A comprehensive guide to gamification

Here is everything you need to know about gamification and gamifying elements for any kind of business.

1. A Comprehensive
Guide To Gamification

2. 2
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
01
Getting Started
02
What is Gamification?
03
Characteristics of Gamification
04
Gamification Use Cases With ROI Stats
05
The Psychology Behind Gamification
06
An Effective Gamified Product
07
The PBL System
08
Major Gamification Trends
09
Application of Gamification in the Business World
Starbucks
Nike
Deloitte
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Mobile and social sharing
Gamified learning
Productivity Enhancement
Efficiency Enhancement
Human Resources
Sales
Marketing and Customer Engagement

3. 11
Gamification Best Practices
12
Upshot.ai Gamification Design Framework
13
The Upshot.ai Advantage
14
Conclusion
10
How to know Gamification is Right for a Product or Business?
3

4. GETTING
STARTED
WHAT IS
GAMIFICATION?
amification is the use of game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts.
It is an instructional strategy that aims to increase engagement, learning, motivation, and
participation. Gamification principles include challenges, rewards, competitions,
personalization, and levels, which prompt people to get hooked and always come back for more.
Game elements include:
G
he term ‘gamification’ was coined in 2002 by Nick Pelling, but it did not gain popularity until
2010. With its “engagement advantage,” the technique caught the attention of software
professionals in 2010 who intended to incorporate the reward aspects of games into customer
software applications.
Today, Gamification has become tremendously popular among non-gaming environments.
Businesses are leveraging it to motivate members across their online communities.

Let’s take a look at some of the statistics to understand how gamification is transforming the business
domain:
These are just a few of the many stats that may enthrall businesses which haven’t employed
gamification yet. This guide may prove helpful if you are planning to implement gamification in your
business or looking for improving your gamification strategy.
The global gamification market size is projected to grow from USD 9.1 billion in 2020 to USD 30.7
billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 27.4% during the forecast period.
95% of employees enjoy using gaming-inspired elements in their work.
Gamification participants score 14% higher on skill-based assessments.
72% of employees claim gamification inspires them to work harder.
Using gamified activities increases motivation by 48%.
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5. By harnessing the game elements aspects, gamification serves user engagement, cooperation, and
collaboration.
The game design technique is more than merely including the game elements. It is thinking like a
game designer and applying design and aesthetics to projects.
Non-game context is anything other than the actual game, such as corporate training, education,
social impact, etc.
Gamification is implementing game mechanics in non-game contexts to make it more engaging and
fun. Some applications include gamification of the sales and marketing process targeted towards
customers and suppliers, gamifying the HR process to engage and motivate employees, and
encourage positive behavior and habits.
Achievements
Avatars
Badges
Challenges
Countdown
Leaderboards
Points or levels
Progress bars
Social interactions and sharing
Quizzes
Virtual coins
CHARACTERISTICS OF
GAMIFICATION?
Gamification bridges the engagement gap by making the product more engaging and game-like to
use the product.
Gamification instills positive behaviors and builds habits in target users.
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Gamification motivates users to perform predefined tasks to improve business growth.
Gamification allows users to share information about the competition, points, and status with
other users.
Gamification improves retention by rewarding users with badges and points for their efforts.
GAMIFICATION USE CASES WITH
ROI STATS
Starbucks
Starbucks launched ‘My Starbuck Rewards’- a loyalty program where customers earn points whenever
they make purchases. This reward system is a way for them to increase loyalty and learn more about
their customers. The Starbucks rewards app was designed to bring more people into the program by
providing innovative, unique experiences, just like the Starbucks store itself. This Starbucks rewards
program helped them earn more than 16.8 million active members in the U.S.
Nike
Nike understands that the primary blocker to consistent training for many people is a lack of
motivation. So, Nike fitness app- NikeFuel leveraged social sharing to engage over 5,000,000 users

