Project Overview

Waggle is an adaptive Math & ELA learning and practice software used by students in grades 3-8 across the country. In 2019, HMH set out to make its learning products more rigorous, aligned, motivating and personal. Working with a team of UX designers, we explored gamification elements as a basis of a motivational system to reward positive learning behaviors and proficiency in Waggle users.

The Problem

A successful implementation of gamification as a behavior motivator needs to be relevant and useful to a student. Video game elements like points, badges, leaderboards alone are meaningless without addressing the needs of the student. A robust motivational system needs to address the needs of all learners. What may be motivating to one student may be demotivating to another. Tackling this challenge required in depth research of psychological perspectives on motivation, user analytics data and user research.

Process

Discovery

I began researching motivational theories such as self determination theory as a basis for the rewards system. I researched gamification implementations in other context to understand what makes them successful or not.

The key learnings from this research were that our motivational system would have to touch on these 3 important concepts:

Competence -We need to feel competent in order to keep going – the feeling of I can do this

Autonomy -Freedom of Decision Making –the feeling that I have a choice . Meaningfulness –My choices are important to me

Social Relatedness- Feelings of belonging and attachment to social group –I am part of a group

We wanted to help students move from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation. So instead of a student being motivated by fear of punishment, they are motivated because the program is fun and meaningful to them. The goal being that this will lead to increased engagement and better outcomes.

Collaboration and ideation

A cross-functional team of product, design, and learning architecture came together to brainstorm appropriate motivational strategies for students for this grade band beyond.

The motivational structure considered rewards for both mastery, persistence, and exploration, through experience points, badges, collection items to customize their avatars and gems for streaks of correct answers. Students gain experience points through persistence in and earn gems by building streaks while practicing problems. Students see the affect of their persistence and mastery in real time on screen through their point totals and streak meters. Students can earn badges both for exploration and achieving learning and practice objectives that are delivered after completing an assignment. Students motivated by social factors and competition have the opportunity to show off their rewards in the class view.

Rewards Structure Development

Below are the reward types for Waggle presented to stakeholders that reward different positive learning behavior and also targets different types of learners based on my previous research findings. An essential element of a successful rewards system is being able to strike a balance between motivational elements that target different types of learners.

In order to determine rewards parameters and delivery points, I dug into Waggle usage data from the previous year. The data was disparate from school to school with varying outliers depending on how the school implemented the program. I determined the standard deviation of each data data set to gain a clearer picture of student behavior. From this analysis, I was able to determine appropriate benchmarks that students could reasonably reach within a school year. According to motivational behavior research, students would need an opportunity to be challenged but also feel accomplished as they are progressing. By determining the mean, median, and range for various student behavior and then plotting the data points, I was able to confidently estimate meaningful and challenging benchmarks for students. This was the basis for a series of tiered badges that allow the students to continually level up as they put more time into the program.

Low fidelity Wireframes

I then developed low-fidelity wireframes to gain stakeholder buy-in from product, engineering, and learning architecture teams.

Interactive Prototyping and user Testing Script Writing

After getting stakeholder buy-in,I developed an interactive Figma prototype to simulate rewards mechanisms and delivery for user research. The prototype included assignment flows, rewards and class view pages. One of the major questions we sought to answer in user testing was how easily would students understand the motivational systems in place and could they find meaning in them.

I drafted a portion of the user research test script that focused on rewards. We then contracted a third party user research group to recruit and administer the test in person. Students were asked to make observations and predictions on the effect of answering questions to get a sense of their understanding of the reward system.

User research findings

Below are the findings provided by our user testing vendor related to rewards and motivational systems. The learnings from the user research validated some key elements of the motivational system. Students were able to understand the celebration screen and their rewards per assignment. Students expressed interest in earning badges and stated that collecting badges would be motivating to them. When viewing the class view, students also mentioned that they would be motivated to do better by competition within their class.

Other key learnings helped shape our copywriting and UI design to help explaining crests more clearly to students.

Summary