How to Actually Use the Octalysis Framework (Most People Only Do Half)
I’ve been teaching the Octalysis Framework since 2003. That’s over two decades of workshops, keynotes, and one-on-one coaching sessions with companies like LEGO, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola.
And after all that time, I can tell you the single biggest mistake people make when they try to use Octalysis.
They do Step 1 and stop.
They learn the 8 Core Drives, they analyze their product or experience, they identify which Core Drives are present, and then they pat themselves on the back and call it a day. “Look, our app has Core Drive 4 and Core Drive 5! We’re gamified!”
No. You’re not. You’ve done the diagnosis but skipped the prescription. That’s like a doctor telling you “Yep, your leg is broken” and then walking out of the room.
Today I want to show you the complete Two-Step Octalysis Analysis: what it actually looks like when you use the framework the way it was designed to be used. And I’ll demonstrate it with a real product that most of you have probably heard of: the Forest App.
About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
The Mistake That Wastes Your Octalysis Training
People who study my work for a year, two years, even three years. They read my book a couple of times, they go through my Octalysis Framework page, they attend my workshops. And they walk away feeling confident.
Then they sit down to apply it.
They look at a product and say, “OK, this experience has Core Drive 4 and Core Drive 5.” And they’re happy. They stop right there.
But that’s only Step 1. Identification is the beginning, not the end.
The complete Two-Step Octalysis Analysis works like this:
Step 1: Identify. What Core Drives already exist in the experience?
Step 2: Brainstorm. What additional ideas can STRENGTHEN each Core Drive?
The brainstorm is where all the value lives. Identification is like looking at an X-ray. Brainstorming is the actual surgery.
I want to demonstrate both steps right now, using a real app that tens of millions of people use every day.
Step 1: The Diagnosis — Mapping Forest’s Core Drives
Forest is a productivity app with a beautifully simple premise: you set a timer, and a virtual tree starts growing on your screen. Stay focused and the tree flourishes. Pick up your phone and check Instagram? The tree dies.
In 2015-2016, this concept was voted Google’s Best App of the Year. A timer that guilts you into not using your phone. That’s it. But the gamification design underneath is far more sophisticated than it appears.
Let’s map all 8 Core Drives:
Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling. This is where Forest transcends being “just a timer.” Your focus sessions earn coins, and those coins can be spent to plant REAL trees in the real world through Forest’s partnership with Trees for the Future. Suddenly you’re not avoiding your phone. You’re saving the planet. That’s Epic Meaning. Your small act of discipline connects to something bigger than yourself.
Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment. After each focus session, you can inscribe what you accomplished on the tree. You can write “Finished Chapter 3” or “100 pushups” directly onto the virtual plant. It’s a physical manifestation of your work. A trophy you created through effort, not through time alone.
Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. You choose your timer length. You pick which plant grows. You toggle deep focus mode on or off. These meaningful choices give you a sense of agency. You’re not following instructions. You’re designing your own focus experience.
Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession. Watch your forest grow over weeks and months. Each tree represents a real focus session. Your forest becomes a living portfolio of your productivity. You feel emotionally attached to it the way you might feel attached to a garden you’ve tended by hand.
Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness. Forest’s “Plant Together” mode lets you grow trees with friends or colleagues. Group quests create accountability. Social leaderboards let you compare focus time. When your study group is all planting trees together for an exam, nobody wants to be the one who killed their tree.
Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience. The plant shop shows you beautiful, exotic trees you can’t afford yet. They sit right there on your screen, locked behind a coin wall you haven’t reached. Dangling. Teasing. Making you think, “If I just do three more focus sessions today, I can unlock the cherry blossom.”
Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity. This is Forest’s weakest Core Drive. The experience is almost completely predictable. You set a timer, a tree grows, you get coins. Zero surprises, zero mystery, zero “I wonder what will happen if…” This is a design gap, and we’ll address it in Step 2.
Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance. This is Forest’s killer feature. If you leave the app during a session, your tree dies. And here’s the cruel genius: that dead, withered tree doesn’t just disappear. It stays in your forest permanently. Every time you scroll through your garden, that ugly brown stump is sitting there among your beautiful green trees, reminding you of the time you couldn’t resist checking Twitter.
That’s Step 1 complete. We’ve identified what’s present and what’s weak.
Most people would stop here. But this is where the real work begins.
Step 2: The Prescription — Brainstorming Improvements
Now we go Core Drive by Core Drive and ask: how could Forest make each one STRONGER? This is design thinking through the Octalysis lens. Some ideas will be practical, others ambitious. The point is to generate possibilities, then filter for the best ones.