7. to beat their personal fitness goals every day. User tendencies to share their fitness achievements on
social media for validation and competing with each other based on their progress bar result in user
engagement and retention.
Deloitte
Deloitte is one of the world’s largest consulting firms that leveraged game mechanics for their training
application. Leveraging badges, rewards, and rank leads to a massive increase of 46.6% increase in
daily active users and an average of 3 achievements unlocked per active user daily.
THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND
GAMIFICATION
s gamification triggers real, powerful human emotions, our brain's structure is linked with
pleasure and learning releases and re-absorbs the neuro transmitted dopamine in response
to activities such as winning, recognition, problem-solving, surprises, and so on. This
dopamine rush maximizes user engagement, retention, and business growth.
Psychology tells us that people don't like to be forced or dragged to do said activities. They like to feel
in control. Gamification gives users control. It allows them to pick levels at which they want to
experience the product, leading a potential customer towards the desired goal.
Gamification reinforces habits by rewarding users at each stage of the journey. When a user
completes an action, they get rewards, badges, or points. Achievement is one of the most potent
psychological drivers of human behavior. If you can make users feel they've achieved something,
they’re going to come back, thus improving user engagement.
While gamification is a way forward to improve user engagement and retention, here are some things
you need to know before leveraging it-
Gamification is NOT a game: Gamification is not just a video game; instead, it uses game
mechanics to induce certain habits and behaviors. Gamification harnesses the tendency to
influence one’s behavior and thinking.
Gaming versus traditional learning: Game-based learning is unique in its way. It involved a
higher level of customization, and participants can learn at their own pace. At the same time,
traditional learning is monotonous and often difficult to comprehend by each learner.
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Driving intrinsic motivation: When it comes to motivation, employees are more motivated by
job satisfaction than case rewards. Intrinsic motivation matters more than extrinsic motivation. It
is essential to design an effective gamified solution to ensure that gamification activities meet
organizational goals.
AN EFFECTIVE
GAMIFIED PRODUCT
esigning an effective gamified product requires thinking like a game designer.
The first step is understanding the user journey and getting the user onboard as quickly as
possible. Simple onboarding without complexity always works the best. Secondly, it should
have a sense of competition, fun, and balanced use of game elements to engage users and create an
interactive experience.
Kevin Werbach explained in Pyramid of Elements that the perfect gamified product includes dynamics,
mechanics, and components. Additionally, it emphasizes design detail while deploying gamification.
Dynamics is the top of the pyramid that is being designed. It includes constraints, emotions,
narrative, progression, and relationships. These dynamics are essential when designing because it
gives a purpose to the user’s actions. Dynamics help motivate users to achieve a particular goal.
The middle of the pyramid is the mechanics, which explains how users will accomplish the tasks.
Mechanics contains challenges, chance, competition, cooperation, feedback, rewards, win status
and transactions.
The lowest level, the pyramid's most surface level, are game elements called components to
encompass achievements, badges, leaderboards, points, levels, and quests. A gamified product
must contain these elements, and there should be coherence between them to become a
successful gamified product.
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01
02
03
Dynamics
Mechanics
Components

