Difference Between Accessibility and Gamification

Gamification and Accessibility are two ways to create super user-friendly designs that anyone can use. According to surveys conducted by M2 Research, gamified applications have a 50% increase in retention and a 30% increase in engagement than normal applications. Similarly, there are many reports on how accessibility improves your user experience not only for people with special needs but also the other users. In this article, we will discuss what Accessible design and Gamification are and how they differ from one another.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is a virtue of design that enables it to be easily used by a wide range of audiences. Accessibility is a design principle that talks about designing products and services in an all-inclusive manner. It means designing for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs, and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface. When we say that a design is accessible we mean that it can be used by people who have hearing, visual, motor, or cognitive impairments. Accessibility is important as we are designing for a world that speaks many languages and comes from many different backgrounds. People have different limitations on what they can easily see, understand, and feel comfortable with and accessibility helps in bridging these limitations gaps.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the usage of game mechanics in non-game contexts in order to drive audience engagement and improve the user experience. This can be done using game mechanics like avatars, progress bars, points, leaderboards, and badges similar between games and gamification. In simpler terms, Gamification means taking specific “game-like” elements or elements that you would most likely see in a game and putting them into your product or a service that is not the game in order to drive user engagement.

The science behind gamification is called motivation science. so typically how it works is including things like progress circles and leaderboards into your product or platform so that when people see these things they’re a bit more excited and a bit more willing to use your platform and complete that one task that brings them closer to complete that goal.

How to create Accessible Designs?

The Three Cs strategy is used by many designers for coming up with accessible designs, these three Cs cover all the necessary accessibility issues with solutions on how a designer can overcome them.

1. Color Contrast: Ensure accessible color palettes for users with visual impairments. Use tools like Stark for accessibility checks. Also, prioritize conveying crucial information clearly through color choices.
2. Clickable Area Accessibility: Enhance usability for all users by ensuring easy navigation with keyboard tabbing. Apply hover effects for better mouse tracking, use pressed effects for button feedback, and provide clear labels and instructions.
3. Common Content Accessibility: Optimize typography by aligning text properly and ensuring adequate line and paragraph spacing. Maintain a responsive layout for accessibility on smaller screens. Aim for left or right alignment, 1.5x font size line spacing, and paragraph widths of no more than 80 characters.

How to create a Gamified design?

A Gamified design can be created using following ways:

1. Divide user journey into goals: The first step is to set a clear outline about what the user’s goals would be and divide your user’s journey into multiple such goals. For this you need to understand what are your user’s needs and objectives in your application or website.
2. Choose Game Mechanics: there are many game mechanics, select those game mechanics that align with your user goals. The most important game mechanics you can select from are Badges, Leaderboards, Avatars and Progress bars.
3. Rewards and incentive mechanism: Rewards and incentives to move ahead in the application or website retains the users and motivates them to finish their goals. Select some reward mechanisms, this could be tangible rewards like discounts, prizes, etc. or intangible rewards like recognition, status, etc.
4. Learner centered mindset: Although gamification uses game mechanics, throwing a point earning system and leaderboards at your users is not effective gamification. Our top priority when designing a gamified solution is the goals of the learner. This is a learner centered mindset. In order for gamification to be successful, make sure that there is an alignment between the user goals and the business goals.

Accessibility vs Gamification

	Accessibility	Gamification
Definition	Accessibility is a design principle that talks about designing products and services in an all inclusive manner. It means designing for everybody, keeping in mind the people who might have some special needs and taking care of those needs in the product experience and interface.	Gamification is the usage of game mechanics in non-game contexts in order to drive audience engagement and improve the user experience. This can be done using game mechanics like avatars, progress bars, points, leaderboards, and badges similar between games and gamification.
Simpler Explanation	When we say that a design is accessible we mean that it can be used by people who have hearing, visual, motor or cognitive impairments.	Gamification means taking specific “game-like” elements or elements that you would most likely see in a game and putting them into your product or a service that is not the game in order to drive user engagement.
Principles	The three important principles for Accessibility are: Color contrast accessibility Clickable area accessibility Common content accessibility	The three important principles for Gamification are: Clear User goals meaningful engagement Feedback and User progress
Benefits	Following are the benefits of accessible design: Improves Usability Reduces Institutional Risk Reduces Cognitive Load Improves User centricity	Following are the benefits of gamified design: Improves user retention Improves user engagement Improves the learning outcomes Enhances the user motivation and productivity
Real World Examples	Example: To improve the accessibility of a social media app we can add a new feature to listen to news also providing the transcript in some commonly used languages so that the feature becomes accessible to people with hearing issues.	Example: Rather than telling the user about why running is important we can introduce features like fitness quests or challenges that users can join designed such that on running a certain distance in a week or completing a set number of workouts in a month, they get some redeemable rewards.

Conclusion

In this article we discussed what Accessibility and Gamification are and how they differ from one another. These two practices in design are very important not only for the user experience but also to ensure that the user stays with the application or website for a longer time. Gamification is the usage of game mechanics in non-game contexts in order to drive audience engagement and improve the user experience. Meanwhile Accessibility is a design principle that talks about designing products and services in an all inclusive manner. Make sure to follow the points we discussed in this article to understand the difference between Accessibility and Gamification.