final solution
Guided Growth:
Driving Engagement with Multi-Layered Point Systems
A phased-release, multi-layered gamification system with client configurable theming options, level progression based on experience points, and redeemable points and rewards to drive guided user learning and engagement.
problem
Financial education is valuable—but without incentive, it can feel like a chore
And a one-size-fits-all solution falls short in a diverse market
iGrad is a B2B financial literacy platform providing tailored financial wellness programs for diverse clients including employers, financial institutions, and higher education. While building the product into a more linear flow simplifies the complexity of finances, it lacked the dynamic elements necessary for fostering long-term user retention and returning user interest.
💡 Challenge: How can we create a gamification system that drives sustained learning engagement across our diverse user base while seamlessly integrating with our client-configurable features?
problem
Financial education is valuable—but without incentive, it can feel like a chore
And a one-size-fits-all solution falls short in a diverse market
iGrad is a B2B financial literacy platform providing tailored financial wellness programs for diverse clients including employers, financial institutions, and higher education. While building the product into a more linear flow simplifies the complexity of finances, it lacked the dynamic elements necessary for fostering long-term user retention and returning user interest.
💡Challenge: How can we create a gamification system that drives sustained learning engagement across our diverse user base while seamlessly integrating with our client-configurable features?
research
Where do we start?
Understanding the scope & basic elements
As gamification was a new area for me, I began with comprehensive overview research and best practices. This approach allowed me to explore the problem space and better understand the project's scope. Consequently, this project relied heavily on secondary research.
Our team knew beforehand, in our existing product streamline plan, that we wanted to incorporate some type of points system into our features. That being said, the most logical starting point for my research was to understand the different types of points systems that exist in the realm of gamification and analyze which one would make most sense for our platform.
Experience Points
Earned when a user performs some type of action in the system
Quantify user’s progression
Points of Skill
Denote user’s abilities in specific areas
Can be applied to quizzes & assessments
Redeemable Points
Virtual currency – increase or decrease as users redeem
Typically involves integrating user loyalty
The purpose of any of these three is to keep users motivated towards some defined goal (e.g. the next level, reward, etc.), incentivize favorable user actions, and provide visualization of system status. However, during this initial research, many resources made an important note –
Point systems cannot sustain long-term engagement when implemented alone.
Combining these systems with other gamification elements is what effectively drives long-term sustainable behavior and greater effective platform engagement.
These additional elements are generally referred to as “game mechanics”. While points systems focus on tracking and incentivizing progress towards specific goals, game mechanics collectively aim to enhance the user experience by maintaining motivation, visually representing achievements, and fostering sustained engagement through rewarding cycles of interaction.
Challenges
Guide users on activities that must be performed in the system and help users remain motivated.
Badges
Act as more robust version of points and visual representation of user progression & achievement.
Engagement Loops
Cycles that sustain motivation through incentive and positive reinforcement for present & future interaction.
Developing my strategy with frameworks & best practices
With a clearer understanding of the key elements that could shape our gamification playing field, I was ready to start crafting a well-supported approach to strategically piece them together.
Elucidat, an award-winning e-learning authoring platform, offers some key practices for getting started when developing gamified e-learning strategies.
Start Small
Start by targeting specific areas for engagement improvement, then gradually implement higher-profile gamification.
Prioritize Learning
Points have value only when tied to behaviors and performance, so define objectives first to design effective mechanics.
Points Hierarchy
Points are easily earned through tasks, while badges should reflect meaningful skill development.
Criteria & Progression
Users must clearly understand which tasks earn points and their significance.
"Zone of Proximal Development"
System should progressively be made more difficult and scarce once users are more integrated.
Going further...
A key source I found, that became integral to my project, was Yukai Chou’s Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design. This is a comprehensive model that breaks down the concept of gamification into several “core drives” that influence user motivation and behavior using certain psychological triggers. Building strategies around at least one or more of these systems will naturally make any game fun and enjoyable by appealing to human engagement mechanisms.
