Airtribe aims to be a community-based and cohort-based learning platform for professionals. Top tech professionals worldwide teach learners in an interactive, hands-on manner. Learners engage with instructors, connect with peers, and collaborate for successful learning. The platform includes a course-specific dashboard, where learners interact with educational content provided by instructors. Features such as leaderboards, discussions, group projects, and peer feedback are integral to their community learning environment.
Check them out at: https://www.airtribe.live/
Project Duration: 2 weeks
Problem Statement
Overview
Gamification features like leaderboard, Xp’s and badges on the Airtribe dashboard not only foster a healthy competitive environment but also motivate learners to complete more tasks and engage throughout the course. However, if not planned out properly, an overly competitive environment can lead to anxiety and disengagement.
Objective
The goal is to:
- Implement Gamification Strategies that boost engagement.
- Improve the retention of learners on the Airtribe dashboard.
While competition can be motivating, it must be balanced to prevent negative impacts on learners who may feel discouraged by trailing behind. Therefore, the challenge is to design gamified elements that cater to diverse learner preferences and drive collaboration while maintaining motivation and a sense of achievement.
Let's have a look at the existing gamification tools in Airtribe.
- We can see that Airtibe has used a leaderboard to rank users in a cohort on the basis of the Xp’s points.
- Xp’s can be earned by the users by several means such as attending sessions, submitting projects on time, giving peer feedback, attending QnA sessions etc.
- Users are also awarded Badges on completion of milestones such as learning minutes, completing a certain number of sessions etc.
Expanding on the problem
User Survey
After talking to some of the users for their feedback, I noticed a trend. Many people showed up for the sessions, but there was a significant drop-off when it came to completing assignments. The incentive was only given upon assignment submission, and there were no incentives to encourage users to work on their tasks throughout the process.
Identified User Pain Points
1. Anxiety from Competition
- Description: Competitive elements like leaderboards can lead to increased stress and anxiety, particularly for learners who may struggle to keep up due to personal circumstances or varying levels of prior knowledge.
- Impact: This can result in disengagement, as learners may feel discouraged if they consistently see themselves at the bottom of the rankings.
2. Negative Comparison
- Description: Numerical goal-setting and visible comparisons can foster a negative competitive environment. Learners may compare themselves unfavorably to peers, leading to decreased self-esteem and motivation.
- Impact: Such comparisons can diminish the overall learning experience, making it more about outperforming peers than personal growth and achievement.
3. Diverse Learning Paces
- Description: Learners have different schedules, learning paces, and external commitments. A one-size-fits-all approach to gamification does not accommodate these differences.
- Impact: Learners who cannot commit as much time may feel penalised, reducing their overall engagement and satisfaction with the course.
4. Lack of Personalized Goals
- Description: Uniform goals and rewards do not cater to individual learner needs and preferences, failing to provide a sense of personalised achievement.
- Impact: This can lead to a lack of motivation as learners do not feel their personal efforts are recognised or rewarded.
Research & Insights
Rewards throughout the journey
Many users expressed a desire for a feature that supports them throughout their journey, not just at the completion stage. They wanted something that could help them stay motivated without anyone else knowing about their progress. This presents a unique challenge because current incentives like leaderboards and badges are public metrics, while the need is for something more personal and customizable. Using private progress tracking instead of public leaderboards, celebrating personal milestones visible only to the learner. This reduces pressure and encourages personal progress.
I thought of ADHD apps that help users break down their work into smaller tasks and milestones. This helps users get constant hits of dopamine motivating them to accomplish the next task and so on.
I studied several ADHD apps for this such as:
Reducing awkardness in random user interactions
Another issue that came up was user interactions. When I talked to two users, both expressed a desire to interact with others and understood the importance of community. They recognized the potential benefits of engaging with peers, but neither of them had attempted to interact with others. Despite the availability of tools like peer feedback in Airtribe, users were still reluctant to engage.
