In 2017, video games became a hundred billion dollar market. After acquiring Twitch for a billion dollars back in 2014, (now with more than 100 million users), Amazon recently bought yet another video gaming company, Curse.

电子游戏已经成为一种现象，有些游戏现在被认为是运动, 世界各地的体育场馆都挤满了电子竞技比赛. 娱乐软件协会(ESA)报告说, as of last year, 65% of US households are home to at least one person who plays more than three hours of video games every week.

If game designers can design video game experiences that make people this engaged, what can product designers 从这些游戏设计理念中学习，帮助他们设计出优秀的数字产品? It’s important to remember that these concepts are not limited to gaming but can be utilized across a variety of mediums.

In a recently published guide on the Toptal Design Blog, we talked about how designers can harness the power of gamification techniques. To round out those concepts, here are five useful game design concepts that can be applied to digital product design.

1. Create Meaningful Choices

There’s a concept in gaming called “meaningful choices,这通常出现在rpg(角色扮演游戏)中 The Witcher and Final Fantasy. These meaningful choices have permanent consequences in the game and typically come with a moral or social dilemma attached, creating an emotional connection between the players and the game elements.

Meaningful choices can create engaging user experiences too. Here’s an example:

During his “Designing for Trust” TED talk, Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of Airbnb, admits that the idea behind their product was neither new nor innovative since there were other companies at the time providing a similar service. However, what Gebbia considers their greatest asset was the understanding that their platform and brand should revolve not around the money part of the shared economy, but the human aspect of it.

Airbnb “builds products to let users get to know each other” as “an enabler for a meaningful experience,Airbnb的体验设计主管查理·奥夫曼在他的文章中写道, Designing for Trust. For instance, 当客人有兴趣住在主人的房子里时, the “introduce yourself” screen on Airbnb not only asks the user to reveal a little information about themselves but also helps them to formulate their answer by providing some starter questions, such as, “What brings you to Atlanta?”

On its mission to become an iconic brand， Airbnb坚信“品牌的力量是情感的”，所以，他们的 design principles are built around that belief. By prompting users to provide more personal and meaningful data, Airbnb is succeeding in creating an emotional connection，不仅是客人和主持人之间，也是用户和品牌之间.

2. Challenge the User

游戏之所以如此吸引人，部分原因在于它们的设计初衷是有趣的. However, achieving “fun” depends on, among other things, whether or not the game is challenging enough. If a game is too easy, players will get bored, but if a game is too hard, players will get frustrated.

As UX designers, we’re inclined to think that the products we design should be as easy to use as possible; however, making users sweat a little can actually boost engagement.

Let’s take a look at an example from Tinder.

Online dating has existed for over two decades—the concept of using the internet for romance is not foreign to people, so Tinder’s success was not due to the invention of something completely new (just like with Airbnb). 事实上，Tinder之所以流行，是因为它引入了“配对”.”

然而，大多数约会网站让用户可以很容易地相互发送信息, Tinder is the first to add a bit of a challenge by allowing users to chat only when both users swiped right on each other. 我们面临的挑战是创建一个诱人的个人资料，从而实现“匹配”.” It’s also worth noting that a zero-friction user flow tends to result in more undesirable messages, which in many cases can be the exact opposite of fun.

3. Keep Users Hooked in Engagement Loops

One of the reasons that video gamers play for hours while completely losing track of time is because games are designed to keep players hooked. Game designers do this by creating what’s known as an engagement loop.

Engagement loops follow a simple three-step cycle—motivation, action, and feedback这个概念在用户体验设计中的应用比你想象的要多.

Let’s take a look at how Facebook uses engagement loops to keep users addicted.

在上面的Facebook例子中，用户粘性循环是这样描述的:

• Motivation: Somebody shares an article that a user finds interesting; hence, 因为这是他们感兴趣的话题，所以他们会主动发表评论.

• Action: The user comments on the Facebook post.

• Feedback: Somebody responds to the user’s comment, and thus they either agree, disagree, or have something new to add. 简而言之，他们有一种重新启动订婚循环的情绪反应.

It’s generally a UX best practice to ensure that your engagement flows don’t overloop users by sending out too many notifications, as this will eventually start to annoy them. 大多数社交网络现在通过将相关通知分组在一起来避免这种情况.

