Having recently launched a rewards program on our Community, we’re looking more at new gamification options to broaden our program in the future. As we started to explore new ideas, we found some of the existing systems placed limitations on us, as a result we started building this wish list of changes to gamification:
I apologise for the length of this post, but I’ve tried to structure it in a way here it can be easily broken down into multiple posts/ideas should this be needed.
Additional Leaderboard time filters
We only have “This week” and “All time” as time filters for the leaderboards, it would be great to have “This month” as an option. Alternatively, a custom option with a date picker and custom title could work too.
This would probably be the most powerful as an option on the leaderboard widget, rather than the page.
Why is this important?
As ours is tied to a rewards program, transparency is critical and while we can pull the points for each user from the user data in control, we really want this to be visible on the front end to all users too.
Right now we’re having to work around this by publishing the numbers at the end of each week, keep a running total to award the winning users at the end of the month.
Custom points rules
Broader options to award points (and badges) to diversify the ways to acknowledge user input to a community:
Too many possibilities to list here, perhaps a poll would be needed to find out the top 5-10, but just a couple off the top of my head:
- Peer awarded points => give users the ability to grant points to other users who they want to thank/acknowledge (think of this as similar to Karma on reddit)
- Onboarding points => One-time rewards for filling out your community profile
Why is it important?
Aim is to increase the number of ways for Community Managers to acknowledge their users, but also for other users to acknowledge each other too.
Stretch-Goal/Incremental Badges
If any of you have used a Fitbit or similar sports watch, over time you’ll probably have received an achievement/badge for the distance you’ve covered in your Fitbit lifetime.
It starts off simple with something like
- You’ve done enough steps to run around a football pitch 5 times
- You’ve done enough steps to walk to the top of the Eiffel Tower
- One of my more recent ones was the Sahara badge (walked the length of the Sahara Desert)
This is already technically possible, you just make separate badges that have the same criteria, just higher thresholds. However, once you have 4-5 different types of badges, each with 5-10 stretch goals and active users - you’ll inevitably reach saturation of their profile page and all those badges start to feel a little less meaningful.
Why is this important?
We all know the value of having goals to chase and achieve, but once you’ve achieved a goal you don’t generally stop there, you look for the next step up, this just mirrors that behaviour.
Having the option for the higher-level badge to take the place of the lower-level badges on their profile would be an important part of this too, having lots of badges is great, until you’ve got so many you can’t tell which is which.
Personalised “Trophy Cabinet”
As an alternative or even additional solution to the “too many badges” problem I just described above, allow users to personalise what badges appear next to their avatar and on their profile page.
Taking one of our users with18 badges as an example:
Why is this important?
Granting users the ability to curate their badges, avatar and profile would give them a great sense of achievement and ownership of their accomplishments.
Wrap up
If you’ve made it this far you’re a real hero and thanks for reading through the topic. Do any of these resonate, would any of them be useful to your own communities?