Client Project
My Roles: Lead of Gamified Progression, UX Writer
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Why do startups fail? Typically, some mix of lack of funding, chasing oversaturated trends, lacking a real problem they are trying to solve, not networking with the right people in early stages, or just not having a strong brand identity. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably at some point been part of a startup that had all these issues.
Connect Link’s platform provides a community for entrepreneurs to network, receive mentorship from industry experts, and begin developing their idea/brand. Think Linkedin’s professional network meets ADP List’s great mentor resources with the gamified hooks of Duolingo — exclusively for entrepreneurs.
My role at Connect Link was working on “Journey,” a way for users to chart their real-world startup creation by dividing this progress up into a series of digestible tasks. My two main responsibilities for Journey were:
Creating the gamified progression system for beginning entrepreneurial users looking to build a startup.
UX Writer for tasks and rewards that encourage and motivate users to make progress on the platform
Our team reached Mid-Fidelity on Journey before a company pivot (more on that later):
The first stage of a Connect Link user’s Journey starts with the “Initial Kick-off” stage. Here, users are asked to define their startup idea in greater detail.
Part one of this stage is “The Hook,” with the goal of having the user focus their idea of, say, for example, “an instagram-style app that measures your fit for various online clothing stores,” into a compelling one sentence hook that will capture an investor’s attention, such as, “a social discovery app that helps people with similar clothing fits find, share, and rate styles across various retailers.”
Rewards + Points screen. Users gain “Connect Coins” for login streaks and completing stages in their journey. They also receive rewards for each tier completed, such as access to Connect Link Networking Events, ability to message more users, and Master Class sessions by established founders.
“Linkedin but for entrepreneurs ” was more or less the version of Connect Link that was being worked on when I started. The focus was on building on entrepreneurial connections, finding mentors, and getting expert advice from successful founders — with the Journey portion of the platform still lacking an identity.
Mid-fi screens of the Community section.
The problem the team faced, though, was what was going to encourage users to continue to engage with the platform once they’ve made connections? How can we facilitate a user’s progress from an entrepreneurial idea to full-on startup?
Once I became part of the UX team, I was put on the group figuring out the Journey part of the platform due to my interest in Game UX and my writing background.
After combing through the design team’s research, primarily their user interviews and competitive analysis, it became clear to me that the process of building a startup should be broken up into bite-sized gamified chunks on our platform. This way the journey never feels overwhelming and progress is much more immediate.
We decided to break up the Journey into three Tiers consisting of twelve “Milestones,” before completing the Journey and entering the fourth and final tier.
Tiers would consist of:
Putting together your startup (idea generation through fundraising).
Launch preparation.
Post-Launch Analysis
Completed all Milestones and become an Expert platform, which gives users access to a community of entrepreneurs who have launched using Connect Link.
Rewards for completing milestones and tiers would consist of things such as access to master class and networking events, consultations with mentors on the platform, Pitch session practices, and more messaging capabilities with other users of the platform.
This ended up being a good place to begin to then sketch out the individual tasks for each Milestone, but a few of these ideas ended up being difficult to actually implement (more on that later).
The goal of each Milestone’s tasks is to give users a roadmap for developing their startup while also encouraging them to think deeper about every step they take.
For instance, in the first Milestone, “Initial Kick-off,” users are asked to define their startup idea over a series of three questions:
Click to enlarge
I didn’t want these questions to feel like filling out a spreadsheet. Bringing to life any idea can be full of boring, tedious tasks. So our tasks should be written in a personable manner that doesn’t just ask users to check things off a list, but asks them to examine WHY someone should care about their idea and what problems it’s meant to solve.
Continuously rewarding users as they make real world progress on their startup sounds great in theory. But what are they rewarded with? Will they find the reward valuable or put it to good use?
Since much of the Connect Link platform is geared towards finding mentorship and creating useful collaborations, it seemed like it would be a good idea to have rewards geared toward feedback sessions with other entrepreneurs.
Our idea was to give out points, dubbed here as “Connect Coins,” for completing tasks and login streaks as well as rewards for completing each milestone. These points could be redeemed for mentor consultations, peer reviews, pitch session practice, and networking events with other users of the platform. When we ran this by the rest of the product team, though, we quickly realized that giving out free mentor sessions as rewards would clash with the company’s business model.
Established entrepreneurs who join the platform as mentors are there to sell their services to the users in the process of creating their first startup. So giving away free mentor sessions as rewards becomes a problem because mentors (and Connect Link) are not making money in this scenario.
With mentorship rewards out, we decided to pivot to points/rewards that were geared toward further community engagement. This included:
Virtual meetups with other users who have reached specific tiers. These would also include mentors who could pitch their services to users.
Redeeming points for increased messaging (ala Linkedin). This would allow users to reach out more users and recruit for needed positions.
Access to Master Classes taught by established entrepreneurs or successful users on the Connect Link platform.
Access to Comparison Features that show users how they are progressing compared to others as well as what they need to work on moving forward.
Unfortunately, while we were in the process of re-tooling the incentives for task completion, higher-ups decided to pivot their focus away from users building their startup w/Connect Link — and therefore doing away with the gamified tasks and rewards.
Instead, they wanted to focus on the much more digestible “Community for Entrepreneurs” angle. Understandable, but that meant I could either move to that part of the team or look for other opportunities. Around this time, I received an offer at another company and decided to move on from Connect Link.
I would have loved to see the gamified aspects make it into the MVP because it would’ve been a really compelling — and innovative — way to bring founders onto the platform who were fed up with Linkedin’s rather sterile, limited features. Making the first steps toward making an idea a reality is the hardest, most confusing part of the process. So the idea of organizing that process for users and creating a compelling ladder to climb seemed to be a excellent way to encourage founders to move forward with their idea.
Either way, this was a great learning experience on ways to keep users motivated and will certainly apply these skills to future projects.
And then (also in Notes) I laid out some rough guidelines for what Rewards and Tiers of the Journey would look like:
Ichiban dropping the wisdom in Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Creating a company is a long, arduous, and often abstract process. So anything we could do to make it tangible and progressively rewarding was our utmost concern.
From there I began to sketch out some ideas in my notes app for how a user’s startup Journey could be gamified: