When product teams copy-paste gamification, it can do more harm than good.
Many apps today use “gamification” as a shortcut... adding points, badges, leaderboards, or progress bars because they’ve seen them work elsewhere.
But few stop to ask
Are these the right levers for our users, context, or behavior?
Research clearly shows that these default elements dominate most digital products, while more nuanced approaches like cooperation, exploration, or narrative progression are rarely used.
Even more concerning, most implementations aren’t grounded in behavioral science or any sort of strong evidence based hypothesis, which means they rarely align with what we know from health behavior change, motivation, research.
The result for many companies is a waste of resources and lack of engagement - or worse yet, uninteded consequences..because they invested in surface-level mechanics without defining the behavioral outcome they want or the mechanism of action behind it.
From my experience in advising companies, this isn’t a design skills issue, because most designers are great at creating well designed products...the real gap is in understanding how a behavior is tied to a driver which is tied to a tactic which is tied to an outcome, which is solving a challenge or creating an opportunity.
While I can't work with all the companies that reach out... here are a few questions you might want your team to ask related to gamification:
1. What specific behavior are we helping users achieve? 2. Which emotional and personal drivers are at play? 3.
Which evidence-based techniques actually fit this behavior?
Without that clarity, gamification can backfire, undermining intrinsic motivation, trivializing serious conditions, encouraging cheating, or even exposing sensitive data.
I’ve shared six practical principles in the carousel for you to consider...
If your team could apply just one of these principles in your product tomorrow, which would it be and why?