Ideas on how to make our app addictive

It has been two weeks since our final project started. Our group is building a health app with digital pet element. During our last consultation Prof provided us some tips on making our app addictive. After further research I summarize the points below and hopefully we will be able to achieve it at the end of the development.

First of all, our app must have a NICE user interface. A successful app should either be cool or cute on first glance otherwise users are like to delete it right after download. Considering that our app is categorized to be a Health & Fitness app, it is likely to be on the cute side.

Second, user should not encounter too much trouble for on-boarding. A bad example for it will be Visor which included unnecessary Facebook login process. We will first allow user to use our app without login and only when user want to switch between devices we will ask for their Facebook or WeChat account.

Furthermore, in order to remind the existence of our app to users, we would come up with certain strategy to entertain user even they are not exercising. Something like a combat among friends will be great. The combat should be directly related to users health data and therefore encourage users to do more exercise. Other than that some interaction between users and their digital pets will be fun as well.

Story line is also important to keep our users. As Prof mentioned during our last consultation, if user feel that they have invested a large amount of time and emotion into our app, they will likely to be more loyal, Therefore, we will include a EXP and level system into our app firstly to help users keep track of their exercising history and secondly enhances the connection between their digital pets and their reality life.

Besides story line, challenges is another element full of excitement and we would like to make good use of that. We would let users set their daily exercise goal and they will be rewarded if they manage to finish the goals. We hope that the sense of accomplishment will encourage them to keep exercise.

Last but not least, game balance is important for any app involving competition. As a gamer myself I fully understand the desperation of somehow losing a game that you are so confident to win due to imbalance. Therefore, since we would like to introduce ability difference into our Mi combat, it would be necessary for us to test our math formula before final deployment. Maybe some kinds of mathematical model need to be build to ensure balance. For more about game balance, I would do further analyze and discuss in next week's blog.