The novelty problem
The first two weeks of any app run on novelty. Week three is where usage falls off, because the new-toy feeling has gone and physical results haven't arrived yet — muscle takes months.
Good gamification fills that gap with a feedback loop that pays out today. Bad gamification just adds noise you learn to ignore.
Mechanics that don't survive
Badges with no scarcity, celebration animations for trivial actions, and lifetime point totals that only ever go up. None of them create a reason to train on a specific Tuesday.
Mechanics that do
A single score that summarises the week, so effort becomes comparable. A rank that puts a named person just ahead of you. A visible countdown to a weekly reset, so the window to act is finite. Rank movement between weeks, so improvement is legible even when you're mid-table.
Propal is built on exactly these four: Propal Score, Builder Rank, a weekly countdown, and week-over-week movement with a personal best.
Anti-gaming rules are part of the design
Any scoring system gets gamed unless it's bounded. Propal caps how much a single day can contribute, weights consistency across days above raw volume, and gives verified activity from a connected service a bonus over manual entry.
A leaderboard people trust is worth more than a leaderboard that's easy to top.
Show the maths
Propal shows the full score breakdown — consistency, active minutes, variety, workouts, streak, verified bonus — so you can see exactly which lever to pull. Hidden scoring feels arbitrary, and arbitrary systems get abandoned.