I first heard of QuizUp last November, and as a trivia nerd I couldn’t help downloading it. I thought that like every other game app, including Scrabble / Words with Friends, I’d get over it within a few days and never again go onto it. Instead, I found myself hooked and I play multiple rounds of trivia games a day. QuizUp hit 1M downloads within the first week of its launch, and was no.1 on the app store in mid November. The app has a beautiful designed user experience, starting with the simplicity of the layout. Their biggest strength lies in the number of questions they have curated across categories ranging from TV shows to standard general knowledge questions and more.
Engagement:
The app is extremely engaging, and builds in some strong techniques for this:
- The questions are timed which means a user is fully engaged when they’re attempting to answer the 10 questions in a round. Further, you can never really stop with just one round – a win motivates you to go for a winning streak, a lose motivates you to challenge the winner in an attempt to win the next round.
- It gives you an opportunity to get a custom title once you pass Level 10 in a category. Just the thought that you can move up from ‘beginner’ to ’novice’ to finally creating something cool for yourself keeps you hooked. This also helps increase engagement because you can level up based on your performance in a specific area of strength. I tend to keep playing the Literature trivia because I do well at it, and I’m sure each user has a personal favorite which they use to motivate themselves when they’re on a losing streak.
- It also has some really well done visualizations that you can use to track your progress and motivate you to keep playing, and in a way feels like a quantified self app for trivia.
All of these are standard principles used across games, but QuizUp has managed to apply them well, and tie them in with an easy to use, extremely pleasing experience.
The Social Component:
While the app incorporates a social component where you could challenge your friends, I also like that it does not make this option in-your-face. You could just as easily choose to play with a random opponent.
Trivia, coupled with a system of levels and well designed user interface ensures that I stay up playing this game over and over in the hope that I will finally beat some random person across the globe in a game of brand trivia. And now that I opened the app to write this post (and played 2 rounds in the process of collecting pictures for this post), I’m going to have to go back to keep playing till I win.