It’s Clément again! Welcome to the 8th edition of the CU Design newsletter – a curated set of learnings, inspiration, resources, and tips.

If you’re not familiar with CUxD (Cornell User Experience Design), we’re a centralized community for UI, UX, and product designers at Cornell. We learn and grow together both professionally and socially!

CU Design-a-thon is a three-day, virtual event that brings student designers together to craft innovative, user-centered solutions.

Students will work together to address a specific problem and visualize their digital product by creating an interactive prototype (no coding required!). During the design-a-thon, students will have the opportunity to learn from industry professionals through beginner-friendly workshops and meet other student designers from all across the country.

We hope to help designers grow both soft and hard skills in empathizing with users, defining a set of goals and needs, developing products, and improving confidence and creativity as a designer.

This week’s topic is about gamification in design. Gamification isn’t just about making things fun, but it’s also about using game elements to guide user behavior, boost engagement, and make actions feel rewarding. It’s essentially tapping into basic human motivation and including it in your designs.

Here are a few key gamification strategies and how they are implemented:

Gamification always starts with motivation, i.e: finding out why should the user care? Clear, achievable goals paired with meaningful rewards (like earning a badge or completing a checklist) give users purpose and momentum. When people know what they’re working towards, they’re more likely to take action.

The most well known example of streaks used in product design is probably Duolingo, the language learning app. Daily check-ins create a sense of momentum, since users don’t want to “break the chain.” These subtle nudges also eventually turn into long-term actions, which encourage users to return for the satisfaction of keeping their strike alive.

However, be careful not to overuse this effect – a counterpoint that comes up sometimes is the unintended pressure or anxiety that might stem from building these streaks.

Think of confetti bursts, satisfying haptics, graphic animations, or cheerful sounds. Immediate feedback reinforces progress and provides users with a real sense of achievement. Turning small actions into delightful moments of joy is a great way of showing the user that you care about their experience.

Friendly competition can be a powerful motivator. Let users see how they rank, track friends’ progress, or even earn social clout through stats through like “Top 5% this week” or “Most helpful contributor.”

My proudest design project might still be the creativity with which I approached my first-ever design case study while taking DPD, accessible here.

Some cool designs to for your dopamine hit!

Have any feedback or want to see something on the newsletter next week? Email us at [email protected] or reply directly to this email.

See you soon,

Clément @ CUxD