I think yes. If you don't create an obvious avenue for the user to infer his development, he won't be able to do it.
You have to confuse the audience to bring in the sense of progress.
People learn by being challenged, confused, and by building something. Nobody learns by interfacing with an application that promises it.
But besides learning nothing, they can feel good about being engaged, by completing tasks, seeing progress bar moving, seeing number go up.
Someone that decides to interface with a learning app instead of learning the damn thing is doomed, will never learn anything at all. Just give them a sense of accomplishment so they can feel good about it. Without gamification what would the platform give them?
If don't help them cope with their inertia, there really is nothing you could do.
Maybe you are equating gamification with dark patterns?
Gamification is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a powerful psychological trick. Can definitely be used for good.
Working on performance often feels amazing because we can profile, identify clear bottlenecks and work to reduce them. When you manage to make number go down, you have a clear indication something went right. Maybe you didn't absolutely improve de code, but you made it better in a very specific way under a very specific lens. People like it because of this aspect, and it does feel a little bit like a game. There is a clear requirement and a clear specification. The game aspect makes it very enjoyable.
I suppose development against a test suite provides a similar experience. Feels good in a game-ish way.
Gamification is more related to the feels good than dark patterns, but obviously, the whole industry will ONLY be interested in exploiting practices. There is no incentive to make the user feel good, at all, without being pervasive.
If you care about your user, you should design around the user. Inevitably, you will think a bunch about what feels good.
If all you care about is the user learning, developing competence, you will offer no platform at all. The platform will tell them to close it and go do the thing.
If you want to motivate them, another story. If you want them to feel accomplished, another story. You're building a feels good, want to feel accomplished want to fool myself into learning app.s gamification is the whole point.
Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
31–40 of 125 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#32Gamification helps with growth and engagement but not necessarily learning. I have a feeling that a "calm" app would grow more slowly but if the experience and results are good, you could have more durable and satisfied customers, less churn, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#33Although it's in a different area, I wanted to mention https://calmcode.io/ as an excellent example of a calm learning platform. There is a whole movement around enshittification, and I see potential in this kind of app, even though it still seems to be a niche.
Creator of calmcode here, AskMeAnything[tm].
Do you accept contributions?
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#34Not doing subscriptions for an app that has ongoing server costs is going to bite you, you may want to reconsider that. Your biggest issue is going to be that language learning for adults is largely an unsolved problem. I know people with 1000+ day streaks on Duolingo who are nonetheless not fluent, and from everything I’ve read, it seems clear that spaced-repetition techniques are not sufficient (and possibly not ne…
It's solved, look up comprehensible input: https://www.dreaming.com/blog-posts/what-is-comprehensible-i...
The problem is duolingo is particularly horrible and is intended to get people addicted, not educate.
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#35To me, a learning needs some kind of gamification and engagement tricks. There is nothing calm about learning, you need the dopamine! Among other things, dopamine is the learning hormone, it is a problem when it makes you learn the wrong things, like "fentanyl is really great", or "I need to buy more stuff I don't need", but it is also what helps you learn useful skills and life lessons.
I remember my father, a teacher, who told me he viewed his job in the classroom as a performance art. His knowledge was secondary, if that's knowledge you want, just read a book, go to the internet, whatever, you don't need a teacher. But it is not very engaging, and a teacher's job is to make it more engaging.
So without engagement, you probably won't make a good learning app, but you can make the engagement entirely targeted towards learning and not monetization, which would be a very good thing.
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#36Yes, according to Duolingo's (obviously biased) CEO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6uE-dlunY
Found this episode fairly interesting (without being particularly interested or personally invested in the space)
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#37Please, de-gamify the universe of digital education, by all means.
There's no evidence that gamification is strengthening performance in any activity, other that creating a cheap dopamine effect.
Please, do it your own way.
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#38TL;DR you have to be like Duolingo only if you plan to monetize like them.
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I think it totally depends on your goals, let's try breaking down why Duolingo is doing what they're doing, and then we'll try to map it onto your own goals.
So, Duolingo monetises via mostly subscriptions, this means that their sales funnel is something like UA channels -> conversion to install -> conversion to subscription -> conversion to renewal.
Leaving out the first two steps (it's marketing I am not competent enough to discuss them), we arrive at "conversion to subscription". The only thing I'll mention regarding user acquisition is that we have to keep in mind, that users from standard marketing channels are always less motivated/interested in a product, that organic users, who are actively seeking the solution for their so called "pains".
In order to convert a user to a subscriber, one has to have an appealing value proposition, which for Duolingo is something like "learn the language in a really fun and engaging way", they support this proposition by including gamification elements, both mechanical (streaks, lives, mini-games) and narrative (cast of characters).
The perceived value for a user also becomes more apparent the more the user interacts with an app (see metrics like time spent, retention rate, stickiness). Thus, the aforementioned gamification mechanics also serve retention purposes (namely, the main thing - the streak) both between sessions and inside a single session.
So the more a user is with Duolingo, the more value she perceives in it ("sunken cost" fallacy also comes into play here), and the more the probability she will subscribe.
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Now, coming back to your question. From your post I see that you're talking about "today's market" so I assume you want to sell it somehow.
You face a choice:
- Go standard UA route, acquiring users via ads, this will potentially get you a lot of traffic, if you have money to spend. Downside: you have to have A LOT of money to spend in order to make positive ROI, as ad traffic is not as motivated, and you'll have hard time making these people convert to paid users without all that fluff Duolingo is doing. Sure "calm tech" is sort of popular thing nowadays, you can play off of that, but still, you have to convince these people to stay with you, learn the value of your thing and eventually pay for it.
– Target a niche in a non-traditional way, via Reddit (though it is not that non-traditional way nowadays), communities etc. Basically direct sales. This way might get you much more focused audience who will gladly be your paying customers. Those people will NOT need bells and whistles. Downside: you really have to nail the solution for them, or they'll get back to their custom Anki decks.
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#39No I think you should continue, frigging done with gamification of everything, I hope to just learn well
Re: Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
#40I tried building a learning app (iraproject.com) for students and eventually the market just pushed me towards gamification and traditional school methods. I held out for a year but at some point I needed to pay the bills. If you're able to I'd encourage you to stay true to your values but know that it takes a lot of time and patience to make it work.