4. Reward Users to Stir Up Motivation

The most engaging games are those that reward players for completing tasks in which they are intrinsically motivated to do so (in other words, awarding players with coins, tools, weapons, upgrades, and other in-game rewards). These rewards are for tasks that players naturally enjoy completing.

Steven Reiss was an American psychologist famous for his original ideas surrounding intrinsic motivation and understanding what activates the biological reward system in the human brain. 经过广泛的研究，他们采访了超过6个,000 people around the world, Reiss和他的团队提出了Reiss的16个基本愿望:

• Acceptance: desire for approval
• Curiosity: desire for knowledge
• Eating: desire to eat
• Family: desire to raise and care for children
• Honor: desire to obey a traditional moral code
• Idealism: desire to improve society
• Independence: desire to be autonomous
• Order: desire to organize
• Physical Activity: desire to exercise muscles
• Power: desire to influence
• Romance: desire for sex/love
• Saving: desire to collect
• Social Contact: desire for peer companionship
• Status: desire for social standing
• Tranquility: desire to avoid anxiety
• Vengeance: desire to exact revenge

当在创建过程中访问用户时，此列表是一个极好的参考资产 personas and empathy maps. Being able to pinpoint what exactly motivates users is a great way to design more efficient reward systems, as Twitter so aptly demonstrates.

Twitter cleverly created a reward system based on two of the most common intrinsic motivators used in video games: “power” and “status,” where the number of likes, 转发量和关注量被用来衡量用户在平台上的影响力. Twitter displays these metrics in plain sight as visual feedback, as if users were collecting points.

5. Let Users Master the Product Quickly

In the book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design，游戏设计师Raph Koster认为“乐趣只是学习的另一种说法.” The core of his argument is that fun is about learning our way towards mastery; therefore, 当一款游戏不再教会我们新事物或不再提供给我们新的可能性时, it stops being fun.

Successful games engage players quickly because they’re taught how to master the game’s basics early on. As a gaming concept this is called a “tutorial,” but in UX design, we call this “onboarding.” This game design concept isn’t exclusive to video games or gamified systems; for example, Slack is well known for its smooth onboarding flow.

Slack是一款基于云的团队通讯和协作工具. During its onboarding process, Slack shows users how to accomplish simple tasks (such as sending a direct message to a teammate) by using tooltips. 它还有一个“Slackbot”，像一个友好的导游一样引导用户通过应用程序. This is the first step towards mastery: learning the basics without worrying about making mistakes.

一旦用户熟悉了Slack的基本功能, 然后他们可以再深入一点，学习如何定制他们的个人资料, use emojis, and automate tasks with Slackbot. 一旦用户达到这个程度，他们就有40%的人掌握了Slack. 当用户深入使用Slack的API时，Slack才真正开始变得有用, which allows users to not only create and train their own bots but also to create a public Slack app that anyone can use.

Leveling up in this way is only possible because both Slack and video games make clever use of contextualized tutorials, rendering the onboarding process easy in order to transform the application’s usage into a habit. It’s only when users and players are comfortable and proficient in a routine that they’ll attempt to explore the next level, and this drives engagement further.

通过设计像Slack这样带有电子游戏UX设计元素的产品, which allow both novice and hardcore users to master the product on their own terms and customize their experiences, UX designers 能否设计出用户不会卸载、取消或忘记的数字产品.

Closing Comments

总而言之，我们把这五个部分分成了几个关键问题 product designers can ask when brainstorming ideas and concepts, 从游戏化技术中获得灵感，创造引人入胜的用户体验.

1. Create Meaningful Choices
   • 用户如何与产品或体验产生情感联系?
   • What kind of meaningful data can the product offer?
2. Challenge the User
   • 为了让用户更投入，我们该如何让产品具有内在的挑战性?
   • What “extra steps” would be beneficial to users?
3. Keep Users Hooked in Engagement Loops
   • How will the product keep users hooked?
   • What will the product’s engagement loop look like?
4. Reward Users to Stir Up Motivation
   • What motivates your users to engage?
   • 你如何设计一个针对这些动机的奖励系统?
5. Let Users Master the Product Quickly
   • How can we make the product easy to master for beginners, but not limiting for savvy users who advance quickly?

当我们深入研究什么是UX游戏设计以及如何利用它时, 我们可以利用这些知识作为用户体验和产品设计师. It doesn’t mean that the products that we design should necessarily include gamified elements such as badges, points, and rankings, but some of the most successful products in today’s world have become adept at user psychology and using game UX concepts to successfully boost engagement.