I thought a lot about how can I get users to give feedback to each other without being hesitant. While thinking about scenarios where users do match with random people willing I thought of dating apps. However there are some fundamental differences in the desired end goal here, I still felt that studying how dating apps work will help me design this feature better.
Dating apps operate on a fundamental principle: connecting individuals based on shared interests, preferences, and potential compatibility. They achieve this or at least attempt to by leveraging a combination of user-provided information, algorithms, and machine learning techniques. Here’s a breakdown of the key components:
- User Profiles
Users create profiles containing information such as age, gender, location, interests, and photos. Some applications also allow additional details like education, occupation, or lifestyle choices.
- Location-Based Matching
Dating apps often incorporate geolocation technology, enabling users to discover potential matches within a certain distance radius. This feature enhances the chances of meeting someone nearby and facilitates real-life interactions.
- Feedback Mechanism
When a user interacts with others’ profiles, the app learns more about the user’s preferences and shows them similar profiles in the future. The now-ubiquitous swiping mechanism allows users to browse through profiles quickly. Swiping right or offering a “thumbs up” indicates interest, while swiping left or offering a “thumbs down” signifies disinterest. This interaction data is valuable for training machine learning algorithms and fine-tuning the matching process.
You can access my research and workspace right here.
User Journey
Check out the user journey for both Planting and Shuffle Feedback.
Wire framing
Solutions
Planting
The idea is to use the growth of a tree as a personal motivator. In this new feature, users will plant a virtual tree to represent their progress. They can set their own goals and milestones, keeping in mind the ultimate goal of completing the assignment. Within this framework, users create personal to-do lists and set their own deadlines for each milestone. Every time a milestone is completed, it rains, and the tree grows a little. The water accumulates in the clouds, turning them dark blue and ready to rain.
If a user fails to meet their deadlines, their tree will wither. Additionally, users can view their plantation of all the trees they’ve successfully grown, providing a visual representation of their achievements and encouraging continued engagement.
Shuffle Feedback
The feature is a partner matching for randomised feedback. Many users feel uncomfortable providing feedback to peers they don’t know well, fearing they might come across as unfriendly or coming off as too strong. To address this, we can implement a system that randomly matches cohort members for feedback sessions. Each pair will have 24 hours to give feedback to each other. This approach aims to ease the hesitation around peer feedback and promote user interactions with each other.
Bonus.
I personally use Airtribe a lot, especially the Resource hub and there were a few features which I hoped for in this section.
VOTING is an up-vote and down-vote feature for the resource hub in order to get quicker access to more useful resources. Users frequently use the resources hub, but a common issue is the lack of ranking for resources that have no likes. When trying to find resources on a particular topic, many resources have no likes, which means that almost 70% of resources are not sorted. Requiring users to sift through numerous entries to determine which ones are useful. This is a problem with only having a positive feedback option (in the form of Likes) available. A more desirable way would be that helps sort the maximum number of resources.
To address this, the decision was made not to add a dislike button as it’s not positively represented by the peers. Instead, an upvote and downvote system similar to Reddit was implemented. This system is considered more effective for resources shared by users rather than created by them. Downvotes are not shown to users but are used to help rank the resources better, making it easier for users to find the most valuable resources. A share button and a pin resource button has also been added.
That’s a Wrap! 🙌🏻
If you made it this far Thankyou for your time.
To ensure the impact that these designs created on the end users I conducted a controlled survey with 16 people, these were the results:
Gamification Strategies that Boost Engagement by 20%.
Improve the Retention of learners on the Airtribe dashboard by 15%.
Working on this project was a lot of fun and an opportunity for me to work on a real life user centric problem statement. Shoutout to the Airtribe team for their constant support and guidance.
If you have feedback please feel free to hit me up, I’d love to discuss it with you. I’m open to Product Designer opportunities and can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter. I also work in ceramics on the side, you can check that here.
This case study provides a brief overview of the project. For a more in depth approach or any other questions, please direct message me.
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