Are you using gamification in your UX?

Rene from Ai Lamo reminded of something about Duolingo gamification. Gamify 2x daily use to combat churn Churn kills growth. Combating churn is a mix of: 1. Selling to the right person in the first place. 2. Having a great product that solves an ongoing problem. 3. Wowing them with great onboarding so they start using it. 4. Keeping them hooked on your product. This tactic is for #4. Duolingo is the best at gamification. They've turned what is one of the most boring and grueling things to do (learn a language) and made it fun and addicting. They do a ton right but this is about their Early Bird and Night Owl chests: If you complete a lesson before Noon, you'll get a Early Bird chest giving you an 2x boost to XP from lessons for 15 minutes. BUT you can't open it until 6PM. You get a push notification when it's ready to open. Then between 6PM and Midnight if you complete a lesson, you get a Night Owl chest (same reward) that you can only open it the next morning (again with a push notification). For this to work, Duolingo had to gamify in others ways first: Gaining XP let's you compete with friends & strangers. And people get super competitive about this. Every day you do a lesson you add to your streak. There are people with a streak of several years—my own record is ~500 days. Therefore, the reward is actually meaningful to people, and it costs Duolingo nothing to give. And the chests encourage using the app TWICE per day, not just once—and gives them an excuse to send you a push notification in a non-annoying way. Takeaway: A hooked user that uses your product multiple times per day is very unlikely to churn any time soon. Get creative with incentivizing frequent use. If you would like me to continue to write things like this here, let me know and I will continue.