3. Maintaining Engagement

Once users have formed an initial habit, your challenge shifts to sustaining engagement over time. Early enthusiasm will always fade, so your app must reinforce usage and prevent drop-off.

Prevent Drop-Off

Even your most engaged users will eventually lose motivation, or at the very least, miss a session or two and risk breaking their streak or some other gamification mechanic that you’ve implemented. When that happens, you’ll want to have a system in place that allows the user to gracefully resume usage with renewed motivation and minimal consequences—but not zero consequences, or they’ll feel like their progress is too cheap. This is a difficult line to walk.

"What we found out worked way better was a feature called earn back. Instead of just paying to restore your streak, users had to do a few lessons within a certain window, and then we’d give their streak back. It was such a retention winner. It feels like you’ve earned it—you deserve to have your streak back. We haven’t cheapened the streak because you’ve done something."​

—Jackson Shuttleworth, Retention Team Lead at Duolingo

Here are some tactics for preventing drop-off:

• Detect disengagement early – Make sure you’re tracking missed sessions, decreasing interaction, or slowing progress. Use these signals to trigger proactive interventions before the user has materially lost something (like a streak or leaderboard position). Interventions could be via email, push notifications, or adjusted difficulty levels.
• Allow graceful win-backs – When users break from their usage commitment, give them a way to restore their previous status gracefully (not cheaply). This will usually involve the user completing some more-difficult-than-usual version of their normal session in your app.
• Use dynamic difficulty levels – You never want users to quit due to the difficulty being consistently too high. This depends on the app, but where possible, increase and reduce difficulty dynamically based on the user’s performance.

Leverage Social Influence

Social features drive accountability and motivation, which in turn drive greater engagement and long-term retention in your app. Not every app needs a social component, but anytime the core value loop is one that you might imagine an entire friend group wanting to commit to, social features could be a good choice. A fitness app, for example, is broadly applicable. A guitar learning app may be too niche.

Here are some guidelines for implementing social features.

• Drive accountability – The core focus of the social component of your app should be driving users to keep each other accountable through nudges, leaderboards, and messages. Let them trash-talk with each other!
• Encourage sharing – Let users share their progress and achievements with friends in-app and on social media. This has the added benefit of driving more visibility of your app.
• Foster competition – Rivalry is what you want here. Pit users against each other in friendly competitions and challenges. Leaderboards make a lot of sense here.

Keep Content Fresh

It’ll be tempting to build out your gamification system and then move on to other things. But users will get bored with the same challenges, streaks, and rewards. Introduce some variety to keep things fresh, and to give them new things to share with friends and online.

• Introduce new challenges – Always be adding new lessons, workouts, or difficulty levels. This will depend a lot on the specific app.
• Leverage seasonality – Update your app over the course of the year with events and challenges in line with the season. New year events, annual recaps, summer challenges, and so on can add lots of variety and shareable moments.
• Embrace randomness – Predictability is boring. The occasional surprise challenge or reward can go a long way toward keeping a user on their toes and engaged. 

Avoid Common Pitfalls

Understand that this part of the Trophy Method is where there is the greatest risk of using tactics that cheapen the experience for users and lead them to quit. This is because you’ll be tempted to focus all your design and engineering effort on the initial process of aligning incentives and establishing a habit. This is understandable—most churn is going to happen within the first week of a user joining—but it’s important not to squander the opportunity you’ve earned during the long user arc that occurs after they’ve established their usage habit in your app.

Here are some important mistakes to avoid.

• Spamming notifications – Frequent, repetitive, bland notifications feel intrusive and train users to ignore your messages. Instead, send personalized and creative nudges, Duolingo-style.
• Punishing inactivity too harshly – Overly rigid streak systems or loss-based mechanics can demotivate users instead of encouraging them to return. 
• Over-gamifying at the expense of real value – Always remember the user’s side of the core value loop. Make sure that every single gamification technique encourages the user to continue iterating through that core value loop of completing a lesson, finishing a workout, etc. 
• Constant repetition – If the users see the same challenges, emails, and push notifications over and over, their eyes will glaze over and engagement will decline. Keep content fresh.

That’s all we have on the Trophy Method! Though we’re starting to think through a potential fourth phase, where you turn your engaged users into experts, elevate them in your app, and turn them into essentially cheerleaders for your brand. But we’ll chew on that some more before we release it out into the world.

Thanks for reading, and if this all sounds compelling to you, we encourage you to try out Trophy.