Zygote: Improving User Retention with Achievements
benbodien
· 6 months ago
A good example of a badge system is in operation over at Motley Fools' CAPS game, where players pick stocks they think will out/under perform the markets, and are awarded or deducted points for each %age point they are correct or incorrect by. "Lucky Charms" are awarded for things like correctly predicting a bankruptcy, or for someone who writes a lot of commentaries. It's a great system and adds a dimension to the game. Not all of the charms are good - there are charms that are the equivalent of dunce caps, but I'm not sure this is a great idea unless you can afford to upset a few users, or you really want to push the element of competition among users, rather than rewarding users on an individual basis.
I like the idea of unlocking hidden functionality for people who earn certain achievements. Lots of scope for easter eggs there.
yongfook
· 6 months ago
great example - I like the idea of "negative" badges :)
James Thompson
· 6 months ago
I created a 'badge' system while Internet Art Director at SportingNews.com back in 2006. If .com members were mag subscribers, they got a badge, fantasy game winners, a badge and so on. It was hugely successful, and it was a bit surprising how intensely passionate the users got over their badges, and how to get other badges.
Things as simple as getting a blog post positively reviewed 20 times, really encouraged participation within the fledgling community. Great driver of participation, as well as retention.
yongfook
· 6 months ago
awesome - it's very cool to hear about this sort of thing implemented out in the wild.
euwyn
· 6 months ago
Foursquare is probably the best example of this (playfoursquare.com). They've integrated dining/going out tips and updating your status with a game. Really helpful post as usual YF.
kevnull
· 6 months ago
As euwyn mentions, Foursquare's implementation has a few aspects that most sites that attempt this system didn't do: personality, external validation, and a design worthy of coveting. I've come to find the design of the badge and the uniqueness of it has a huge impact personally on my desire to acquire it. Following that, there's a desire to show that off.
It's funny you should talk about a central place for achievements. A few of us from Yahoo! Brickhouse launched a product called BravoNation in December 07. In the system, we explored exactly what kinds of achievements exist on sites today and also created a mechanism to "covet" achievements.
If you look at http://bravo.yahoo.com/docs/ you'll see hints of the direction it was meant for. Unfortunately, the project only lasted for a few months and all of the project team has since moved on.
Ultimately, when it comes to achievements, what matters most is, "do your users care?" It won't make a useless site more interesting and it won't even help a useful site be more engaging if the achievements are not designed to appeal to various base gaming psychology profiles.
Gordon Luk
· 6 months ago
"There is no solution for this and perhaps there should be."
Well, there almost was. While at Yahoo! Brickhouse, I led a team of 5 to try and build the achievements platform that you're thinking about. We got as far as launching a "rough draft" which included both a strong centralized developer platform and a consumer site. If Brickhouse had been the right place for us to grow this product over the course of 3-5 years, I believe we could have succeeded, but as you may guess, Yahoo! in late 2007 was a challenging place to be for products trying to trailblaze into new markets. As far as we can tell (I resigned in March 2008), there has been no further development.
We didn't have much public discussion about the API as it was while it was running, but it was a fully OAuth-compliant 3rd party REST API, accessible via JSON and XML. We had an interesting centralized but partitioned-by-application design that solved many of the interesting issues with such a system, and also allowed user-to-user participation in the same ecosystem through the consumer site.
All in all, i'm simply glad that we were able to invite members of the public to come and play with it. As a "public" release, we saw the light of day in after a remarkably short development cycle (for Yahoo!), and as public knowledge, we can talk about it freely now. :) I think it would take years of dedication and investment to convince application developers to integrate, so time will tell whether this type of functionality may appear once again. If I had to do it all over, I'd certainly plan for the long haul.
cindyalvarez
· 6 months ago
Two other companies that do this:
Lithium http://www.lithium.com - their online communities subtly reward frequent contributors (i.e. after posting a certain amount, your name may appear in bold or red, and there's no other way for users to get that "status indicator"). Their background is from gaming - the CEO originally ran gamers.com, and they've proven that those psychological motivators hold over in other contexts.
Bunchball http://www.bunchball.com - also has a community platform that incorporates gaming/behavioral economics concepts to encourage users to interact with the sites they power.
Jan Horna
· 6 months ago
Very inspiring ideas, thanks! The title of this article could also be "How to please the ego" :)
Another very simple example of the "Express yourself" strategy is Twitter where you can customize the colors, background etc.
Derek Organ
· 6 months ago
The best example of this is StackOverflow.com They have a great badges system..
Forums have had this as a simple concept for long time now. The more posts etc.
Richard Chang
· 6 months ago
Virutal Badges have been used a lot in my company -- Tencent (China-based Internet company). http://www.tencent.com/en-us/index.shtml . A large percentage of our revenue comes from virtual item sales, e.g. premium membership or avatars.
From experience, we found that these Badge system, or achievements, or even as simple as a Level system can be very effective when it comes to user behavior (retention is part of it). While these are very basic concepts in the gaming world, they do work in web sites or SNS as well.
marcfalk
· 5 months ago
Nice post as always ;)
Another PC game which, more or less, is played because of its achievements is Left 4 Dead for Steam (http://steampowered.com/) by Valve. World Of Warcraft by Blizzard is also a good example...
