From Risk to Return: What Founders Should Understand about Gamified UX

Every business, especially those that rely on continuous consumer engagement, should continually look for new ways to stand out against competitors and address the desires of their customers. One effective way to achieve this is through a gamified user experience.

Gamifying content is a tactic that can aid a multitude of different sectors, from online casinos to productivity apps, but it doesn’t come without its risks. In this article, we’ll break down some of the key mechanics involved in gamified content and explore how they might be able to aid your business, alongside touching on some of the risks to be aware of.

Rewarding Users

This is one of the simplest and yet most effective ways to gamify UX. By rewarding customers for engaging with your content, you are helping them to create a motivation for doing so. This also allows for dopamine to be released in the user's brain, which makes them infinitely more likely to repeatedly engage.

One only has to look at the brand-new casinos for June 2025 to see this in action. These casinos begin interacting with their users by rewarding them in the form of welcome bonuses and free spins. This not only helps create a trusting relationship between the founder and the user, but it also allows for these sites to stand out against their competitors.

However, it is important that rewarding users comes from the right place, and is not just a tactic your business uses to reel people into your product. Rewards should be utilised as a way to foster customer engagement, not to make up for a subpar business, or simply to increase the number of users.

Progress Bars

This is another feature that speaks to the psychology of users and can help increase user engagement with your business. Progress bars help users feel a sense of progress within whatever it is they are engaging with, making them more likely to continue doing so. Progress bars also act as a positive feedback loop, an aspect of gaming that is well studied, often implemented, and refers to when a user's actions while engaging with a product directly affect something within the product itself.

Progress bars can be especially useful in productivity or finance-based businesses, especially those in app form. This is because the users of these services have told you, simply by opening the app, that they want something. Whether it’s to clean the house and do their laundry, or meet their saving goals, they already have a goal, and your business is in a position to aid them in reaching it. Progress bars allow users to see their progress as they move closer to their goals, and this not only gamifies the product they are engaging with, but also their own lives.

However, progress bars can certainly be used for the wrong kinds of things in businesses and become exploitative. You should ensure that any progress bar you place in your product is there for the user to keep track of their own goals, not your business's. Progress bars for the amount of money spent with your business, for example, probably isn’t a good idea.

Unlockables

Unlockables are another great way to gamify your content and increase user engagement. Everyone loves a surprise, whether in the real world or digitally. Providing unlockables to users works, psychologically, in much the same way as rewarding them, but with the philosophy of progress bars added in. Hiding the content that is locked, by having it exist behind a digital padlock or present, for example, is another great way to create a sense of excitement in users.

Like a progress bar, unlockables are great for content that actively wishes to improve an individual’s life. Whether that’s through helping them with many of life’s tasks or providing them with some recreational gaming time. They allow you to set up a goal for users, which can be tracked using a progress bar, and then immediately reward them for reaching these goals.

One thing to keep in mind when adding unlockables to your business is what content you intend to put behind the ‘locked box.’ Useless or poorly thought-out prizes are a surefire way to ensure your customer never wishes to engage with your content again. The prize must meet the effort that was needed to unlock it, and in an ideal world, it should exceed it.

Gamified Content Can Revitalise Your Business if Done Right

Gamifying content can be a highly effective method of increasing customer engagement and speaking to a wider audience, but it must be done with the right intentions. If you think of using this tactic as a sole way to reel more people in, but do not care about how they engage with the product, it isn’t going to work and might even turn some people away from your product. Instead, gamifying content should put the consumer first and speak to whatever it is they are looking to get out of your content.