Identify opportunities in existing Unifocus mobile application and redesign the app to incorporate gamification idea. The goal is to increase user interactions with our core applications and drive client's core performance KPIs. The focused platform for this project is mobile first-design since our initiative was to launch it out to employee's level who constantly use Unifocus's mobile app.

The team was tasked on coming up with a system to  increase user interactions with our core applications and drive positive changes in client's core performance KPIs. Our tasks were to identify a set of features with consulting partners and implement those utilizing company's design patterns.

I partnered closely with PMs and other stakeholders to really understand the purpose of the products, brainstorm, and define strategy. I also prepared documentation on Confluence, which helps the team imagine what future outcomes of the project could (and should) be, as well as captures open questions to help move us forward. We spent a good amount of time analyzing existing customer research, investigating best practices across the industry, as well as planning for new research that would help us answer more specific questions about customer behavior and expectations.

Our main users were hotel managers. Their position within their companies make them critical drivers of business success. We also targeted operation employees including housekeepers, room attendant, servers, front desk agent, and front desk supervisor. Their positions are crucial in driving core performance KPIs.

Before diving deep into the design, I wanted to take an amount of time to understand how gamification can elevate the user experience but at the same time, I wanted to ensure that I’m not overlooking any negative impacts of gamification on users. These findings also help drive my design decisions.

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:​
1. Points system
2. Level system
3. Badges & other awards
4. Notable achievements
5. Leaderboards
6. Sharing with community

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.

I also began to develop high level flows and mocks that helped facilitate discussion and project planning. One of the most interesting challenges I encountered was how to allow users to realize value from the program and drive them to participate in, so I mapped out this experience and how employees can earn attendance points so that they can level up in their rankings.

We tested the initial prototypes on 4 people, with all of our targeted users represented. ​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.