We examined how other companies like Strava, Nike and Duolingo were implementing gamification into their products to drive engagement. We explored concepts using different gamification design patterns to see what value they could add to our product. These involved ideas such as adding an achievement system to the product, community leaderboards, and an incentivized points based system.

Ultimately, the deeper we dove in the direction of gamification, the harder we found that it was to develop a system that our users would find meaningful. We decided that although there was some indication of added value, gamification was a feature that we should reprioritize for a later release.

Moving away from idea of gamification, we started exploring the idea of using social tools and community building as a means to get people involved. We felt that the addition of a social component combined with an enhanced discovery experience was a much stronger direction to take the platform. We analyzed products like Ticketmaster, Airbnb, Eventbrite and Facebook for inspiration.

Our strategy was to demonstrate to users on both the social side and the discover side that there are many different avenues to giving back to your community, some of which with less barriers than others. Our platform offers individuals many different tools to decide for themselves how they want give back. Communicating that idea to the individual was critical to the redesign.

We also explored solutions to reduce drop off rates throughout certain creation flows such as creating events or fundraisers. Many of these flows were long complex processes that were overwhelming to our users. We used design patterns like forced progression to break up the creation process into small steps for the user that were more manageable. We also gave users the option to skip some steps if they were able to add the information in later.