Strengthening Core Drive 1: Factions
Right now, you plant trees for a generic environmental cause. What if Forest created factions? Ocean Conservation vs. Forest Conservation vs. Urban Greening. You pick your cause, join a team, and compete against other factions on who’s contributing more.
This does two things. First, it creates group pride: you’re not just planting trees, you’re fighting for YOUR cause. Second, it introduces intergroup competition, one of the most powerful motivational structures in game design. Ask anyone who’s played World of Warcraft’s Horde vs. Alliance.
Strengthening Core Drive 2: Make Achievements Visible
Forest already lets you inscribe achievements on trees, but the feature is buried. You have to tap a tree, then tap again, then scroll to see what you wrote. That’s too many clicks between the user and their moment of pride.
The fix is simple: make inscriptions visible immediately. Tap any tree and BOOM: “Finished 50 pushups” or “Wrote 2,000 words” appears right there. The emotional payoff should be instant and visceral, not hidden behind three navigation layers.
Strengthening Core Drive 3: Duration-Gated Trees
Here’s where it gets interesting. What if 10-minute sessions grew small plants (daisies, succulents) while 1-hour sessions grew massive redwoods or rare exotic trees you can’t get any other way?
Now you have a meaningful tradeoff to think about. Do I want QUANTITY (many small, colorful plants from short sessions) or QUALITY (a few towering, rare trees from deep work sessions)? That’s a real creative choice, and it turns every focus session into a strategic decision rather than just a countdown.
Strengthening Core Drive 4: Persistent Analytics & Nurturing
Two ideas here. First: your trees currently don’t grow beyond their initial session. But what if exercise trees sprouted fruit if you kept exercising? What if work trees grew taller the more hours you logged in that category? Your forest would become a living record that evolves with your habits.
Second: persistent analytics. “You’ve logged 340 hours of deep work and 85 hours of exercise over the past two years.” That kind of long-term data creates deep ownership. You’re not just using an app. You’re building a legacy.
Strengthening Core Drive 5: Achievement Social Feed
Remember those inscribed achievements? They’re currently private notes. Nobody sees them but you. That’s a missed opportunity.
Make them optionally shareable. “Your friend Sarah just completed a 100-pushup challenge.” “David finished Chapter 12 of his novel.” This creates social proof and gentle motivation. It’s not competitive in a threatening way. It’s inspirational. You see your friend’s accomplishment and think, “If she can do 100 pushups, maybe I should try my 50.”
Even better: let advanced users LEND a rare tree to a friend for 24 hours. The friend has to complete a focus session within that window to keep it. This creates urgency, friendship, and a social trigger that pulls lapsed users back into the app.
Strengthening Core Drive 6: Category-Locked Plants
Some plants should only unlock through specific activity categories. The sakura cherry blossom? Only available through exercise sessions. The ancient oak? Only through reading. The crystal tree? Only through meditation.
This forces completionist users to explore MORE life areas within Forest, increasing the app’s surface area in their daily routine. Instead of using Forest only for work, now they’re using it for exercise, reading, family time, because that’s the only way to complete their collection.
Strengthening Core Drive 7: Mysterious Seeds
This is the Core Drive Forest almost completely ignores. Here’s the fix: introduce a “Mystery Seed” option. You plant it, you don’t know what will grow until you complete the session. Maybe it’s a common daisy. Maybe it’s a rare golden tree you can’t get any other way.
Now there’s excitement. Anticipation. “I wonder what I’ll get this time?”
One important caveat here: this is Black Hat Core Drive 7. There’s a risk that users will think about the mystery seed instead of actually focusing. So offer it as an opt-in mode, not the default. Let users choose between “I know exactly what I’m growing” and “Surprise me.” That way the unpredictability serves people who want it without disrupting people who don’t.
Strengthening Core Drive 8: Earned Dead Tree Removal
Here’s where a lot of apps get it wrong. Dead trees in Forest sit in your garden forever, mocking you. Some apps handle shame differently. Duolingo, for example, lets you pay gems to repair a broken streak.
But most users resent paying to erase their own failure. It feels like cheating on yourself.
A better approach: let users EARN the right to remove a dead tree by completing a 5-day streak challenge. You failed once, fine. But if you can prove you’ve bounced back with five consecutive days of focus, you’ve earned the right to clear that stump from your garden.
This is positive behavioral reinforcement to undo a negative consequence. Instead of paying to forget your failure, you’re demonstrating growth to move past it.
