Competing with other users motivates engagement, making leaderboards an effective element of gamification.
MyHyperskill is an application for learning STEM and programming languages. The web version of the platform has an audience of about 900k registered users. The application serves as a supplement to the learning on the web version.
Product: mobile app (iOS, Android)
Target audience: users with the free plan
Role: middle product designer
Team: mobile engineers, project manager, product manager
Objective: increase daily paying audience
Timeline: November 2023 — February 2024
Results: the feature has not had a significant impact on daily paying users
At the time, the primary metric for the app was the daily paying audience, and the team was focused on increasing it. After analyzing potential features, we settled on leaderboards.
According to analytics, about 80% of users complete only one task in the app to extend their streak. We hypothesized that leaderboards would motivate users to solve more tasks within the app. Consequently, users on the free plan would reach their daily limit faster and be more likely to purchase the premium plan. Therefore, by implementing leaderboards in the app, we aimed to increase the number of daily paying users and improve retention.
Together with the product manager, I assessed how many users would be featured in the leaderboards. I researched how leaderboards are structured in different apps (such as Duolingo and Mimo) and gathered references. To engage more users, we decided to use two time intervals: day and week. A user who solves one task a day will appear in both leaderboards simultaneously. This way, we aim to motivate users to continue their efforts while not demotivating them if they miss a day within the week.
Users who solve a task a day are included in both the daily and weekly leaderboards. Those who did not solve a task today remain in the weekly leaderboard. Each new week starts on Sunday, with the app displaying the time until the start. Users who miss a week or more see a motivational placeholder leading to a task.
We decided to add the leaderboards to the navbar to maximize visibility among users. Tabs were used for switching between days/weeks. To demonstrate to the team, I assembled a prototype and mapped out the user journey for each screen. I also created an illustration for the empty state.
In the first iteration, the feature was released with limited functionality. Users could only see their neighbors and the leaders of the day/week.
From the results of A/B testing, we found that leaderboards did not significantly impact the daily paying audience. Group A showed similar results to Group B.
In the upcoming iterations, the team decided to minimally enhance the functionality: adding entry points and improving the onboarding process.
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© 2024 Viktor Seleikov