We currently have a fairly linear user flow, which in summary generally looks like
Account Creation → Financial Wellness Checkup → User Dashboard → Priority Tasks
On top of the 8 Core Drives, another important aspect of gamification design according to Yukai Chou, is understanding the ‘4 Experience Phases of a Game’. This is an additional framework that views a product as a user’s journey through evolving phases of product perception/experience: Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, and Endgame. Based on the scope of our product’s reach, we would only be able to focus on the Onboarding and Scaffolding phases for this project.
These were great findings to help guide and inform the progression of my research, but I felt it was also important to find specific frameworks that offered concrete, in-depth strategies that unpacked the intricacies of gamification principles at a more granular level.
I paired each Core Drive that I felt was applicable to our platform with the two phases and mapped out how each would apply accordingly.
Onboarding: Account Creation & Financial Wellness Checkup (FWC)
Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning & Calling): Instilling a sense of purpose or greater meaning in users.
Our onboarding process showcases the platform’s potential by empowering users to use it to build habits that shape a better financial future.
Core Drive 4 (Ownership): Users feel more motivated & connected to what they feel they own.
Our Financial Wellness Checkup aligns with this drive well by using each user’s responses to tailor their content, giving them a strong sense of personalization.
Core Drive 8 (Loss & Avoidance): Driving action to prevent setbacks
Users are directed to the FWC after account creation, then to their customized Dashboard with simple tasks, ensuring a clear next step.
Scaffolding: Dashboard & Exploration
Core Drive 2 (Accomplishment): Internal drive to make progress and develop one’s skills.
Small point-yielding actions in Dashboard Tasks encourage engagement, while experience points help users visualize progress. User actions should trigger meaningful feedback throughout their experience.
Core Drive 4 (Ownership):
We can reiterate this core drive here with implementation of additional complementary game mechanics that reward users for reaching key milestones.
Core Drive 7 (Unpredictability):
Motivate users by surprising them with unexpected points for special actions or rare accomplishments, sparking curiosity and encouraging further engagement.
Further referencing the Octalysis Framework, gamification design involves two types of motivators:
Extrinsic Motivators refers to visible or tangible incentives such as points, badges, or prizes, which drive behavior by providing external rewards.
Intrinsic Motivators refer to internal rewards or the sense of personal fulfillment or enjoyment that arise from doing a particular action. Most often, these motivators are effective because their outcome aligns with a user’s inner needs, autonomy, or personal mastery.
Finding a balance of both types in gamification design is important for maintaining both immediate user engagement and long-term user engagement.
Having established a deeper understanding of gamification implementation, I felt it would be a suitable time to conduct a competitive analysis to see how these frameworks and practices might be applied in action.
Rather than focusing on direct competitors in the B2B financial literacy space, I chose to center my competitive analysis on gamified e-learning companies, both financial and general, as none of the direct competitors had well-implemented gamification systems. My analysis included Duolingo, the Long Game, and ZOGO.
I identified the most common gamification elements among these were experience points (XP), redeemable points, badges, and engagement loops – which helped me narrow down which elements to incorporate. I decided to place most of my focus on experience points (XP) and redeemable points.
A key advantage to implementing point-based gamification, particularly in a B2B context, is the ability to guide users towards desired actions.
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This can involve promoting important or impactful features, as well as advancing specific business or client objectives. With this idea comes the Power Law of Participation: A model of early online user participation that organizes the idea of user participation into distinctive categories: Low Threshold v. High Threshold
Low Threshold = Easy to perform or requires little participation
High Threshold = More effort or more valuable to the organization
By aligning this concept with business objectives and client goals, we can strategically assign point values to user actions, encouraging desired user behaviors and promoting key features. Our platform is organized into three main sections: Dashboard, Topics, and Mindfulness. I analyzed the features within each section to determine the most effective opportunities for applying points, categorizing them as low- or high-threshold actions based on their impact and effort.