The Bootleg Quest: A Game Technique Born from Step 2
Step 2 doesn’t just generate product improvements. Sometimes it generates entirely new game design techniques.
During this Forest analysis, one of the brainstormed ideas (the Streak Tree concept) led me to formalize something I call the Bootleg Quest (Game Technique #107).
Here’s the problem it solves. Most streak systems are brutal. You build a 200-day streak in Duolingo, you miss one day, and everything resets. Months of effort, gone. That kind of all-or-nothing structure eventually causes burnout and resentment. Users who lose long streaks often quit entirely because rebuilding feels pointless.
The Bootleg Quest separates two types of rewards that most designers mistakenly combine:
Journey rewards: benefits you keep only as long as you maintain the streak. Miss a day, lose the benefit.
Milestone rewards: permanent unlocks you earn by reaching a certain point. Once you have them, they’re yours forever, even if you break the streak afterward.
Think of it like a smuggling run. You’re carrying contraband across the ocean. Every mile is dangerous. Get caught and you lose everything. But once you deliver the goods to port? You’re free. The money is yours. Nobody can take it back.
Applied to Forest: Complete 30 consecutive focus sessions and earn a special Streak Tree. This tree is unique. It can’t be obtained any other way. And here’s the key: once you earn it, it stays in your garden PERMANENTLY, even if you break your streak the next day.
The early phase is pure Black Hat motivation. Core Drive 8 (don’t break the streak or you lose progress) and Core Drive 6 (you’re SO close to 30, just keep going). But once you hit the milestone? The motivation shifts to White Hat. Core Drive 2 (I accomplished something permanent) and potentially Core Drive 3 (if the Streak Tree unlocks new gameplay options).
By the time users reach the milestone, they’ve already built the habit. They already enjoy focusing. They already see the value. The permanent reward ensures they stay voluntarily. Not because they’re afraid of losing something, but because they want to be there.
That’s the power of the Bootleg Quest: it uses temporary Black Hat pressure to build habits, then replaces it with permanent White Hat satisfaction before burnout sets in.
Why Step 2 Changes Everything
Look at what we just did. In Step 1, we mapped Forest’s existing design. That took maybe ten minutes and produced a checklist.
In Step 2, we generated nine concrete product improvements across all 8 Core Drives, plus a formalized game technique (the Bootleg Quest) that applies to any product with streak mechanics.
That’s the difference between analysis and design. Step 1 tells you where you are. Step 2 tells you where you could go.
And here’s what I’ve noticed after twenty years of teaching this: the people who only do Step 1 tend to use Octalysis as a retrospective labeling tool. “Oh, that’s Core Drive 4.” They sound smart in meetings but don’t actually improve anything.
The people who do Step 2 are the ones who build products that change user behavior. They’re the ones whose case studies show 188% revenue increases or 21.5% sales lifts. Because they didn’t just understand the framework. They used it to CREATE.
So the next time you sit down with the Octalysis Framework, don’t stop at identification. Push through to the brainstorm. Go Core Drive by Core Drive. Ask “How could this be stronger?” for every single one, especially the weak ones.
That’s where the magic happens. That’s where Octalysis stops being a diagram on a wall and starts being a tool that transforms experiences.
Speed Run Notes
The Two-Step Octalysis Analysis: (1) Identify which Core Drives exist in the experience. (2) Brainstorm how to strengthen each one. Most people stop at Step 1. The real value is in Step 2.
Forest App Strengths: Core Drive 8 (dead trees as permanent shame), Core Drive 1 (real tree planting), Core Drive 4 (growing your personal forest over time).
Forest App Weakness: Core Drive 7. The experience is almost completely predictable. No surprises, no mystery, no “what if.”
Key Brainstormed Improvements: Factions for Epic Meaning, duration-gated trees for Creativity, mystery seeds for Unpredictability, earned dead tree removal for healthier Loss Avoidance.
The Bootleg Quest (GT #107): A streak mechanic where bonuses accumulate with consecutive actions and reset on failure, but reaching a specific milestone locks in the reward permanently. Solves streak burnout by transitioning from Black Hat (fear of loss) to White Hat (permanent accomplishment).
Bottom Line: If you’re using Octalysis only for identification, you’re leaving 90% of the value on the table. The brainstorm is the prescription. Don’t skip it.
Want to go deeper? Check out Actionable Gamification for the complete Octalysis methodology, or explore the full Octalysis Framework to start your own Two-Step Analysis.