only solution was to go cold turkey and delete the app. 

I mourned and missed my little farm for days afterwards, wondering how this game had gotten me to hand over cash (well, I use Apple Pay) to buy its currency (Township Cash), all in the hope of building out and improving my farm. RIP, my little town. How, even though I knew it was a game, it’d mastered gamification in a way I’d never seen before.

When we think of gamification, we think of the classic badges and streaks. But gamification is so much more than that, and with its rise, we need to get cleverer and better at using it. As much as I love my ‘Goal Getter’ badge on my Garmin Connect app, it’s not enough to keep me around or using the app. 

Don’t worry. I’m not going to claim gamification is dead; it definitely isn’t, but we need to explore how we can best use it to create an emotional investment in our app. 

We’ll start with the basics: a 101 on gamification: what it is, when to use it, and which types of apps it actually makes sense for. Then, we’ll draw inspiration from the gamification greats (yes, Duolingo, but also Peloton, Strava, and Mimo), as well as some lesser-known but brilliantly executed examples like Dwellspring, Klarna, and Bloom. You’ll walk away with a solid understanding and a backlog of gamification ideas ready to test.

Which kinds of apps should use gamification?

The most obvious categories are:

• Education 
• Productivity 
• Fitness/Health 

These are spaces where people are actively trying to learn and improve, which makes them naturally well-suited for gamification. But there are also categories where gamification is underused:

• Finance / Banking 
• Deep learning 
• News
• Entertainment 
• Utilities and Tools 
• Photo and Video editing 

Why? Gamification is there to help users achieve their goals. Gamifying an app is not a goal in itself. It should be linked closely to delivering value for users. This is where the controversy about Duolingo and its addictive streak comes in. I think that’s why Duolingo sometimes gets a bad rap.

The goal of Duolingo is to help you learn languages, but in the sake of building gamification, it almost gets caught up in pushing translations and indirect learning:

“Finally, none of the reviewed studies attempted to challenge or reimagine the standard use of Duolingo – that is, as a largely behaviorist learning tool focused on rote learning, translation, competition and extrinsic rewards – which stands in contrast to a widely accepted view on language learning as process rooted in social and cultural exchange.” – Lantolf et al., Citation2015

So, circling back to the less obvious examples, gamification doesn’t really help you achieve your goal when reading the news or transferring money. That said, there are exceptions. Take saving money, for instance: gamifying it can make the process more engaging and rewarding. In other words, it’s less about the category itself and more about the specific use case.

Let’s determine what good gamification could look like for you.

How to work out your gamification approach

As usual—and I know I sound like a broken record saying this—it all starts with user research. You need to understand what is meaningful to your audience and what actually motivates them.

This will help you see how to play on these motivations to help them achieve their goals. Let’s get more concrete. For Strava, users want to not only have routes for biking and running, but also measure and improve their performance. They are motivated by competitiveness. So what type of gamification do they use? Leaderboards as well as social competition and comparison. I don’t even have a premium Strava subscription, but I was excited to receive an email that said I was a ‘Local Legend.’ Then I discovered it wasn’t for speed but the frequency of a specific route, but still, I’ll take it.

You also want to think about the value of gamification you want it to provide:

• Provide real-time feedback (progress bars)
• Reward behavior (milestones and goals)
• Prevent stopping through loss aversion (streaks)
• Push for interaction with others (community elements)
• Break up bigger tasks into smaller steps (milestones)

My advice is to write it out for yourself as follows:

1. What is the main value my app provides?
2. What are users trying to achieve?
3. Where in their journey do they need extra support?

Knowing this will keep you focused as we discuss various examples of gamification. I’ll start with the obvious two, streaks and badges, before sharing some less common but equally powerful forms of gamification.

1. Streaks

I thought I was above streaks after I broke free from the evil Duolingo owl, only to realize I had fallen hard again. I recently had a killer streak on Garmin: for 89 days, I had walked 10,000+ steps. I was so proud, I even did extra living room circles in the evening. 

Until one day, a friend was visiting. We had such a great time catching up and chatting away that I forgot about my streak. The following day I woke to a broken streak… I’d walked 9,873 steps… I was way sadder than I should have been. After that, my addiction diminished (and thankfully so). I still usually walk 10,000+ steps a day (mainly because I have ADHD and an equally hyperactive dog), but I don’t care the same way I did anymore. The power of the Garmin streak was broken.

