User Engagement
The team was tasked with coming up with a system that would increase user interaction with our core applications, change user behaviors, and drive positive changes in our clients’ core performance KPIs.
Supported platforms include desktop, tablet, and mobile. This requires two design approaches: one for desktop and tablet, and a mobile-first design.
Project Summary
This client delivers tools for hotels, restaurants, and casinos to manage their staff, finances, guest satisfaction, and labor costs (among others).
This project was intended to increase user engagement with our products and to introduce features that the company could use to drive beneficial user behaviors that would increase service quality and financial performance in their own businesses.
Due to our inexperience with gamification, we worked with a consultancy to come up with some core game loops and systems.
My Contributions
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Lead visual designer
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high-fidelity interactive prototypes
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user researcher
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UI analytics plan and reports
Project Dates
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December 2020 – December 2021
The Challenge
The team was tasked with coming up with a system that would increase user interaction with our core applications, change user behaviors, and drive positive changes in our clients’ core performance KPIs.
Supported platforms include desktop, tablet, and mobile. This requires two design approaches: one for desktop and tablet, and a mobile-first design.
For this project our company consulted with a firm that had created user engagement (or “gamification”) systems for other companies. This allowed us to leverage their expertise and shortcut some of the trial-and-error learning that we would have to do on our way to success.
After the consulting engagement the product team was given a set of recommended features and some low-fidelity mockups with some of those ideas in place. Our task was to vet the recommended features with our user base, flesh out the mock-ups within our own design language, and roll out a finished product based on the knowledge from our consulting partners.
Targeted Users
We targeted three types of users for the first phase of this project:
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General managers at hotel properties
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Regional managers for hotel chains
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System / Product administrators for hotel chains
Our main users were hotel managers. Their position within their companies makes them critical drivers of business success on a day-to-day basis. For our first release, the biggest impact we could make was with those users.
We also targeted regional managers, who are responsible for strategic decision making. Their position makes them ideal for effecting lasting change within their organizations.
The third user we targeted were system administrators, who are responsible for setting up and configuring the products that the other two users actually use on a day-to-day basis to manage their businesses.
You can see the user personas below.
User Testing
We tested the initial prototypes on 6 people, with all of our targeted users represented. The test was a combination of conversation and task-completion.
Users responded positively to most of our proposed features, like the profile, leaderboards, newsfeeds, and achievements. However, our testing revealed to us that some features were likely not going to be worth the cost to Implement, or would have a specifically negative effect on our user engagement.
For Instance, many of our clients already have Internal messaging systems implemented alongside our software. Therefore, our messaging-related features received little Interest and we got feedback suggesting that our clients would want to specifically disable It within our app so as not to Interfere with their other, more established solutions already In place.
Additionally, some of our proposed features, such as awarding temporary “negative” badges when a user takes an action we hope to discourage, were not perceived by our users in the fun, lighthearted way that we were hoping they would be. Many felt that getting a negative badge would discourage them from attempting certain actions at all, so as to avoid the risk that they might perform poorly and thus receive a negative mark on their profile in front of their coworkers or manager. As a result, we opted not to Include them In our first launch of the product, so that we could get additional information.
Testing also helped us to discover that many of the managers would like to use our system of points and awards to reward their employees based upon their own success criteria. This would allow them to incentivize actions based upon their expertise, using the knowledge they have about their own properties, employees, and business strategies. We are looking into this and hope to roll out a comprehensive feature set that meets their needs and delights them as well.
Solution
Our solution involved creating a multi-part awards system that allowed us to incentivize behaviors that would lead to positive outcomes. Below are many of the core features we implemented:
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Points system
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Level system
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Badges & other awards
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Notable achievements
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In-app marketplace for digital goods
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Leaderboards
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Bragging rights & points of pride
We created a new user profile page so users would have a single place for all of their points, levels, and other engagement-related updates. This allowed us to deliver a highly-personalized experience to every user and show off their progress and growth within our system.
By using points, we could reward our users for taking actions that we considered to be beneficial to the growth and success of their business. A points system also allowed us to offer personalization options within our marketplace, where they could spend those points as currency on digital goods like avatar decorations and profile personalization.
Below are a few of the badges and other artifacts that I created as part of this project (using Illustrator and Photoshop).
Screens Gallery
Below you can get a closer look at each of the screens featured in this case study.
Conclusion
A learning experience: This project was eye-opening. For one, it allowed me to spend much more time on aesthetics than we previously did in our UIs, which was fun. I spent time making illustrated badges for users to earn, and thinking about fun effects to dazzle the users with.
I also dug into Gamification and read through the Octalysis book.
Extensive testing: We also user-tested these designs more than any other application design.
Interested in seeing more? Check out the Unifocus Press Release announcing the project.