Anyway, definitely something I will think about for future and current applications :) Thanks.
David C
· 5 months ago
I'm a little late to the conversation on this.
Just finished reading "Yes We Did", which describes some of the social media stuff the Obama team did to help get him elected.
Ignoring the political aspect and focusing on the systems, they had an interesting idea for badges on my.barackobama.com. You'd accumulate points for doing certain things (phone calls, parties, canvassing, etc), except those points would be averaged out to a total score out of 10. AND, it would only track recent activity (past few weeks or month). Chris Hughes' (one of the founders of Facebook) fear was that people would on be in it for the points is it was simply cumulative.
This meant that in order to maintain a "good score", you'd have to participate often. It also allowed the Obama team to track serious participants and "recruit" them for greater responsibility.
Very good book. It doesn't show an ounce of code, but it does talk about the thought that went into their social media campaigns and is definitely worth a look.
I also think Joshua Porter refers to this as Reciprocity in "Designing for the Social Web" (another good book on social sites). Give them something and they're compelled to participate more.
All Comments
http://caps.fool.com/Help.aspx?source=ifltnvsnv...
I like the idea of unlocking hidden functionality for people who earn certain achievements. Lots of scope for easter eggs there.
Things as simple as getting a blog post positively reviewed 20 times, really encouraged participation within the fledgling community. Great driver of participation, as well as retention.
It's funny you should talk about a central place for achievements. A few of us from Yahoo! Brickhouse launched a product called BravoNation in December 07. In the system, we explored exactly what kinds of achievements exist on sites today and also created a mechanism to "covet" achievements.
If you look at http://bravo.yahoo.com/docs/ you'll see hints of the direction it was meant for. Unfortunately, the project only lasted for a few months and all of the project team has since moved on.
Ultimately, when it comes to achievements, what matters most is, "do your users care?" It won't make a useless site more interesting and it won't even help a useful site be more engaging if the achievements are not designed to appeal to various base gaming psychology profiles.
Well, there almost was. While at Yahoo! Brickhouse, I led a team of 5 to try and build the achievements platform that you're thinking about. We got as far as launching a "rough draft" which included both a strong centralized developer platform and a consumer site. If Brickhouse had been the right place for us to grow this product over the course of 3-5 years, I believe we could have succeeded, but as you may guess, Yahoo! in late 2007 was a challenging place to be for products trying to trailblaze into new markets. As far as we can tell (I resigned in March 2008), there has been no further development.
Here's Andy Baio's nice coverage of the consumer site side when we had our private launch: http://waxy.org/2007/12/exclusive_yahoo/
We didn't have much public discussion about the API as it was while it was running, but it was a fully OAuth-compliant 3rd party REST API, accessible via JSON and XML. We had an interesting centralized but partitioned-by-application design that solved many of the interesting issues with such a system, and also allowed user-to-user participation in the same ecosystem through the consumer site.
All in all, i'm simply glad that we were able to invite members of the public to come and play with it. As a "public" release, we saw the light of day in after a remarkably short development cycle (for Yahoo!), and as public knowledge, we can talk about it freely now. :) I think it would take years of dedication and investment to convince application developers to integrate, so time will tell whether this type of functionality may appear once again. If I had to do it all over, I'd certainly plan for the long haul.
Lithium http://www.lithium.com - their online communities subtly reward frequent contributors (i.e. after posting a certain amount, your name may appear in bold or red, and there's no other way for users to get that "status indicator"). Their background is from gaming - the CEO originally ran gamers.com, and they've proven that those psychological motivators hold over in other contexts.
Bunchball http://www.bunchball.com - also has a community platform that incorporates gaming/behavioral economics concepts to encourage users to interact with the sites they power.
Another very simple example of the "Express yourself" strategy is Twitter where you can customize the colors, background etc.
They have a great badges system..
Forums have had this as a simple concept for long time now. The more posts etc.
From experience, we found that these Badge system, or achievements, or even as simple as a Level system can be very effective when it comes to user behavior (retention is part of it). While these are very basic concepts in the gaming world, they do work in web sites or SNS as well.
Another PC game which, more or less, is played because of its achievements is Left 4 Dead for Steam (http://steampowered.com/) by Valve. World Of Warcraft by Blizzard is also a good example...
Anyway, definitely something I will think about for future and current applications :) Thanks.
Just finished reading "Yes We Did", which describes some of the social media stuff the Obama team did to help get him elected.
Ignoring the political aspect and focusing on the systems, they had an interesting idea for badges on my.barackobama.com. You'd accumulate points for doing certain things (phone calls, parties, canvassing, etc), except those points would be averaged out to a total score out of 10. AND, it would only track recent activity (past few weeks or month). Chris Hughes' (one of the founders of Facebook) fear was that people would on be in it for the points is it was simply cumulative.
This meant that in order to maintain a "good score", you'd have to participate often. It also allowed the Obama team to track serious participants and "recruit" them for greater responsibility.
Very good book. It doesn't show an ounce of code, but it does talk about the thought that went into their social media campaigns and is definitely worth a look.
I also think Joshua Porter refers to this as Reciprocity in "Designing for the Social Web" (another good book on social sites). Give them something and they're compelled to participate more.