Celebrating Lumosity Users’ Achievements
We created a variable rewards system to celebrate effort and performance and to create a richer experience for our users. Our objective was to motivate users to train more regularly, boosting engagement.
Overview
Problem
There are a few moments in the training experience where we reward users (e.g. top 5 score, workout completion, streaks) but overall they are lacking. We know that our users like to share these moments on social media (FB, Instagram, and twitter) which confirms that these moments are quite rewarding and create value for our users. We saw an opportunity to celebrate even more moments to motivate users to train more regularly while creating a richer and more delightful user experience.
We know from habit forming UX design based on the Nir Eyal hook model, that rewards are important to the success of a product. We wanted to explore new ways to integrate variable rewards into our product in order to boost engagement and retention.
GoalS
Celebrate users’ milestones and achievements and make these moments in the experience more delightful.
Incentivize users to train more regularly and boost engagement and retention.
Approach
Celebrate effort and performance through variable rewards. We had many ideas on how we could do this but for the first integration of variable rewards in the product, we created a reward delivery system that takes place when a user completes a game or a workout, celebrating top scores and stats, streaks, and weekly/monthly training milestones.
My Role
This feature team was comprised of a PM and two designers: myself primarily focused on visual and motion as Senior Visual Designer and a UX Designer. My primary responsibilities included:
Research
Prototyping
Usability testing
Visual/UI design
Motion design
Illustration/iconography
Copywriting
My Design Process
Research
Our first step, as a team was to determine which rewards to deliver to our users. Through scanning social media and interviewing users, we learned that they were most proud of their streaks and top scores.
In order to further incentivize users to train regularly, we also wanted to reward them for consistent training by focusing on weekly and monthly training milestones.
Our final list of achievements to focus on for v1:
Top Score
Top Stat
Training Streaks
3+ days in a week
10+ days in a month
20+ days in a month
Visual Design + Iteration
I designed mocks in Sketch and completed animations in Keynote. Due to timeline constraints, I needed to animate relatively quickly and this particular feature didn’t require much interaction so I chose Keynote as the best tool for the job.
Final Designs
Deliverables
Here were the final animations that I delivered to engineers during production.
Updated Designs in Lottie
Here are the updated animations created by our motion designer in Lottie:
Learnings
Future Improvements
We implemented this feature in an A/B test and saw a slight bump in engagement and retention. As this was our first iteration of the feature as an MVP, there are many improvements we can make in the future to make this feature even more sticky and successful:
Track the number of times a user has received the reward
Allow users to share with their friends
Implement a badge system where users can receive different categories of rewards including game-specific achievements, performance, LPI milestones, monthly milestones and streaks, etc.
Use sound design to make the rewarding moment more exciting
Introduce more variability (the hook model)
Understanding which rewards are most motivating
We added a “like” feature to understand which reward screens resonated with people. We found that the ones that rewarded training goals (workout streaks and training days per week) received more responses than the ones for individual gameplays (top score or top stat). We might conclude that the rewards felt more meaningful if they were more attainable.