Gamification has been a hot topic for years in the software industry.

The basic idea is to make tasks more fun by turning them into some type of game,

but what does that really mean?

One way to look at gamification is through the lens of persuasive patterns.

Like other categories of patterns, there are many.

So we're just going to look at a few, but I encourage you to check out the notes for

more resources.

Let's get started.

It's difficult to define exactly what constitutes a game or gameplay.

You might say it's a set of problems to solve or a cycle of challenge and reward.

In any case, we can motivate users toward the completion of a challenge or

a goal by praising them and then providing them with a new challenge.

In this case, we'll use the example of an online school similar to Treehouse.

Let's say you've just finished a video like this one or a quiz.

What happens next?

Well, one way to motivate users to keep going is to show them

the progress they've made and give them some encouraging words.

So let's add some words, and

we'll say, you've been learning for

3 days in a row, keep it up.

And we'll make that bold and exciting and make the font bigger.

There we go.

And maybe add a check mark next to it to let them know this is a good thing.

And then we'll add a big graph here.

And then we'll add an arrow to complete the graph.

We'll remove the left arrow.

And then let's start it at the bottom,

have it end up at the top, and we'll add a little curve to this.

Here we're showing the user a graph of their progress to remind them of

their hard work.

In addition, we're telling them a small narrative about their progress that might

help motivate them to continue their learning and continue to be consistent.

However, sometimes a user might feel like their skill level has outpaced the task

at hand.

Or they might have repeated the same step so many times,

they need to break the routine.

In these cases,

you can use the persuasive pattern of challenge to re-engage the user.

Below the graph, let's add some text that encourages the user to reach for more.

So we'll add, A label here.

And we'll call this Extra Credits, and we'll put it down here.

Again, let's make this a larger font size.

And let's add maybe a star next to this.

And then let's add some paragraph text or a block of text here.

And we'll imagine that this says to go ahead and

recreate the same project, but may use a different front-end framework

than the one that's used in this course or something like that.

So these types of challenges should be used very carefully because

if users aren't being asked to do more, they might get bored.

But if they're faced with too many challenges on a regular basis,

they might start to feel overwhelmed, like they're not up to the task.

This is just a small example of gamification.

You might use points and leaderboards on a shopping website to encourage repeat

customers, or show a small graph that indicates the percentage of completion for

a user's profile page.

There's lots of ways to persuade users when the tasks are turned

into simple games.