Motivational Design Beyond Gamification

For a while, the term gamification was everywhere. Startups and corporations alike rushed to add points, leaderboards, and badges to their products, hoping to “hack” engagement. But over time, this trend faded. Why? Because most of these implementations were shallow. They treated engagement as a trick rather than a fundamental design principle.

1. Motivational Design

Motivational Design isn’t about adding game mechanics into none-game applications for the sake of it. It’s about understanding why people take action in the first place. It’s about tapping into the psychological triggers that make experiences compelling. Some of these are intrinsic—people engage because it feels meaningful. Others are extrinsic—rewards and incentives push them forward. Think about the products you personally love. What keeps you coming back?

• Is it a sense of progress—the feeling that you're constantly improving?
• Is it a sense of ownership—the fact that you've invested time and effort into something?
• Is it social connection—because you're part of a larger community?
• Or is it just that the experience is fun, unpredictable, and exciting?

Different products excel in different areas. But the best ones tend to incorporate multiple motivators—intentionally or not.

2. Understanding the 12 Core Motivators

Ultimately motivation can be categorised into 12 different motivators. Each of these motivators plays a role in why people stay engaged with products.

1. Purpose & Meaning: The product helps users identify meaningful goals, contributing to themselves or others.
2. Challenge & Competence: The product offers challenges that grow with the user's abilities and provides opportunities to improve.
3. Completeness & Mastery: The product allows users to complete tasks and track their achievements, fostering a sense of mastery.
4. Autonomy & Creativity: The product gives users choices and the ability to express themselves or create new content.
5. Relatedness: The product enables users to connect, interact, and collaborate with others, fostering a sense of community.
6. Immersion: The product offers an engaging narrative or experience that fully captures users' attention.
7. Ownership & Rewards: The product allows users to own virtual goods or gain rewards for their effort, motivating continued interaction.
8. Unpredictability: The product offers varying tasks, challenges, or rewards, keeping users engaged through surprises.
9. Scarcity: The product provides rare or difficult-to-obtain rewards, motivating users to stay engaged for exclusivity.
10. Loss avoidance: The product creates urgency by making users feel they could lose valuable rewards or progress if they don’t act immediately.
11. Feedback: The product provides clear, immediate, and actionable feedback, guiding users on their progress and next steps.
12. Disruption: The product allows users to contribute positively to its improvement or innovation, while protecting against harmful disruptions like cheating.

This list is already long and each of the motivators would deserve an own article. But the key takeaway is this: The more you think about the motivators that drive your users, the more engaging your product will be.

3. Okay, but how do I start?

As a starting point, you can think of Motivational Design with this very simple framework:

• What actions do we want users to take?
• Why would they take those actions?
• How does this align with business success?

You can use this for a product as a whole, but also for individual features. For example, if you're building a fitness app, you might want users to log their workouts.

Why would they do that?

• Because it helps them track their progress and feel a sense of continously and mastery.

How does this align with business success?

• It keeps users engaged, coming back for more and wanting to buy a premium plan.

User Intention Canvas

One tool we like to use is the User Intention Canvas. It helps us to understand the users intentions, how we support them and how they align to business impact.

This is a great baseline to get a common understanding of the product and the users. And it doesn't take longer than one workshop to get the first version ready.

Brainstorm and iterate

Together in a team, we like using the Brainwriting 6-3-5 method to generate ideas for different motivators. Here is how it works:

1. Agree on a desired action you want to brainstorm around
2. Each person writes 3 ideas related to motivators in 5 minutes
3. Pass papers around, and build on top of the others’ ideas
4. Repeat 5 times to get a total of 108 ideas.
5. Discuss and cluster the ideas
6. Vote on the best ideas on effort vs. impact.

From there on, you can iterate and improve the concept and go into more details. For example you might take a deeper look into different user groups, or different phases (discovery, onboarding, retention, etc.) of the user journey.

4. Conclusion

There are many things you should consider when building a new product. But having a solid baseline of the motivators that drive your users is a great start. At the end of the day, successful products aren’t just well-designed—they are deeply engaging, rewarding, and built with human psychology in mind.

Now, it's time to put this in action and build something great! We are here to help you with that. From concept to design to development in record time. Get in touch and let's build something great together!