Something I’ve come to notice when designing consumer software is that humans love seeing numbers go up.

One of the best examples of this are idle games like cookie clicker, adventure capitalist or egg inc. All carefully designed to carefully harvest as much “I am making progress” dopamine as possible.

When designing your apps you should make sure this idea is present as well. In your landing view you should have something that clearly indicates to the user that they are making progress and this number should go up when they use your app.

This idea also bleeds into other aspects of life as well. Create metrics and dashboards about things you care about and you and others will most likely optimise on these things which are measured.

Visual rewards in mobile games

Was able to learn a super interesting piece of data that showing progress or this visual reward in the first 30 seconds of a game is one of the best ways to increase the retention rate of mobile games.

So what counts as a visual reward? Any text, sounds, graphic that shows progression and encouragement. When the user completes an action, a level etc.