Gamification: Award-winning marketplace
This is my story of gamifying the marketplace trading experience for the Me2You app at Dory Tech, an early-stage startup in Hong Kong.
🚀 Launched Me2You 2.0 for iOS & Android.
💪🏼 Achieved a 33% increase in daily users.
🏆 Honoured with both national & international awards.
Problem
Decline in engagement due to static & stale trading experience
Despite an increase in downloads since its official launch, user feedback indicates that users tended to lose interest due to the static and stale user experience.
1st week
Excited and often browse the app, believing it can support sustainable living.
3rd week
Get bored due to the lack of sense of achievement/self-satisfaction.
4th week
Lose interest. Find it hard to keep motivation. Abandon the app.
Goal
Boost user engagement in a more scalable way
Success Metrics: Increase active users & the number of items traded.
Holistic UX research
🔍 Internal: Identify frictions from tickets analysis
I reached out to the customer support team to understand the health of the trading experience at scale and created the trading journey map to identify gaps with stakeholders.
Top 3 problem spaces
Inflexible
Users earn points by giving away items, but they cannot trade when they lack items or points.
Lack of guidance
Many users got stuck in transactions and didn’t know what to do with points on hold.
Irrelevant
Lack of personalized choices. Users struggled to find a suitable match to trade with.
🧐 External: Direct observations from user interviews
I also recruited six participants across a range of user types for example, a daily user, a casual user and new user to observe their behaviour, finding out how people feel and how that relates to their experience throughout the journey.
Based on the research, we found that people come to the app not only to trade items, but also to feel valued & connect with others.
Incorporate user needs to define product roadmap
By analysing user data, my team and I discovered that people exercised both their functional & emotional needs while using the app.
🔸 Functional Need
"I want to easily get items or give away items to those who need them."
🔹 Solution
Make it simple and easy to use for everyone, anytime.
🔸 Emotional Need
"I want to trade meaningfully and motivate more people to support sustainable living.”
🔹 Solution
Create an emotional connection for deeper engagement.
To launch on time, I facilitate workshops with stakeholders (Business, Engineering, Operations, Marketing) to prioritise the most impactful features & shape our product roadmap
Explore concepts & evaluate trade-offs
After exploring various ideas, I narrowed down to three design concepts, discussing the feasibility with engineers and weighing the pros and cons.
Due to technical constraints, we deprioritised the interactive map and bidding features in this phase.
Based on the preliminary critique with engineers, we decided to develop missions to motivate users to return to the app.
Beta testing
Iterative prototypes & user testings
I designed several prototypes and conducted user testing sessions to observe their interactions and gather valuable feedback.
🤨 Lack of Trust
Based on the user research, we found that many users actually have concerns about trading with strangers. However, only a few of them take the time to set up their profiles.
🧐 Unknown Progress
Users were uncertain about their progress. They want to know the value of their actions and the impact they're making.
We learned from research that people need help with trust and trade in ways that feel accomplished.
Iteration 1.0
Based on the previous user insights, we decided to leverage our point system to develop Achievements, a gamification program that addresses the user needs.
🥱 Before
Points were used just like currency to get items.
🤩 After
Points were seen more like rewards that they can connect with.
Collaborating with engineers & product owner, we implemented this design in three milestones.
Milestone 1
Make it inclusive
Transform the technical login into a rewarding process, enabling more users to participate in trading at any time.
Milestone 2
Build trust
Provide tasks to help users set up their identity to connect with others and stay motivated with a progress indicator.
Milestone 3
Stay motivated
Provide level-up tasks and tutorials to empower users to trade confidently and progress to higher tiers.
Iteration 2.0
The controversial survey task
One of the Achievements tasks is the Survey, which is important because it help users find what they want more efficiently. However, from direct contact with users, I found that many users missed the survey task because it was too hidden. To address this, I proposed integrating the survey task into the onboarding flow.
At first, stakeholders were hesitant about my proposal. To build influence, I involved them in user testing, helping them gain confidence in making adjustments to the onboarding.
Qualitative prototype testing with seven users revealed that 5 out of 7 were delighted by the onboarding survey task and expected a personalised experience sooner.
Interactions
Establish interaction guidelines to increase speed & design quality
I created reusable patterns and scalable interactions to elevate the experience.
Additionally, I led the QA efforts, establishing frameworks to speed up our development process, & collaborating closely with engineers to fix bugs and iterated quickly before the market launch.
🥳 The designs totally changed how users interact with our platform, making each click more engaging.
The Launch
Improve trading experience with machine learning & gamification
Daily Login Rewards
Leverage login behavior to reward users, offering them a flexible way to earn points and encouraging consistent returns to the app.
Personalised Content Discovery
Enable users to discover content tailored to their needs and preferences, maintaining their interest in the app.
Task with Guided Tutorials
Help users build trust through curated trading tasks and enable to trade confidently with guided tutorials.
Impact
The designs have increased daily active users by 33%
These designs successfully increased daily active users by 33%, boosted the transaction completion rate by 15%, and helped the business grow 40+ partnerships to promote our sustainable mission.
Reflection & Learning
Engage stakeholders like your users
Engaging users is important, but stakeholders matter too. During the process, I’ve learned to initiate many whiteboard sessions to get stakeholders involved in my design process. It helped them connect better with users and align more efficiently with the team.
👇🏻 Post-launch feedback👇🏻
The app helped users contribution towards sustainability and support a green lifestyle, which is confirmed in the quotes from users below:
