The main thing…
The point of the Bible Garden app is to encourage users to develop a habit of regular bible reading.
Other apps and games do a great job of encouraging users to come back and thus foster strong habits. For example the game Wordle has the concept of the users “daily streak” the incentive is to play every day otherwise you will lose your current streak of XX days. Duolingo uses the same idea of a daily streak to encourage users to use the app every day, and then builds on that by adding rewards in the form of tokens that can be exchanged for in-app items. Wordle also has an interesting mechanism that only lets you play one game per day – thus adding “rarity value” to the games.
So, how could we use these ideas in the app to build bible reading habits?
- Record a daily streak. We can have the app track how many continuous days the user completes a reading in the app, and use that info to encourage the user, eg “You’ve read the bible everyday for 34 days. Read today or you will lose your streak”
- Give tokens for reaching milestones, eg for completing a reading course, or reading for XX days straight, etc. The tokens can be exchanged for rewards in the game, ie things to decorate your garden like a fountain, or bird bath.
- Have some bible course that are limited to one per day (eg daily dated readings).
- Use app alerts to remind the user they need to read if they haven’t read today.
Some ideas to play around with. Needs some thought to work out the right mechanics and the right incentives/activity levels.
And we need to keep focused on the main thing – the point is to encourage regular bible reading. There’s lots of cool things we could do: but each has to pass the test: will this help to build the bible reading habit?