9. THE PBL
SYSTEM
MAJOR GAMIFICATION
TRENDS
oints, badges, and leaderboards (PBL) are some of the most influential and widely used game
elements for your product's gamification. Points enable users to keep score, determine win
status, display progress, and connect to rewards.
Badges represent achievements, flexibility, and signals social status. Leaderboards rank users based
on their actions in the product.
Although the PBL elements are more prominent, they are not all-inclusive. There are other play
elements such as opinion polls, puzzles, trivia, streaks, etc., to motivate users and make your app and
website more engaging and fun.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence(AI) has become all-encompassing among businesses, as it brings together brief
analysis from large data sets. AI-run solutions are more common and less expensive than ever before.
The same data analysis would cost employees many thousands of dollars and hours; companies can
access it efficiently.
Companies collect massive amounts of data from customers, such as where they go shopping, how
much time they spend in the app, and other movements around the internet. All this data can be used
to personalize the experience. Personalized pitches are very useful in gamification applications as they
improve engagement and boost loyalty. To better understand employee workflows, AI collects and
uses data about the individual employees’ engagement and performance, which helps companies to
improve their work culture and increase employee productivity.
Mobile and social sharing
The ubiquity of mobile usage for both work and play has driven the rise of gamified mobile
applications. Employees can get notifications on the phone about the sales numbers, work orders,
and consumers can interact with apps from anywhere.
Social media has dominated our life; we keep up with friends and family on social networks like
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Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. Online social interaction has paved the endless
opportunities for businesses to adopt social media as their business tropes. The reinforcement of
gamified elements in social media interactions supports business goals.
Gamified learning
Gamification of learning is an educational approach to motivate students by using game elements and
game design techniques in learning environments. The ultimate goal is to maximize learning while
maximizing enjoyment and engagement. Progress mechanics- points, badges, leaderboards, facilitates
learning. Gamification initiative benefits students by giving students ownership of their education,
opportunities to identify work, and freedom to fail without negative feedback or discouragement.
Leveraging gamified learning increases fun and joy in the classroom. When done right, game-based
learning can take training and learning to the next level, from gaining basic knowledge to the
application of critical thinking and more accurate decision-making.
APPLICATION OF GAMIFICATION
IN THE BUSINESS WORLD
amification is useful for any business team that needs the motivation to get more done.
Leveraging game elements for business solutions encourage employees to contribute,
enhance the quality of participation, boost productivity, and develop leaderboards to rank
people based on their involvement and expertise.
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11. Productivity Enhancement: Gamification motivates employees and provides valuable feedback
to improve their performance. Gamified solutions can highlight the KPIs, achievements, numbers
in a positive way to encourage employees to do productive work.
Efficiency Enhancement: Grammarly is one of the best examples to leverage gamification to
encourage users to write more efficiently. Gamification makes employees work better by
improving their core job.
Human Resources: HR takes responsibility for hiring, critical onboarding, training, and ongoing
performance management initiatives.
- Recruitment: Introducing gamified elements can identify the best candidate and review
candidates in the recruitment process.
- Onboarding: Leveraging points and progress bars to onboard employees quickly and hassle-
free.
- Training: Use of game mechanics to encourage employees and reward them for learning and
attending training sessions.
Performance Review & Employee Recognition: Recognizing employee’s effort by awarding
badges, points, and other forms of recognition instill a sense of achievement and motivate them
to work better.
Innovation and Skill Development: Employing game mechanics can encourage employees to
develop remarkable new ideas. Learning involves problem-solving and engaging those parts of
the brain that love to figure out new things, leading to skill development. Leveraging gamification
for innovation and skill development is helpful for both employees and the company.
Sales: Sales often run on a natural sense of competition for its best deals and strategies.
Gamification can help them to focus on crucial enablement tasks, promoting overall revenue
generation.
Marketing and Customer Engagement: Various marketing initiatives such as offering discounts
and incentives may work in short-term customer retention, but it might not work long-term.
Gamification can help marketers increase customer lifetime value, retention, and engagement
across the customer lifecycle.
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HOW TO KNOW GAMIFICATION IS
RIGHT FOR A PRODUCT OR BUSINESS?
GAMIFICATION
BEST PRACTICES
any product-based or SaaS companies usually wonder if gamification is right for their
organization or business problem. When in doubt, ask these three questions-
Question 1: Where would you derive encouraging behavior?
Motivation in situations that involve creativity and unique skills, connections, and teamwork, not just
work, encourages productive behavior. Situations where the task seems boring and repetitive, require
people to go the extra mile. High-value tasks desire innovation, productivity, and lasting user
engagement. Motivation gets them to do that. Game mechanics such as challenges, quests,
leaderboards motivate uses to get involved in the tasks.

Question 2: Are your set of target activities sufficiently engaging?
Activities that businesses use to engage users should be attractive enough. The user has to make
meaningful choices to engage with your product or service, for instance, Snapchat streaks, where
users choose to send snaps daily to get the streaks- this is one of the best ways to motivate users to
increase engagement.