This is the risk with streaks: they are powerful when you’re on one, but easily lost or de-motivating when you break one. You realize the world didn’t end with that streak.

Both Duolingo and Mimo use the same clever solution: you get days off, aka you can miss your streak once or twice and keep your streak. Even more ridiculous, you can pay using their internal currency (another form of gamification we’ll get to later) to continue the streak. So, before you worship the 500+ day Duolingo users, know that they probably have had quite a few ‘freezes.’

With streaks, getting the right frequency is key. I really like that many fitness apps do weekly streaks, as it’s unlikely and unnecessary for people to use them every day. The workout app Ladder solves this by having a streak based on a number of workouts per week, e.g., three workouts in this example:

So, if you plan to use streaks, consider how often users should use your app to gain value. 

Try to come up with a fun visual to represent the streak; I love how Fable, a book and TV tracking app, does this visualising the books you read per month, with the streak secondary below:

Another great example is Dwellspring, a soundscape app. Rather than your classic streak, each day of listening grows your tree of serenity. You can see the tree expand with every track you listen to:

I like that if you miss a day, it’s more forgiving. You lose one ring and not all progress. What I like less is that it talks about rings, which for me was confusing. I think they’re referring to the rings of a tree, but it isn’t the right word choice to hit home, in my humble opinion.

2. Badges

Badges are everywhere, and they’re especially useful for long-term products, where they help break up the user journey. They offer small moments of celebration along the way. That said, in my opinion, they often feel a bit generic or disconnected from the overall experience.

If you plan to use badges, go all in and have a party for it. Peloton nails this. Hit 500 rides during a live class? The instructor shouts you out by name, hypes you up, and gets the whole class cheering. It’s a moment of glory. Now compare that to a tiny badge quietly tucked away in an app… not quite the same, is it?

In my opinion, only use badges if your users would or should be proud of that achievement anyway. They meditate for 100 days straight? Incredible! Next, make sure you send it via push notification and/or email so they don’t miss it.

I also like how the activity tracker Fitbit makes badges fun, talking you through what you achieved:

3. Internal currency & point-based rewards

I don’t feel like I need to convince you of the power of internal currencies. You’ve heard firsthand how I bought Township Cash not once but multiple times. But internal currencies are popular, not only in games but also commonly used in education apps. They allow users to personalize or improve their experience. 

Internal currencies can also drive upsells, adding value for your brand. Even if you offer a subscription, you can unlock additional revenue by encouraging users to purchase in-app currency to enhance their experience.

Now I’ve grouped these together as sometimes, you get internal currencies you can’t purchase and other times you get points you can buy. 

If you’re not using currency or points to drive revenue, you can still boost retention and extend user sessions. Duolingo, for example, no longer rewards lesson completion with gems (their shiny internal currency). Instead, they offer 1.5x to 3x points for lessons completed within a time window. Usually, the window is 10 minutes, but they’ll occasionally bump it to 15-30 minutes. This, combined with the scoreboard, encourages users to stay longer. While you only need to complete one lesson to maintain your streak, the challenge of climbing the leaderboard keeps you engaged beyond that initial task.

Points can also be seen as the equivalent of an e-commerce loyalty programme, so in my opinion, they are a lighter, more accessible form of gamification to use. For example, Klarna, a pay-later app, uses a point system:

Here, the goal is to get you to actively use and explore the app. Another interesting case for points or an internal currency is when your app topic requires quite a high level of knowledge and understanding.

For example, Bloom, a financial investment app, uses an internal currency to encourage its users to take lessons about investing (or play quizzes about investing), which will help them become more comfortable using the app. The motivator to gain the points is that they can then use them to win prizes.

4. Leaderboards & Communities

By now, you’ve probably noticed that gamification rarely occurs in isolation. Points work well with leaderboards and come in combination with them as a measure of performance. Some apps don’t work with points, but still use leaderboards, like Peloton. For their bike, you get an output in terms of effort. During your bike ride, you can see how you rank against the 30,000 or so others who have done the ride.

The interesting thing about this is that it’s the opposite of what Mimo and Duolingo both do. Mimo leaderboards are small-scale; you’re in a mini competition aiming to move up a level. 

