You’re doing Gamification Wrong: Dual Loops Explained
Core loops, dual loops, and variable reward scheduling explained in the context of product design (with examples).
Gamification is the process of implementing game mechanics in products to create user motivation and increase user engagement & retention. These mechanics leverage an individual’s desire for learning, social interaction, competition, achievement, status, expression, etc. depending on the particular mechanics being implemented.
We’ve seen an explosion of gamification in several industries. A while back there was a mass adoption across several industries. However, over time this has lost traction — which I believe is due to products failing to implement gamification well.
A common oversimplification of gamification involves a superficial sprinkle of points or badges on top of a product. This execution does not take into account true user behaviors and motivation.
The missing component? Core loops.
To create a meaningful gamification experience within a product, we must craft an engaging core loop consisting of two separate session loops (dual loops).
A core loop is a series of repeated patterns related to the core behavior a user goes through while using the product. A simple core loop has three repeating steps 1) action, 2) reward, and 3) expansion.
The user performs an action and is rewarded for it, and that reward helps them “expand” their growth or progression within the product. Between reward and expansion is “anticipation”, which is when the brain releases dopamine to the user. This is a huge part of what causes motivation, and “addiction” for lack of a better word.
Over repeated loops of anticipation and expansion, we begin to see “investment” into the product — which creates a sense of dedication and reduces the chances of the user leaving the platform.
In traditional video games, this is the sunk-cost feeling of creating a high-level character with awesome gear, and feeling hesitant to quit or switch to another game.
These core loops can be long (outer) or short (inner). Furthermore, a product can also contain multiple loops. The length of a loop refers to how long an action takes, how much friction is involved to complete an action, or how frequently an action can be completed.
A single long core loop within a product would not build true engagement, since the loop’s action would be too tedious or too infrequent. This means users cannot complete core loops often enough when first joining to create an “investment” or build habits.
A lot of products fail here due to the presence of a single core loop that takes too long or is too hard to complete.
For optimal engagement, a product needs to contain a dual loop consisting of smaller “inner” session loops resulting in a minor reward, and larger “outer” session loops resulting in a major reward.
These shorter inner core loops exit to lower the barrier to investment, provide a lot of initial progress towards expansion, and can be chained together & done more often compared to outer loops.
The combination of having multiple inner loops, and a few outer loops, allow users to spend as little or as much time as desired using the product while still feeling productive, and that their time was well spent.
So with all these core loops leading to minor and major rewards — another important concept to understand is the “variable reward schedule”. A few decades ago, B.F Skinner came up with the concept of “operant conditioning”, which examined how various rewards could influence the behavior of mice (and later on humans).
He found that mice were much more motivated to push a lever for food when there was a random chance for the food to be released compared to mice who received food after a consistent number of pushes.
This later became known as the Skinner Box experiment and formed the foundation of tons of addictive video games (e.g. Diablo, most MMORPGs, etc.). When applied to video games, we tend to spend a lot of time “grinding” for a rare item, because there’s a chance of receiving it. If the item was guaranteed to drop after a certain number of monster skills, we wouldn’t be as engaged. A great product example of this is how Robinhood gives new users a free random stock upon joining.
The next frontier of this dual loop is converting extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation, to avoid the over-justification effect — but that’ll be part two of this article (if the readers are interested).
Example
So let’s take all these concepts and create an example dual loop for a restaurant review app called “Kelp”. When crafting a dual loop for a product, we need to generate a list of actions that are beneficial to the product’s success & drive the right KPIs.
Each reward needs to be tied to an individual core loop. We need to spend some time evaluating which actions are most beneficial, and receptive to our users. It’s not good practice to bloat the product with core loops that users aren’t interested in.
So for our examples let’s assume “have the user write a review for a restaurant” is the core loop we want to focus on.
If this was the sole core loop in the entire product, it would be doomed to fail. Even if the core loop led to a valuable real-life reward for the user, the lack of inner loops to supplement this outer loop would result in a poor gamification experience.
Users would have to exert a lot of effort or wait a long time to complete the core loop, resulting in poor engagement & retention.
The single outer loop in this example would not create engagement because the average user would not be able to complete a core loop as often as we’d like. Therefore we need to add at least one inner loop (or multiple inner loops) to create a true dual-loop experience, and leverage gamification for all its worth.
Let’s take this dual loop as an example. In addition to the outer loop, we’ve created an inner loop that has low friction, which all users can do at the beginning. This allows users to perform minor actions for minor rewards and work towards expansion, and then investment.
Given the concept of variable rewards, we must be mindful of which rewards are mapped to which actions. Minor rewards must be mapped to inner loops, and major rewards must be mapped to outer loops, with some degree of randomness. Users will be more inclined to complete loops over and over again for the anticipation of receiving their desired major reward.
It’s best if the minor rewards can help the user achieve their desired major rewards. For instance, in a tiered points program, a user can complete inner loops to receive points and rank up a tier; whereas their true desired reward chance increases at a higher tier.
Gamification when applied through dual loops is a powerful tool that creates numerous opportunities to motivate users toward the completion of certain actions. The goal is to use our core loops to create value for users through the completion of certain actions embedded in our core loops, which would also be beneficial for the business.
Ethical implementation of gamification is a trickier concept to tackle, but there’s a fine line for us to tread in the future, thus we need to understand these core principles now when considering how to develop our roadmap.
I’d love to hear examples in the comments of well-executed gamification experiences in digital products.
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