Simple Gamification Achievement Badges With Trophy

Achievements are a key part of the gamification strategy of popular consumer-facing apps like Reddit and Nike Run Club. These applications reward users with achievement badges for completing specific actions, keeping users engaged and encouraging them to use the app more often, boosting retention.

Types of Achievements

Product teams use a number of types of achievements to motivate users to take specific actions. Here we’ll outline the different types of achievements and how to use them.

Multi-stage Achievements

Multi-stage achievements reward users for taking the same action an increasing number of times. For example the Nike Run Club app uses multi-stage achievements based on the total distance run by each user. It rewards users with a new badge every time they unlock a new running milestone.

This encourages users to continue using the app and helps them build personal equity in their running journey.

One-off Achievements

One-off achievements are more suited to rewarding users for taking specific actions that users can only take once. For example Reddit rewards users with a one-off achievement for securing their account with an email or phone number.

Streak Achievements

Lastly, achievements can be driven by a user's streak, rewarding users for reaching increasing streak lengths. For example the Nike Run Club app uses streak achievements to reward users for reaching streak lengths from 3 days to 12 months.

Powering Achievements With Trophy

Trophy is a developer-friendly platform for building engaging gamification experiences into any mobile or web application. It has support for multi-stage, one-off and streak achievements and can automatically keep track of all users’ achievements without any custom code. Additionally, it allows you to add new achievements, or modify existing ones using the Trophy dashboard, preventing back-and-forth code changes.

Trophy can also host achievement badges for you on a global CDN, and has purpose-built APIs to help you build achievements UI within your application.

Best Practices For An Achievement Badges System

Motivating

It’s important to ensure all achievement badges that you implement in your application are aligned with users’ core incentives. This ensures that achievement badges are naturally motivating without feeling like an unnecessary gimmick.

Balanced

Achievements should reward both first time and power users alike. It shouldn’t be possible for first time users to unlock all achievements within their first week, leaving them without motivation for the rest of their journey. Likewise, achievements shouldn’t be so hard to unlock such as to provide no motivation at all.

Engaging

Celebrate when users unlock achievements by sending them gamified emails and push notifications. This extends the user experience outside your app whilst reminding users to come back and keep up their progress.

Personalized

Driving achievement badges using zero-party user behaviour tracking ensures that all achievements follow each user's unique journey and never feel generic.

Shareable

Encourage users to share their achievement badges with friends on social media to promote organic user-generated content and drive growth. Use engaging and well-balanced badges that users can be proud to share.

Trophy provides achievement badges at scale

Trophy provides scalable APIs and SDKs built from the ground up with features designed to best aid building gamification experiences like achievements and streaks with no custom code.

Create a free account and start adding achievements to your application using our developer-first APIs in just a few lines of code.