With Peloton, you can compete either with those taking the class live (which is more engaging) or against a broader group. This dynamic is fascinating because, with 30K competitors (unless you’re Pogacar), the goal isn’t necessarily to be number one, but to see progress by moving up the ranks. This progress-driven competition is a powerful motivator, and it’s one way you can leverage leaderboards effectively.

Leaderboards are most effective in community-based apps, where there’s a sense of competition or coexistence between users.

5. Challenges

Who doesn’t love a challenge? I’m so competitive I’m banned from playing Monopoly with my family, so this type of gamification works too well on me. 

Challenges are particularly popular with fitness apps. I’ve used Fitbit and Garmin, both of which utilize challenges. My relentless testing of workout apps has had me complete multiple 10-day, 4-week, 6-week, and more challenges.

With challenges, you need to think clearly about the motivator and explain that upfront. This isn’t just about a sense of achievement (or intense competitiveness); it can also be a drive to build a new habit. Hence, challenges and streaks often go hand in hand.

Challenges are also great for activation. A small initial challenge can get them to commit to trying out your app. I suggest linking the duration to the frequency of usage in that initial period that best correlates with retention.

Strava challenges

6. Guided progression

Imagine you paid for an app and then discovered you could only access part of the content. Okay… you want more money? No, if you want the rest, you’ve got to work for it. It sounds crazy put like that, but guided progression actually works really well for education apps. This is exactly what Duolingo and Mimo do. Want to go further? Got to complete the level first. Sure, you can skip to a section, but you’ve got to prove you know enough to be worth it.

This form of gamification is great for keeping your app exciting and rewarding progress. You could always have special content that only gets unlocked for the most active users. This is a classic reward mechanism, but it works well. You can add clear progress bars to help users see how much is still needed to unlock the next part.

Township (how I miss you) actually did this, too. Each level unlocked new buildings, crops, and more. I went from being a basic wheat farmer to having cacao and fetching tropical fruits from other islands. This is also what kept it from becoming repetitive.

7. Social interaction

Before my Peloton era (I finally caved), I was all about Zwift. Zwift is a hardcore biker’s paradise; you attach your real bike to a Tacx and cycle through virtual worlds. Before laziness set in and I stopped bothering with the whole bike attachment process, I loved it. I’d be huffing and puffing along, only for a complete stranger to send me a thumbs-up. Sure, they could only see my virtual self, but I promise, I sat up straighter and pedaled just a bit faster. The irony? I never actually figured out how to give a thumbs-up back—oops.

Using social interaction as a form of gamification only works if you have a big enough community or a tight-knit community to interact frequently. It can also be a great way to refer friends (let’s virtually bike together) as there is often a network effect: more people add value.

Gamifying for value

Before you go wild and add the different types of gamification we covered, please hold your horses.

With every form of gamification, you need to critically think about how it adds value. When gamification occurs for the sake of engagement rather than value, a study found it actually detracts from users’ participation in value-adding activities. I think this is why there are so many jokes about how people use Duolingo for 500 days and still don’t dare speak the language. 

You want to use gamification in a way that pushes users towards activities that drive revenue for the app, or help them on their journey there. We’ve seen great examples of this throughout: 

• Bloom helps people become more comfortable with investing (value) by giving them Oinks, their internal currency (reward) for learning about investing
• Peloton shows you where you are on a leaderboard (reward) to encourage you to push yourself throughout a workout (value)
• Dwellspring shows you with a beautiful serenity tree (reward) if you consistently listen (value)

The study in the Journal of Marketing Research goes on to suggest that rather than starting with gamification, you could potentially only offer it at a later stage, once they’ve started gaining value from the app: 

“One potential issue for app providers is that success in game-reward attainment makes users less inclined to engage in value-added activities. To prevent this effect, app providers can restrict access to certain game rewards until users have engaged with a certain number of value-added activities.”

While gamification can be incredibly powerful, especially in this age of short attention spans (guilty), it’s important to only consider it once users truly see and understand the value, rather than slapping it on as a quick fix. You want users to feel good about the experience, not pressured by gamification for its own sake. 

I think that’s the real reason I stopped using Township; I became so consumed by the constant stream of gamification elements that I lost sight of why I started using it in the first place: the nostalgic joy of building my own little farm and town, just like I did in childhood games.