WhaleDesign
Type
Full-time Job
Tools
Sketch, Adobe XD
Timeline
Mar 2017 to Aug 2018
Overview
From March 2017 to August 2018, I worked at Whale Design as a product designer. Whale Design, which launched in 2017, takes companies' design requests and floats competitions for freelance designers, with the winner being allowed on work on the company's project and earning a bonus as well.
As the individual product/UX designer on this project, I was mainly responsible for the design of the second iteration of the website product. After the one-month user and market research, I decided to incorporate the gamification strategy into our product to optimize the design contest process and improve user experience.
| Business Goals
01. Increase the number of registered designers by 50% in one year
02. Increase the number of submissions in each contestby 20% in 6 months
03. Increase the number of new clients by 100% in one year
Problem Statement
Only 5.2% of Whale Design users are winners of all contests on the platform, the others work hard but get nothing, which is a big disappointment to those users.Experience Points Grading System
Contestants who are not winners would also earn XP as prizes which can help them level up their accounts. We incorporated the XP Grading System into our product mainly for two reasons:
1. We want to encourage all users to participate in contests and help them improve their skills.
2. We would be able to rank designers on our platform based on their account levels.
Users at higher levels have eligibility to participate in higher-level contests.
Multiple Contest Types
We designed 5 types of contests based on different needs of designers at various degrees of proficiency in design skills, which are:
1. Open Contest
2. Invitational Contest
3. Creative Contest
4. Individual Contest
Betting System
Users can also participate in semi-finals even if they lose in the preliminary stage. In a contest betting, they can try to pick the winner before the contest ends. They would also earn money as prizes if they win the bet.
Personal Center
Personal Center is a multi-functional hub for users to do all kinds of tasks and check all the notifications.
Design Process
Research
To quickly get familiar with the current website, I began my research by creating an interaction map of the current website and a contest flow diagram. I noticed there are two issues:
1. Averagely, one contest would have 150 submissions, but only 10% of them can earn prizes and others just get nothing. This contest mode can be a huge disappointment to those designers who work hard but get nothing 2. Other than uploading designs and waiting for results, there is nothing else designers can do on the platform. There is potential to create new features for them.
After previous research, I conducted 4 interviews with current users to understand their goals/pain points in their work as well as their experience on the website. From interviews, I realized that the money is not always the motivation for designers to participate contests. Designers at different levels can have different goals.
Based on insitghs and data collected from the interviews, I created three peronas to help me understand different types of users and their goals.
An interesting detail that I noticed during interviews is that one designer said he has won 5 contests. But I know that
we only have 21 contests on the platform at that time and 5 of them are still ongoing, which means he won 1/3 of all the contests.
This finding drew my attention, which made me want to explore the data about our designers, I had three questions in mind:
01. How many active designers do we have on the platform?
02. What percent of designers have earned money from contests?
03. Designers stop participating in contests after how many times of failures?
After creating personas, I have a solid understanding of what needs do designers at different levels have. I want to create a new mechanism to help different types of users achieve their goals and also participate in more contests.
Design Goals
Design a new mechanism that helps users earn what they want and also encourages them to participate in more contestsDesign Process
We brainstormed more than 10 ideas and sketched them out. We presented our findings and designs to the development team and product manager to get feedback.
I decided to incorporate the gamification strategy into our product after brainstorming. I found game players and Whale Design users have many things in common, especially they both care about improving their skills in the game or design and players or users with skills at different levels would perform differently on the same task/contest. After two-week gamification research, I came up with four insights of how should I implement this strategy:
Lo-fi Prototypes
Final Design
Multiple Contest Types
Dashboard
Whale Design Case Study
Contest Detailed Information
Make a Pick
Landing Page