3 GREAT MOBILE APPS USING GAMIFICATION

After having followed our blog in the past 2 months, are you getting more and more excited about gamification in practice? Today I am going to introduce you three top interesting gamified apps, just download them right now and start enjoying the magic of gamification!

1. Starbucks

The interface of Starbucks app is simple and beautiful. The more coffee you buy, the more rewards you get and the more you fill up your cup with stars. This visual aspect of reaching a goal by filling up the cup motivates users to accomplish the highest level of earning and meanwhile increase the total revenue .

2. FuelGood

You are worried about the global-warming but have no clue how to deal with it? ? Now the behavior change gamified app is coming to save the earth!!!!. It gamifies the driving process and motivates users to reduce their carbon footprint and to co-create eco-friendly environment. FuelGood tracks your driving and offers tips on how to improve gas mileage. The feedback system is designed to help you beat your personal best and offers different journeys over similar distances to see how fuel consumption is improving.

3. Nike+

This might be the most popular fitness app you’d like to use everyday-Nike plus, which enables users to track their physical activity and rewards them with points they call “NikeFuel”. It sets a fitness goal for users to challenge themselves and brings out their competitive nature by allowing the to share their accomplishments with friends. The more NikeFuel they earn, the more awards, trophies and surprise gifts they earn.

Gamification in edcuation - a real life example

I am living in Spain since September and trying to give my best to learn Spanish, no matter if outside the university or within the classes.

Being just 4 people in class, we all have to participate but at the end it doesn’t matter what your answer is, they are no points for right answers. But in my last session things changed… Being 2 Germans and 2 Italians we split in two groups and everything we did turned out to be a Competition.

We played 3 games…

The first two have been related to “por/para” and each group had to create questions for the others. Every correct answer was worth a point and resulted in thinking more about answers and questions, simply to beat the others.

This kind of incentive resulted in a Leaderboard in which unfortunately the Italians have been leading.

But in the final game we still had the chance to turn it around. Every time one of the team members had to go to the board, received a sentence including the usage of “por/para” as well as past tenses, had to draw it while the other was trying to figure out the words, forms and order.

Due to being in a competition, trying to win the challenge with receiving the last missing points everybody was focused on the point and tried to be as fast and precise as possible.

Linking this real life experience to business we can see at http://www.duolingo.com how to use gamification in the education business. Loosing hearts for giving incorrect answers, practice against the clock and move up the “duolingo leaderboard” while learning Spanish at the same time…

By the way the German team won the game at the end but all of us gamified their Spanish J

Enterprise Gamification Design (5)

Step 5: Manage, Monitor and Measure

Managing, monitoring and measuring are essential elements in order to run a program. Indeed, gamification is and has to be run like that. The players motivation has to be monitored at the same time as the mission needs to be managed in order to achieve the goals aimed thanks to specific mechanics that have to be measured continuously.

However these three crucial elements are not alone. We also have to mention that in any enterprise, there are several ethical and legal issues that we have to take into consideration because they have a direct impact on gamification. Nowadays we often hear about users' privacy and users' protection. The same rules apply for workers. Though they can change from a country to another from a legal point of view. Any project undertaken in any company requires a certain level of ethic. Therefore, ethic in gamification becomes another crucial element of any project. Gamification is not a tool to manipulate worker, it is only used to motivate and engage workers.

Thus gamification can be identified as a process wherein the worker is considered as a player and wherein the goal of the process is to the player to feel positive emotions such as trust, fun and delight.