Designing gamified rewards to encourage repeated app selection: Effect of reward placement

•Temporal discounting, which is the tendency of rewards to lose value following a delay in their presentation, could potentially impact a rewards ability to influence behaviour.•Two lab studies examined whether placement of rewards within app interaction affected the frequency with which an app was used.•Users selected applications more frequently when rewards were placed closer to the start of the interaction with the application.•The effects were seen with both monetary and gamified (points-based leaderboard) rewards.•We suggest designers implement rewards as close as possible to the start of an interaction to reduce negative effects of temporal discounting.