Low Threshold
Dashboard
Financial Wellness Checkup
Tasks
Monthly Challenge*
Recommendations
Favorites
High Threshold
Topics
Courses
Tools
Articles
Infographics
Webinars
Mindfulness
Meditations
Journals
Users prefer big numbers.
Users respond more effectively to clear reinforcement. In gamification, this often manifests as larger point values. This is also beneficial because it distinguishes different point-yielding activities more clearly. However, this also depends on whether the UI of the interface can support big-digit numbers.
In our case. . .
iGrad's platform is a large interface with lots of engagement features. This means users will be able to accumulate points fairly quickly. For instance, a 1000-point scale would be impractical, as there are many interaction opportunities on our site — causing points to quickly escalate into the thousands. When a user's earned points become excessively large too quickly, they can lose their visual impact and perceived value.
A 5/25/50 point scale may be most effective here.
This may create a significant enough gap where point values remain visually impactful, providing the right level of motivation for users. It also allows for smaller actions to be rewarded while effectively depicting a user's point progress.
Assigning Point Values
Next, I ranked the low- and high-threshold actions based on the effort required to determine their point values.
Courses and Tools
iGrad's platform is a large interface with lots of engagement features. This means users will be able to accumulate points fairly quickly. For instance, a 1000-point scale would be impractical, as there are many interaction opportunities on our site — causing points to quickly escalate into the thousands. When a user's earned points become excessively large too quickly, they can lose their visual impact and perceived value.
Monthly Challenge
For context, our Monthly Challenge is a client-promoted feature that highlights a chosen course each month to boost engagement. If users complete that chosen course, they are automatically entered to into a $1000 raffle.
This involves more sparse course engagement in comparison, but the raffle aspect already introduces a significant tangible rewarding mechanism. Keeping this feature at a high point value could be beneficial, as it aligns with client priorities and promotion efforts.
Mindfulness
Our Mindfulness feature offers journaling prompts and audio meditations, which may require significant time and effort from users. However, these serve more as supplementary elements to the primary learning content.
Tasks
These are instructed actions that vary in time and effort. Tasks should yield the smallest point value since they are meant to be easy, bite-sized interaction opportunities aimed at building consistent engagement.
Here is how my initial point hierarchy proposal turned out.
Now, with the idea of gamification and point systems floating around, a major question from many other stakeholders was...
Will there be rewards that users can earn by cashing in their points?
Will there be rewards/statuses that users claim when they move up a level?
💡 The challenge was to create a reward structure that balances difficulty, commitment, and appeal across user verticals, while considering feasibility for every client.
Pulling from my competitive analysis, other gamified learning products have varying redeemable reward options for their users. However, there are also several that we can rule out solely based on the limitations of our business model. Considering our product structure, I narrowed down a few feasible ideas to…
For context, this project was prefaced with the intent to include rewards options so inclusion of redeemable points and tangible rewards was already a key component from the outset.Upon my initial overview research on best practices for reward mechanisms, the main observation I found was that rewards should be tangible and attainable, yet offer enough scarcity in order to act as effective motivation. While this seemed like an obvious takeaway, it was a very important principle to keep in mind when designing for such a wide demographic of users. To reiterate, our user basis ranges from higher education students, early to mid-career professionals, and those approaching retirement.
Gift Cards & Discounts
Similar to ZOGO, we can look into gift card or discount APIs so users can redeem points for real monetary rewards
Unlock Tools
Since some tools are situated within courses, we can lock the tools that are not offered in courses and users can unlock them using points
Monthly Challenge entries
Points can be redeemed for additional entries into the Monthly Challenge
Recognizing my limits as a designer,
I felt it was crucial at this stage to involve other stakeholders to weigh in on a deeper discussion about rewards, as their input would offer valuable perspectives to help determine the best direction forward. I gained several important insights from both a business and client standpoint, of how we can better leverage rewards to drive more meaningful impact:
- Given that our product serves as a benefit for students and employees, rewards must be highly tangible and lean strongly into extrinsic motivation – meaning the appeal must be significant enough to overcome challenges with discoverability and retention.
