<aside> đź’ˇ Note: This is only one interpretation of building strong game mechanics, please feel free to comment and share others!
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Now that you understand how your customer’s journey unfolds, let’s zoom in on the habit-building stage, and design your Learning Loop. That’s a gaming term that refers to the set of activities, feedback and choices that a player engages in during a play session. This powerful model is not just for games—it applies to ANY product, app, service or system with the potential to evolve over time as the customer becomes more skilled at using it.
The beating heart of your Learning Loop is a repeatable, pleasurable activity that pulls customers back—triggered by some emotion—some internal urge or need. Without that, it’s tough to drive long-term engagement.
In a Mario game, that repeatable core activity is running, jumping and collecting coins. In Rock Band, it’s playing a song with your friends. And in Slack, it’s reading and responding to updates from your team.
Feedback is fundamental when you’re bringing your Learning Loop to life. Once you’ve identified a core pleasurable activity, you need to provide feedback to let players know if they’re on the right track—and help them improve.
Every complex system starts as a simple system that works—and the simplest coherent system is a feedback loop. So ask yourself: what type of feedback will help my Super Fans get BETTER at the core activity in my system?
In Slack, the feedback loops are simple and familiar—you’ve read all your messages, you’ve caught up with your channels—and Slackbot drops hints about customization options and advanced features once you’ve mastered the basics. Which is a loop inside a loop.
What’s missing here? There aren’t any points, level or badges to clutter up the interface—just a lot of customization options that help you create the product YOU love. Again—an experience that’s consistent with the through-line.
That brings us to progress & investment. Once you’ve got a simple feedback system that helps you get better at something, layering on progress mechanics and an investment path makes sense.
Sometimes it’s seemless—like In Slack, where you make progress by customizing your environment and building new things—a path to mastery that’s more similar to Minecraft than to Yammer.