Does gamification can help my site to push actions?

Design Thinking
#1

Hi, my question is probably in the head of lot of people.

My team and I created a web site to practice languages by writing discussion. The idea is to create a win-win relationship between learners and natives. To create this win-win we thought about gamification. We created a virtual currency. Our main idea was to split the role of the user into two different roles: motivator and learner.
As a learner I can spend credits to request a correction to a post.
As a motivator I can earn credits when correcting posts or when I start discussion in my native language.
Our main problem is that people don’t start discussion in their native language. We don’t know what we did wrong.
Do you have trips and trick to tune our solution or any other suggestion for us?

What is a bit frustrating is that we don’t know if we have made the good chose or if we have to totally rethink the solution.

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#2

hi @marc_roche
from my POV the project sounds very interesting.
I will start, for sure, to use your platform for boosting my English!

At the same time looks quite weird what you wrote about user behaviour.
In my experience building communities, I learned that, very often, it does not matter how good is the platform in terms of features. It is very important how the users are engaged with it and how the user generated content is handled.

Anyway, due to the fact that I did not had direct experience with your platform I will ask some questions:

  • are the main user tasks well explained in terms of call to actions, placeholders, labels and step descriptions (if there are any of them)?
  • is it available a tutorial or a demo to help users understanding the main task?
  • how you reach your audience?
    *There is any subscription form?
    *Are they invited to join the platform?
  • Is it available any power users giving help and tips how to manage the platform features?

Don’t give up and embrace the challenge, I’m sure you will reach your goals :wink:

#3

Hey Marc, that sounds like a cool idea, and a frustrating situation.

Yes! Talk to your audience. Do some research. There is either an issue with your value proposition (in which case you’ll need to rethink your concept) or your platform/UX (in which case you need to identify the point of friction and fix it).

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#4

Thank you dopamino for your support,

Despite we already have active members (members connected almost all day long) we still struggle to guide people. We tried different approach and confront the platform to users.

We saw during last tests that newcomers are lost due to to many features. We cut off things to just focus on the minimum. Though what we think as the minimum.

I hope to have finished the transformation by the end the week.

With less things pehaps it will be easier to explain the main user task. The first idea is to create a three step flow chat from on the landing page.

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#5

I look forward to hearing how this goes. Best of luck!

#6

We are making some changes. First we review the landing page to better illustrate what we do.

You can find it at talkalang.com

Second, we are changing the entire navigation to better guide people. We try to make things simple and then we will try to tune our gamification system.

Certainly our major problem is a missunderstanding from users.

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#7

hi @marc_roche
I opened the website with a tablet view (1024*768) and these are my gut feelings

1391Ă—1031 700 KB

I will register in the next days :wink:

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#8

Wow… this sounds really interesting, already signed up for it. But while going through the website, I found the interface a bit confusing. The title tagline in the home page sets my expectation to find people exchanging conversations about language, but the platform is more like a social sharing website. If people are using it as a social platform too, then I feel you could emphasize more on its social media capabilities on the home page.

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#9

Hi Neonester,

We stopped promoting the social media aspect to prevent people from posting things similar to facebook. Our intention is to have quality exchange and not just reactions (like, …)

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#10

Awesome!

#11

We made an adjustment to simplify the second line. I redistributed the H2-H3-H4 tags.

For green and orange CTA buttons, I copied other sites. I don’t know what to think about.

#12

that’s what was in my mind:

1218Ă—744 147 KB

The color guid is self-explanatory:
*same task= same color
*violet the main CTA “Get started”
*violet the link in the main navigation “Sign Up”

#13

OK, we’ve modified the top button to make something quite similar. I like the new look.

#14

@marc_roche, Before writing my general response, looking at this page made me think, why are we using “Join for free” as a CTA? Why not using “Start your story” or “Write your first post”, something that really talks to me about the most important task for me to do with your website, so I will always have that in mind, I know that my commitment is for writing my stories to learn… and then for Motivators, have a different CTA on top right to encourage them for becoming a motivator/teacher… this might be my favorite example: https://www.upwork.com/

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#15

I like it too!

#16

I like the idea of a new strong message the CTA, we did a change this morning. What I’m not sure about is your second point. What do you have in mind with motivator/teacher special CTA.

#17

Something like this example: https://www.upwork.com/

On the top right of the page you “Become a Freelancer” which targeted for the freelancer persona, while in the middle of the page they are only targeting they clients by “Get Started” CTA. That’s a reasonable balance, the same thing happens in your case, you have people who are looking to learn that can be motivated by a get started kind of action in the middle, and teacher mentalities who are similar to Freelancer persona in Upwork.

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#18

@ali_eslamifar that’s a great example!

#19

I would like to thank you all for your help. You helped us a lot but we did a global change and to better explain it, I created a new topic.

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