- We should focus on rewards that promote financial literacy rather than unnecessary spending to truly align with our value proposition.
If we want to consider monetary or subsidized rewards, they should be cost effective and cost-flexible to appeal to varying client budgets.
Locking/unlocking functionality does not align with our value prop since we acknowledge that different users are at different points of their financial journeys so content cannot be linear. Additionally, we prioritize consistent value delivery as a B2B product.
With this new insight, I generated a new reward proposal that involved three other options to better leverage client configurability.
Financial Benefits & Incentives
Discounts on Essential Expenses
Rather than standard gift cards, we can take inspiration from Gas and Grocery Rewards and integrate APIs for discounts on Gas, Groceries, Amtrak, Internet, etc.
Support Services
Direct Deposit payouts, Scholarships, Subsidized Account Opening, Fraud Monitoring, etc.
Why this works: These align with everyday needs that facilitate smarter spending and engagement with key financial practices.
Monthly Challenge entries
Again, this option would allow users to redeem their earned points for additional entries into the monthly challenge.
We can offer this as a low-risk, configurable alternative for clients who want to offer rewards without the complexities or financial strain of providing ongoing discounts or additional services.
Why this works: Since points are earned through platform interactions, it encourages active financial learning, and indirectly incentivizes users to apply their winnings toward more informed financial decisions.
No Rewards (Client Opt-out)
The final option for clients would be to completely opt-out of redeemable points and rewards, using only experience points and levels for gamification on their platform. This provides flexibility for clients who may want to incorporate gamification without the logistical challenges of managing a rewards system, those who have their own existing rewards system, or for those where a reward system does not align with their business goals.
Since this project already presents such large scale changes to the platform, we decided to launch the Monthly Challenge Entries as the sole reward system in the initial phase, ensuring a smoother transition if more complex rewards are introduced later.
Additionally, with this third option for clients to opt-out of rewards, intentionality about both client configurability and the different user experiences per use case became even more critical.
I decided to split gamification into two separate point structures: XP and Rewards
This separation allows for a gradual rollout of the platform change, with XP and Levels as the first phase, providing a foundational gamification system. Rewards and Redeemable Points will follow as a second phase, adding extrinsic motivation. This approach encourages initial intrinsic engagement, builds long-term commitment, and offers flexibility to appeal to a broader audience with different motivations.
Empathize
With the foundations in place, I analyzed how well the elements worked together to create a flexible experience for a diverse user demographic.
I focused on defining key user types, mapping their interactions, and aligning configurations with the client’s goals. This ensured the gamification system remained adaptable, relevant, and seamlessly integrated into the overall experience.
Personas —
I especially wanted to test out if my proposed point hierarchy would work for XP to suit the usage levels of our diverse user base and ensure that progression remains balanced and rewards feel meaningful. I created a user flow that represented a typical single session for each persona.
Referencing Yukai Chou’s Octalysis Framework, we can categorize our users into three main “Player Types”:
They prioritize points, progression, and achievement, driven by mastery and measurable success.
They enjoy discovery and learning, valuing new experiences over points and rewards.
They value autonomy, creativity, and personalized content, avoiding restrictions in their journey.
I created five different personas to represent user demographics from each of our main verticals, and constructed a user flow that represented a typical single session for each.
With these flows mapped out, I began to feel that the XP amounts were too low. Across our five personas, the average session generated only about 75 points. These results may be suitable for a redeemable points structure, which should hold a lower value than XP to maintain its secondary nature and preserve the value of rewards. However, it’s important to consider that our current user activity is highly sporadic, with average platform returns occurring on a monthly basis or longer.
Larger values are necessary to reflect user progress and also sustain motivation, despite long re-engagement gaps. (Remember, users prefer big numbers!)
