Today we will discuss our approach to promoting engagement on CollegeGuide.
Introduction
While CollegeGuide offers a lot of useful features we feel are missing from existing online learning platforms we are aware of, those alone aren’t enough to maintain consistent engagement. In order to make CollegeGuide more fun, we decided to gamify it a little by introducing an experience system, badges and a leaderboard to appeal to the natural desires of achievement, recognition and progression.
Experience System
Every user starts with 0 experience and receives some for certain actions in the application, such as creating notes, advice queries or chatting with the Chatbot. A PopupNotification component was designed for this to show a short popup when the user gains experience to promote a sense of immediate reward. Users can check their experience on all Community Boards or their Profile Home to ensure it is a central focus of the application.
When a user reaches a certain threshold of experience, stated in their Profile Home, they will level up just like in a video game. The next level requires more experience than the previous and is currently set to a static 100 experience points requirement increase.
Badges
Users can earn badges for reaching certain statistics, such as for every 10 levels earned. These are automatically displayed on their profile home. Any other user who enters said profile, if it is not private, will be able to see these badges on full display.
According to a study by Juho Hamari in Tampere University, introducing badges in their test platform has increased the frequency of user interaction: “…users in the gamified condition were significantly more likely to post trade proposals, carry out transactions, comment on proposals and generally use the service in a more active way”.
We used research such as this to determine the best course of action for ensuring consistent engagement on the platform.
Leaderboard
In order to further promote a sense of recognition, the navigation bar has a direct link to a leaderboard that lists all users ordered by their level and experience. We hope that this public display will bring forth a sense of friendly competition among the students, thus promoting engagement.
Sources of Research:
https://saasdesigner.com/the-impact-of-gamification-on-saas-user-retention/ https://www.enterpriseelearninghub.com/elearning-challenges-solutions/gamification-strategies-boosting-engagement-elearning/ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273704751_Do_badges_increase_user_activity_A_field_experiment_on_effects_of_gamification