Sometimes I find it hard to stay motivated to keep working or continue daily habits and routines. Unlike video games, there may not be any incentives, visible progress, or immediate rewards while working towards our goals.

Gamifi combines task planning and habit tracking with role-playing aspects by rewarding the completion of real-life tasks with level experience, gold, and items for the user’s in-game character. Players can hold one another accountable for finishing quests through the Expedition Party and read a Daily Summary of their wins. This app aims to encourage productivity and make work fun.

In developing this gamification app mockup, I went through a user-focused design process; reviewing an existing similar app, Habitica, interviewing ideal users and developing personas, creating a wireframe and user scenarios, designing a prototype, and conducting usability tests.

Habitica is a productivity app and role-playing game founded by Tyler Renelle in 2013, inspired by a need for help with his habits and self-help books, including The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, covering habits and productivity. It started as a tiny colour-coded Google Docs spreadsheet that grew too complex and consequently programmed into a website. HabitRPG, as it was initially named, was eventually shared with his friends, and with their encouragement, he introduced this idea to Reddit and other platforms. It brought massive traffic to his site, so he started a Kickstarter campaign to save the servers and build a mobile app for it with new features.

Habitica, designed as a role-playing game for your to-do list, aims to gamify your life by turning real-life tasks into in-game quests that level up and reward a personalized avatar upon successful completion. The app attempts to motivate its users to build productive habits and bring enjoyment to accomplishing goals.

The primary audience for this app that builds on a rewards system appeals to the younger generation who enjoy playing video games and are fans of retro games. The interface reflects that of a 16-bit roleplaying game while wanting help with productivity and organization in the real world.

Habitica improves your habits by playing a game. The core solution of the app is to incentivize tasks by visualizing your progression through an in-game character. The hook is that it makes work fun and rewarding.

According to Yu-Kai Chou's gamification framework, the Octalysis, I determined that three of the Eight Core Drives of Gamification incorporated in Habitica make the app successful in encouraging productivity:

When users set and complete tasks, they progress more in the game, gaining experience to level up and money to build their avatar with new gear. They are driven by growth towards a goal as they feel a sense of accomplishment from it.

Habitica is an engaging app that allows players to customize their characters. tasks, and rewards. This Core Drive emphasizes play as the creative process brings about happiness.

Habitica currently has over four million players, and users can create guilds and go on quests together. The community allows them to collaborate, compete, and hold one another accountable. When fighting monsters with your party, for example, failing to meet a task will cause everyone to lose health.

The app is successful in helping users form strong habits while having a lot of fun doing it. Like all video games, players feel motivated and gratified to complete quests.

Habitica's major weakness is its interface, which makes setting up tasks challenging and time-consuming. Because it is not so simple, it may deter new users from trying this habit tracker.

Although Habitica offers excellent customization, the 16-bit, retro game aesthetic remains. The concept of gamification appeals to a greater audience than just retro-gamers, and therefore, other apps of similar nature can focus on different target groups.

My app will be similar to Habitica. It uses similar concepts of gamification to motivate players to accomplish their tasks, including a personal avatar that levels up and earns money for gear and forming parties to hold accountability.

Different from Habitica, my app will target fans of anime MMORPGs rather than retro games; the completion of tasks will level up skills instead of the avatar as a whole so that you can see what skills you are explicitly working towards, there will be an integrated focus timer to avoid distractions by keeping you off your phone and also give rewards as well as an auto-fill feature of example skills/habits/tasks for assistance.

Wireframe & User Scenarios

The overall feedback from the interviews for the Figma Gamifi mockup was quite positive. However, the users experienced similar navigational issues whereby the Daily Summary, Character, and Item Shop screens were difficult to find. To fix these, I would attach a view reminder to the Daily Summary icon at the end of the day, make the Character page accessible from both the home screen and Profile screen through the profile icon, and have an Item Shop button in the Profile screen.

I would also make the following additions to Gamifi:

• Personalized avatar progression with RPG elements.
• Integrated focus timer to reduce distractions.
• Auto-fill for skills and habits to assist new users.
• Community accountability through party quests.