From here, I decided to increase the XP hierarchy to a 20, 50, 100, 250 scale to better align with our users’ session frequency. This way, the average points-per-session will be high enough to provide a sense of accomplishment and progress.
I also set our two major platform onboarding features, ‘Financial Wellness Checkup (FWC)’ and ‘Your Money Personality (YMP)’ to be the only site actions to yield 250 XP. Rewarding onboarding generously aligns better with gamification best practices to boost early motivation and reduce drop-off.
With this new system, our personas will earn 250-500 XP in onboarding, and an average of about 270 XP per session afterwards. This rapid initial progression leverages something called the "endowed progress effect," which makes users feel accomplished and more likely to return. XP earning then slows afterwards to better sustain long-term engagement, as users become more familiar with the system.
Level System Tiering
Now that I’ve created an improved XP hierarchy, it was time to decide on a level system and how many XP should be required between each level to maintain a good progression of challenge and growth for users.
Considering Client Configurations
It’s important to emphasize that our business model allows clients to turn certain features on or off depending on their needs for the platform. This includes all or some courses and tools, mindfulness, and the monthly challenge. It’s crucial that I factored this in when deciding on level tiering to ensure flexibility between these use cases.
To do so, I first wanted to estimate a numerical threshold and determine the total amount of levels based on the use case where the minimal amount of content is available. This was to ensure the system could remain effective even when clients configure the platform with the least possible content enabled.
Total for all Courses = 4,000 XP
Total for all Tools = 6,800 XP
Total for Challenge = 100 XP
Total for Meditations = 1,600 XP
Based on existing client data, we can assume that most clients disable up to half of major content (courses or tools) at most.
Considering additional configurable features, we can confidently set the final level cap at 5,250 XP with 11 levels total. This way, the final level can still be attainable regardless of all client configuration possibilities.
With our onboarding features set to 250 XP our users will reach at least 500 fairly easily, so level 2 was set to 500. This is a ‘freebie’ level since no other actions on our site will yield as many points as FWC and YMP.
Current user data from Google Analytics was used to validate that most used features of our platform are courses and tools. We can also assume average ideal usage will be once a month after Phase II (Rewards and Redeemable Points) is introduced. Therefore, the next level XP requirements were decided with how many courses and tools would realistically be used (each are worth about 100-200 XP).
According to the Octalysis Framework, designing an effective level system requires very intentional scarcity control. A general rule of thumb is to increase difficulty by 20-60% between levels. I divided the level system into three difficulty sections (easy, medium, hard). Levels 2-5 were set to increase in difficulty by 20% only. Levels 6-8 set to increase in difficulty 30%. Levels 9-11 set to increase in difficulty by 40%. I decided to only increase the difficulty by 10% every 2-3 levels based on the results of our user flows and return frequency.
Ideation
With the logical frameworks in place, I explored how to bring the experience to life through storytelling and visualization.
This phase focused on branding, early design concepts, and low-fidelity layouts to create a cohesive identity and bring the gamification concepts to life.
Branding —
According to my gamification research, storytelling through theming is an effective way to connect various concepts and elements, creating a more immersive and compelling experience for the user. Most competitors like Duolingo and ZOGO also make great use of illustrative themes to engage users with their product and make complex material more inviting.
I chose plant references and gardening illustrations for our theme to symbolize the process of planting the seeds and cultivating financial knowledge. Our unbranded platform logo already incorporates leaf imagery, which already naturally reinforces a theme of growth and nature. Furthermore, by drawing on familiar phrases like "growing your investment" and "growing your knowledge" this theme seamlessly aligns with financial concepts, making it an intuitive and cohesive experience for users.
My first implementation of this was in the level names, as seen below. I decided to categorize redeemable point as “Sprouts” and, to maintain clarity and alignment with common gaming terminology, I kept experience points simply as “XP”. You will also see further incorporations of theming later on in the iterative and design stages.
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