What is Gamification?

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....

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....

How to create a Gamified design?

A Gamified design can be created using following ways:...

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....