Badge Leveling
Role Involved
UX, Marketing, PM
Problem
The platform lacked a gamification component that kept users actively creating content over a longer period of time. It did have some gamification, but users could only unlock various badges once and there were no more elements that encouraged them to continue afterwards. The platform also didn't feature these achievements, weighing users' contributions against one another to spur competition.
Strategy
Add a new form of gamification where users can unlock tiered levels of achievements corresponding to custom events, such as writing reviews. This would not only add incentives to "keep going" after initially unlocking a badge, but it would add a competitive gauge to compare users' contributions against each another to better feature high quality engagers.
To build this, I strategized to use the existing badge unlock system in our backend. This minimized development significantly, so as not to take away from other projects. The main requirements were to add new fields to the badge table to let my team configure new levels and mapping each new level to the corresponding image, descriptive text, and the amount of actions required to unlock it. I spaced out the points of each level to convey increasing difficulty. Unlocking level one would only require very few actions so even new users could participate, while unlocking level five would require several hundred actions.
Design Details
The front-end view of the badge leveling experience lives on the profile. Users can access their badges through their profile and view the available badges they have unlocked or could unlock. Unlocked badges with levels would follow a new color palette where certain colors would indicate different levels. Locked badges would be grayed out until the first level was reached.
When viewing a specific badge, the user would be able to see when they unlocked their current level as well as their progress towards the next level. On this page users can also tap a button to perform the related action required to continue leveling up, leading them to a new page where they can search for specific products or view product suggestions generated based on their previous activity on the platform (e.g. brands they've used, products they've interacted with without reviewing).
Gratification & Marketing
Because this project was focused on expanding Influenster's gamification, it was important to include elements to gratify users when they did something good. I achieved this through four main components: a custom unlock animation to celebrate when users unlocked a new level with the corresponding color, an in-app and push notification when users were close to leveling up to keep progress top-of-mind, a new display next to user content indicating the author's current level to better feature their activity amongst their peers, and a new email summarizing their leveling with a CTA to keep going.
Results
After development, there was a 19% boost in our app session review conversion rate and a 16% boost in our monthly retention rate for reviewers coming back to review again. Additionally, the development for this project added a new internal tool to market other tiers of engagement such as receiving likes to reward quality, posting media content, and using the app scanner function. It also laid the groundwork for a phase two of development to reward users for posting more nuanced types of content, such as being a trendsetter who repeatedly is the first to post content on products, reaching influencer follower milestones, and being an active survey responder.