Question 3: Can the desired behavior be modeled through innovative elements?
The game elements such as points, social sharing, badges, and leaderboards make a gamified
structure. This structure of gamified elements guides the user's behavior to complete the
predetermined actions.
1. Understand your needs: Be objective and realistic with what your business needs, what are the
challenges that you are currently facing, and where you may be headed. Ensure you have a deep
understanding of your goals, product, and success metrics.
2. Align your needs with digital strategy: Gamification is a potent enabler of digital strategies and
transformation in businesses such as leveraging plug-n-play gamification platforms to improve user
engagement and conversions.
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3. Find the right niche: Know your target audience. Gamification will be more effective and attractive
to the targeted segment of users. Therefore, choose carefully, especially when you’re in the testing
phase.
4. Choose the right use case: The full privileges of gamification are linked to effective deploying
game mechanics in business problems. Test all underlying assumptions, game dynamics, mechanics,
and choose the right gamification use case that works best for the business.
5. Experience the array of game design options: As explained in the beginning, game design is
thinking like a game designer and applying design and aesthetics to projects. Choose from a wide
range of techniques and options that can be used to engage and retain your users.
6. Design a gamification strategy that fits the purpose: Design an effective gamification strategy as
the type of game elements, how it is designed and the enabling technologies that will be leveraged to
deliver the experience will have a significant impact on the quality of the results.
7. Test, learn and iterate: The best way to discover the value of gamification strategy is to test
against appropriate multiple sets of users and keep iterating until you get the expected results.
Leveraging testing and iterating approaches will give you a fair amount of understanding of user
behavior which can be useful while launching the product in the larger market.
The bottom line is gamification isn’t just a buzzword but is a powerful tool to increase engagement,
provide a better user experience, and create brand loyalty. Like any business decision and process,
gamification can be implemented exceptionally well or really bad. To avoid bad gamification, always
approach it strategically, identify your niche, align your goals with strategy and leverage gamification
to engage users, and fuel your long term business growth.
UPSHOT.AI GAMIFICATION
DESIGN FRAMEWORK
amification is a design that focuses most emphasis on human motivation in the process. It
drives all the fun and engaging elements found in games and applies them to real-world
situations. In its essence, it is “Human-focused design” that optimizes human motivation.
At Upshot.ai, we follow the following 6-step design framework-
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02 03 04 05 0601
Define Business
Objectives
Delineate Target
Behaviors
Describe Your
Users
Devise Activity
Strategy
Don't Forget the
Fun
Deploy the Right
Tools
Define business objectives- The first step is to analyze what purpose we are trying to
accomplish. The business objective is the gamified system's ultimate goal, For example, an
increase in customer engagement.
Delineate target behaviors- Here, we define the user behavior which you want users to
accomplish. It can be specific behavior or success metrics that tell you if the gamified system is a
win or not, for example, a 300% increase in completion, of course, a 40% increase in daily active
users.
Describe your users- Understanding who will be using the product, analyzing user behavior,
their preference, and how the system can respond to the different kinds of users demographics,
age group, location income level, psychographics, etc., and what motivates them.
Devise activity strategy: The user acts to accomplish particular goals such as collect badges,
complete the course, etc. Achieving these actions becomes a strong motivator. Motivation leads
to action; action leads to feedback, which in turn leads to motivation. Understanding the user
actions, we devise the perfect engagement strategy.
Don't forget the fun: The gamifies system should be fun for users. We find ways to make your
product more engaging, involving more surprise, choices, and delights associated with fun.
Deploy the right tools: We leverage gamified elements and structure with different options and
techniques to choose the right game element. We prefer those that seem best and most
appropriate for your product’s success. We repeat the iterative process and tests to improve your
product's gamified sustainability that works best for users.

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THE UPSHOT.AI
ADVANTAGE
Case study:
How we helped Amway, the world’s largest direct selling company, to increase the adoption of its
digital learning platform, leading to a double salesperson completing the course.
Amway is a market leader with its sales force, called Independent Business Owners or IBOs. Amway
wanted to train its sales force more efficiently to learn about Amway products faster and sell more
products. To achieve this, Amway created a digital learning platform to increase sales per salesperson,
especially by expanding the range of products they sell.
The goal was to increase digital platform adoption, leading to course completion and capture
feedback to improve the product experience.
But soon, Amway observed that IBOs were not accessing the platform much and completing enough
courses, which put their business results at risk.
To motivate the IBOs to access the platform and complete more courses regularly, Amway employed
Upshot.ai to gamify the learning experience by awarding badges to IBOs based on their progress.
These badges become a visible status symbol among the IBO community and motivating factors to
complete the course. Additionally, the platform collects users’ feedback to improve the product
experience.
Results:
Click here to download the case study.
400% increase in monthly active users
112% increase in the number of users completing the course

16. CONCLUSION
verything considered gamification can be a game-changer for any mobile or web application.
All you need to do is to proceed with sustainable operations. It is crucial to engage users
employing tailored gamification techniques. It is not only about increasing engagement but
also about monitoring and analyzing users’ participation. The real secret of gamification lies in
thinking about motivating human beings and crafting a winning strategy to achieve your goals.
Partner with us to handle your gamification needs
Gamification might sound like a straightforward tactic to engage your users, but the strategy might
backfire severely without proper planning and implementation.
A successful gamified solution may require extensive knowledge about gaming principles, powerful
UI/UX skills, and sound development experience. While your in-house development team may have
the skills to gamify apps, you'll need more specific skill sets to integrate a creative gamification
strategy into your product successfully.
With the help of upshot.ai, unlock all the benefits of world-class talents and technology capabilities to
develop a gamified product.
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17. www.upshot.ai
[email protected]
[email protected]
At upshot.ai, we have a certified team of customer success
specialists with years of industry experience devising and
implementing successful gamification strategies. We offer
enterprise-based gamification solutions to meet your
engagement needs, delivering maximum ROI in minimum
efforts.