School of Information Systems

Turning Users Into Players Gamified UX

09 Jul 2025

Introduction 

UX or User Experience focuses on how the experience makes the user feel and how easy it is for the user to utilize an application, while UI or User Interface design complements it by focusing on the product’s appearance, presentation, and interactivity, shaping its overall look and feel. Gamification involves integrating game elements into non-game settings, such as websites, online communities, learning platforms, or business intranets, to boost engagement and participation. It applies game design principles and features like badges, leaderboards, points, and rewards to make activities more engaging, enjoyable, and interactive. A great gamification experience connects with emotions and guides users toward impactful, shared goals. 

Why is it needed? 

As we all know, playing a simple game is entertaining and relieves stress after a long day. Which is why UX designers have been implementing gamification to some of their projects with rewards that users will love. This will make users spend more time using their platform, some people even waste their sleep time to continue playing games for that gamification elements like badges, points, streaks and other things. Gamification does encourage a friendly competition among other users on the platform by completing a certain task and when you achieve enough, your name will be on the leaderboard rankings where many people can see.  

But not every application should apply gamification, it is not a one size fits all solution. With every gamification rewards like badges should have a continuous motivation for the user to keep on using the platform. Gamification shouldn’t be a need that users must do in order to continually use the platform, UX designers should implement it where users are still able to fully control their own behaviors. So, gamification is a really important aspect for a new platform app or website to attract new users and maintain them to use the platform for a long period of time. 

Successful gamification implementation 

To highlight the successfulness of gamification, we can see from the most famous language learning application like Duolingo. Founded by Luis von Anh desire to make education more accessible to people around the world, introducing their gamification style of language learning since the first release of the app. One of their gamification framework that they often use is the “Epic meaning and calling” where Duolingo will bombarded users with notifications where it will encourage them or call them to use the app again and learn some languages, this makes the user feel important and are quite funny engagement way where it becomes an internet meme.  

As we can see here, Duolingo has gamification elements like leaderboard, task, and rewards system to keep users using the application daily. Their system is that, when a user learns a task from their unit journey, they will earn xp which level up their progress and eventually will level up. The chest rewards will give the user some benefits like xp boost to earn an extra xp for the user after completing a task. 

One of other things to highlight is that the UI design should be interesting and goes well with the overall application design so that it would make sense. Their leaderboard and leagues might ignite some emotions within the user where being promoted gives the user to continue on excelling. But it does bring the fun where you can compete with your friends or families in a healthy environment through learning languages together. Basically every week there will be a competitive match with players around the globe. 

Duolingo has proved themselves on successfully implementing gamification to their application, enhancing the User Experience and it makes them the most popular language learning application on both Playstore and Appstore. Same like other kinds of games, Duolingo does have a store where people could spend points earned during learning sessions for other benefits like “Health” that could be used to continue on learning. But it does also bring an in-game purchase feature, where people could pay a subscription for an infinite health. 

As we can see here from the image above about the store page at Duolingo, which in my opinion, they managed to keep it balanced for a lot of users. In the game environment, there’s a common term called “Pay-to-win”, which basically means people could spend more in real life money in order to win or achieve something great in the game. Duolingo does not have that, even though they have the subscription heart but it won’t really change anything on the competitive leaderboards. 

 

To sum it up 

In conclusion to close the article, gamification is a common practice nowadays for basically any kind of platform. But there are still some things that still need to be considered and UI/UX designers shouldn’t always think about the game as the solution to everything, they will still need to prioritize the main functionality of their platform. Applying gamification does require non “pay-to-win” things in order to maintain a healthy competitive environment and just let it be a simple game. Lastly, gamified UX is a good innovation for a new app or web. 

References: 

Willy Kristian