Gamify Your Personal Training App
The fitness app market is becoming more and more competitive. Software development companies are creating personal training apps that tap into the increasing popularity of smartphones, wearable technology, and wellness. But, there is a way to compete. It’s a process known as gamification.
This process involves using gaming features in non-game apps. Among those features are recurring leaderboards, social sharing, and digital storytelling.
Boost User Engagement with Recurring Leaderboards
Leaderboards are visual displays showing the rank of each person using gaming software. They encourage users to compete, and they boost engagement as a result of doing so.
To incorporate leaderboards into your fitness app, you should equip the app with features such as real-time ranking, a simple format, and competitions that have an end date.
When a user overcomes an obstacle in a gamified fitness app, the app automatically requests a ranking change from the server hosting the software and provides a visual display of the latest leaderboard data. This real-time display of data is shown in a standardized, easy-to-understand format that enables the user to interpret the leaderboard format and monitor his or her ever-changing position.
Recurring leaderboards can be updated and refreshed on a regular basis, enabling goal-oriented users to obtain a top-ranking position when a competition ends.
Fitness enthusiasts will be motivated by the time-sensitive nature of app-based competitions. That’s a great reason to equip your personal training app with regularly-scheduled competitions.
To integrate a recurring leaderboard into your app, you must utilize an application programming interface (API) known as representational state transfer (REST). This API facilitates coherent data transmission between the user and the server, thereby allowing users to see their rankings change as they move up and down the table.
Top fitness apps such as Samsung Health and Google Fit already include recurring leaderboards.
Promote Your Brand Through Social Sharing
Users who overcome the gaming challenges in your personal training app might want to share the news with their family, friends, and followers. That’s why you should integrate social sharing functionality into your fitness application. By doing so, you will enable your users to post their fitness app achievements on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
Such behavior will benefit you by enabling you to increase your fitness app’s brand visibility and extending your reach to new audiences. Ultimately, this will improve the likelihood of your generating more leads and inviting more users to your app download page.
To make social sharing possible, you must first allow external applications and websites to pull data from your software platform. When you use a dedicated social media API, your users will be able to link their fitcom accounts to their social media profiles. Once this synchronization of credentials takes place, your users will be encouraged to share their achievements whenever they make noteworthy progress from daily workouts.
Captivate Your Audience with Digital Storytelling
You can tell digital stories by integrating your fitness app with 3D visualization systems and live streaming solutions. Stories elicit empathy, excitement, and engagement. Highly visual story-based fitness apps captivate users, distracting them from the physical toil of working out.
These apps immerse audiences in animated landscapes, enabling users to make decisions and follow different in-game pathways. As these users interact further with virtual worlds, they become more detached from the reality of their fitness regimen.
According to a recent paper published in the Journal of Motor Learning and Development, people can perform better during workouts by focusing on something other than physical exertion.
Zombies, Run! is a prime example of a fitness app that has taken full advantage of storytelling gamification. Users of this ultra-immersive workout game are transformed into heroes and tasked with completing a series of physical missions in virtual environments.
As they overcome these post-apocalyptic challenges and listen to the accompanying audio track, they delve deeper and deeper into the adaptive story.
The intrigue and the distraction it provides have helped make Zombies, Run! into a popular and profitable app.
If you want to take digital storytelling to another level, consider using an avatar generation suite in your app. This suite will enable your users to generate and customize 3D versions of themselves. They will then be able control their avatars and use them to explore the story-based fitness landscape that you create.
To implement avatar features in your app, you will need to hire a graphics and animation development company, ideally one that specializes in Unity framework design. This partner will help you create an immersive 3D avatar architecture that will look good on next-generation gaming consoles.
Why Gamify Your Fitness App?
Retaining the bulk of your fitness app users won’t be easy. Recent studies have shown that a third of fitness tracking technology users give up on their workout routines within six months. The reason is that a lot of people don’t feel that working out is fun.
So, make it fun. Gamify your personal training app by including features such as recurring leaderboards, social sharing, and digital storytelling. Those features will motivate your users to work out. This will help them remain on track with their fitness goals, bolstering your user retention rate in the process.
Optimize Your Fitness App with Custom Game Integration
Want to provide a seamless gamification service? If so, you must augment your expertise with a custom fitness business management software specialist.
A skilled developer will be capable of integrating the REST, social media, and other necessary APIs required to combine your fitness services with gaming features.
Your specialized partner will also help you incorporate email, text, and push notifications into your app. This will enable you to alert your users of any upcoming fitness classes, worthwhile discounts, and gamification updates that may entice them to return to your app after prolonged inactivity.
Author Bio: Tyler Boykin The Vice President of Sales at Chetu, Inc., a global, custom software development company, where he oversees the Hospitality & Travel, Transportation, Events & Meetings, and IT Service Management accounts, as well as a myriad of partner tools. A graduate of the University of West Georgia, Tyler joined Chetu in 2013 where has risen through the ranks of the sales department and helped the company grow into an award-winning organization.