3 important UX lessons I learned from video games

Why am I addicted to video games? What is it that makes them so irresistible that I come back to them again and again, even when I lose? No, I don’t want to quit playing, but I want to leverage that “addictive property” to make better products.

I play Call of Duty and a few other cool games on my gaming console pretty much every day. There’s a unique quality in these games that will energize you and relax you at the same time. But that’s not the biggest aspect that fascinated me about video games.

When I started playing the new COD Mobile game for the first time, something astonished me. It was the point that how quickly I learned to play a new game that I’m not familiar with at all!

After installation, you open the game right in the middle of a training arena. There’s a commander that acts as your guide/companion and quickly teaches you everything you need to know to start the training. You go step by step, playing mini-missions and you get familiar with the setting, buttons, and commands at the same time. The mini-missions get more advanced as you play more and you can see that you’re getting a hang of it.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

That’s right, I just played a game and learned it at the same time, quite enjoyably I might add. I couldn’t find any other software product that I can say I enjoyed learning how to work with it.

From the first day the first software product was born, a big problem showed itself: Working (especially learning to work) with these software products is way too hard, complicated, and very time-consuming.

Nobody enjoyed working with those software programs. Even programming was too much of a hassle at that time. For many years, programming was a low-paying job and was considered as boring as the job of a typist. All of this changed when video games were born.

Video games had the same problem and because of that, they had a rocky start. Video games were too complicated, especially for new users. So they failed for a long time, until some studios like Nintendo, changed the game.

Lesson #1: First impressions matter more than you can imagine

The worst thing about creating video games is that you get only one chance! Either early adopters love you or hate you and they make up their minds in just a few minutes after playing your game. Most games' success is determined in the first month of their release, which is not imaginable for any other software programs or hardware products.

This huge pressure to please their audience fast made video games pioneers of user experience! Every successful video game excels at only two points:

1. Enjoyable user onboarding: Makes you learn the game in a way that you fall in love with it.
2. Addictive by design: Makes you addicted to the progress that you’re making in the game, so you come back to it again and again.

It wasn’t only the game that should be enjoyable. It was everything! The loading screen must be jaw-dropping, the menus should be eye-catching, and even the character names and style should be as wonderful as possible. Everything inside the game, including all tutorials, are “gamified”.

Later in the 1980s, some smart software companies adapted these success-proven methods and revamped their products with better user onboarding, loyalty incentives, and growth hacking techniques. Thus Gamification was born.

Take a good look at what happens the first time you play a game. Every successful game has the same formula here to get you to learn their game.

They will drop you inside a demo area (with no real repercussions on the game or your progress) and you just play the simple version of the very same game! Every once in a while, a voice, a companion, or something will tell you what to do next, and when you do it, you’ll get a reward! You’ll get familiar with its environment, learn the game, its objectives, and at the same time, you’re getting more and more invested, because of all the good incentives they rewarded you.

Now replace the word game with your product. Every product’s user onboarding should as enjoyable as this. This gamified user onboarding is not only effective to get users to be familiar with our product but actually shows them how they can use it to their benefit.

These are the most important steps and tips on creating a gamified user onboarding:

• I’m not talking about any visual tutorials, videos, or pop-ups at all! They’re so boring. The main point is to use the product itself, not show how to use it. You need to play the game to learn it!
• The worst thing that could happen here is to include unnecessary steps in our onboarding and make our users confused.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

Pascal

The onboarding should be as short as possible and explain exactly what the user wants, not what you think they want. Distinguishing these two is very hard and requires lots of user monitoring and feedback.

• One of our goals here is to enable “positive churn”. The user should quickly come to a conclusion on if our product is what they’re looking for or not. This kind of churn is not only bad, but it’s actually a good advertisement as it shows our product cares about solving the user’s problem and creates a good memory of our product for our users.
• Don’t ever show an empty dashboard to your users. Have you ever looked for the start button in a game? Engage the users from the start when you want them to be engaged.
• Level by level onboarding: As your users use your product more and more, show them more advanced features. Engage them to learn more use cases about your product in their fields. This way you’re making power users for your products without being annoying.

One of the good examples here is the popular spelling check service, Grammarly. When you sign up for the time for their services, they automatically show you a demo document with lots of spelling and grammar errors. Then they show you how you can improve that documentation, word by word, with their suggestion. Instantly, you both learn how to work with Grammarly and you see the benefits of this service.

Another example is what we’re doing at Formaloo. We don’t show new users an empty dashboard, instead, we create an example app right inside their dashboard with demo data, with step by step guide on what it is, and how you can customize it to make it your own. So they can see it in action.

Lesson #2: Make your product irresistible and addictive

In addition that games are entertaining, the real attribute that urges us to go back again and again to play them is the feeling of achievement and progress that they gave us. Every time we finish a mission or level up, we get a fresh shot of endorphins in our veins. That’s what makes them addictive.

We can replicate this feeling of progress and achievement for our users in our product too with the use of gamification elements combined with a killer strategy.

Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance the product experience by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users.

We have 7 main elements in gamification that are deployable in every product imaginable:

1. Goals/Objectives: Give users a sense of purpose, success, and accomplishment.
2. Rules: Repetitive, continuous limitations give users structure.
3. Feedback: Show users their progress through progress bars, badges, levels, etc. You need to show them how they can achieve their goals, and what’s the best way, and alert them about what they’re missing out inside and outside the product (marketing automation).
4. Rewards: Reward users for their time and effort through badges, points, leaderboards, and even monetary rewards, like credit inside your product that they can spend to upgrade. Rewards are best designed when they’re aligned with both the user’s needs and your product KPIs.

One of the best examples of a great reward is what Dropbox did when it started. They gave you 2GB cloud storage and if you referred Dropbox to a friend, they reward you another 500MB and also gave your friend another 500MB bonus. Their KPI (more users) and users’ need (more storage) were perfectly answered.

5. Motivation: Give users a reason to act through intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. You can trigger their curiosity, or give them rewards if they test and use certain aspects of your product.

6. Freedom of choice: Best games let you play freely. Don’t limit your users or put them in a box. Don’t force them to participate in any way. Don’t let even gamification be a limit for your users.

7. Freedom to fail: Nobody likes a game that you cannot fail in it. Give users the opportunity to try again when they fail.

One of the best products that used all these 7 elements perfectly in their product is the popular language learning app, Duolingo. Duolingo's entire product is the perfect harmony of great UX practices and gamification methods.

In each step, Duolingo tries to engage and motivate you by putting you in competition with your friends and giving you nice shiny incentives every step of the way. They also corporate a great FOMO (fear of missing out) feeling inside their app, so you have to learn by their app every day, otherwise, you’ll lose your daily streak and lose your place on their leaderboard.

When you’re using all these elements and practices, it’s very easy to forget the first and most important goal of gamification.

The goal of gamification is not so we can generate more revenue from our products. The goal is not even to make our users more loyal. These are all its results. The main goal of gamification is to make our product easier, more enjoyable, and more engaging for our users.

Lesson #3: Enable each user to reach what they need as soon as possible

Old video games were very hard. Soon they found out that people love games that are very easy at first but get trickier step by step.

The same rule applies to all software products. Your product should be super simple and easy to use and complex use cases and features should show themselves later, to then an experienced power user.

The ideal point to design your gamification is to imagine your perfect user. Then imagine that they never touched anything even remotely similar to your product. For example, imagine they only use Whatsapp and Tiktok, don’t really know what an email is, and never used an online software platform before.

The next step is to determine what’s your product’s real value for this specific user, step by step:

• What would they like to see first when they sign up?
• What would be the first thing they would do in it?
• What are you solving for them?
• In their mind, what are the steps?

Finding answers to these questions is very hard. All of us know our own products very well, so we suffer from the “curse of knowledge”. We’re unable to even imagine what’s it like not to know. However, you can find these answers by closely monitoring your users and tracking their behaviors inside your product.

It’s best to do these with complete strangers, your team and colleagues are not a good focus group. They might have prejudices that throw the results off.

Based on the activity of our users, and tracking of their behaviors in our product, we can then segment our users into different groups. Now the questions are a little bit different:

1. Why exactly this specific segment of users are using our product? What do they need? What’s the reason behind it?
2. This specific segment of users expect to see what in this stage? What about the next stage? Where are they getting confused? What’s missing in each stage of our product for this segment?
3. In each stage, what should this segment do? What are they expecting to do? What should we change so the answer to these questions becomes the same?

The final step is, based on answers to these questions, we design a gamification system (or algorithm) for each of our major segments, by using the 7 elements mentioned above.

The biggest mistake that even gamification experts make, is that they focus (and give rewards) on aspects and activities that are beneficial for the product or the company, but not so much for the user!

The best gamification system is a system that translates the product’s benefits into the user’s benefits.

Thank you for reading this post, I would love to hear your feedback and your experiences regarding this post. If you want to contact me or ask me any questions, here is my LinkedIn, I would be happy to hear from you.