Farhan • Product Designer

Designing Inclusive Leaderboard

The story of how we design the leaderboard experience that encourage more users to play every day

CONTEXT

The Holy Month of Ramadan

Ramadan month is indeed a special month, especially for Indonesian people. Many teenagers (LINE target users) tends to have more idle time because all activity usually be reduced in order to save energy for fasting. In 2019, LINE Indonesia saw this as an opportunity to engage deeply with the users whilst forwarding the positive message of LINE – then agreed to build an interactive product that can turn user’s idle time into something fun and meaningful, which later known as LINE Ramadan.

I was part of this magnificent team who developed the main feature of LINE Ramadan called, Kuis Rejeki Anak Soleh (Daily Quiz) from zero to one. In a nutshell, it contains:

• Question and answer system
• Point system
• Leaderboard system

PROBLEM

Leaderboard and its challenge

The goal for the leaderboard was pretty clear: we want our users to feel motivated to compete with other users. But... apart from the good stuff, we realized that it also comes with its challenge. We did understand that in a leaderboard, there are 2 kind of people who have different objectives:

We also read lots of research, and found that leaderboard could only motivate the people who are shown in the leaderboard (the competitive one). Other than that, it might demotivate them (the fun one) – which possibly counter our goal at the first place. So how might we design a more inclusive design leaderboard?

Backed by Self-Determination Theory, to create a leaderboard that could motivate every users, we need to make sure these 3 things in the design:

PROCESS

How Design Solve the Challenge

Actually, we came up with a lot of options. But, since Ramadan (date) can't be moved, we need to roll out our product in time – which only gave us less than 2 months to design and develop it. So here's what we did:

1. Migrate to mobile web

To make sure that the user feels that they are good (by rank) in the leaderboard, we need to make sure to design the quiz properly. By that, the user can get a bigger point, and feel that they are good at it. So we designed questions that are easy, even if you're not an expert in Islam or even Muslim – by making the answer look obvious or funny.

You might be asking, how about the competitiveness? We also made sure that the competition was always there. So we added a time-sensitive point that will be given as a bonus point for those who can answer correctly. The faster you answer it right, the bigger point you have. We also added Easy, Medium, and Hard to the answer. The harder the difficulty, the cheekier the answer.

2. Make the user feel they're part of the leaderboard 🤝

We know what it's like not to be a part of something, especially something that you expect. And to know whether you are part of the leaderboard, affirmation is needed to answer user's questions about their existence in it.

Is my name listed on the leaderboard?
To answer this question, people need to see their name and their rank/position on the leaderboard. But, showing each user rank after the user completes their quiz, could be a boomerang to our goal. Once they know they are not in the leaderboard, they might feel that they don't belong on the leaderboard. Especially if their point is way too far from the low sest position.

Instead of showing the real rank in the leaderboard through the entire Ramadan month, we replaced it with what we call percentage rank and hide the real leaderboard until the end of each season.

By hiding the real rank, we give a sense of curiosity and mystery to their real rank. So... they will keep coming in and play the quiz at their best with the hope to win the leaderboard at the end of each season.

Is it possible to reach the leaderboard?
We also divided the entire Ramadan month into 3 seasons for the daily quiz. Each season, there will be winners and the leaderboard will be reset and start all over again in the next season. The biggest reason was we want to make our users believe that they can win the next leaderboard, even if they didn't win in the previous season. Thus, the user could answer the question above with a positive answer.

Make the user play because of their own choice 👊

To level up the game and make people want to play the quiz every day, we designed a quiz home page with a big image of prizes for those who win. Not only that, we added the total value of the prizes (in IDR) that gives clear information about the prize. Who doesn't want to get big prizes right? especially what you need to do is just to play the quiz.

Copywriting and illustration also play a big role to encourage those who couldn't reach the leaderboard. Instead of focusing on the defeat, we created an experience that feels positive and encourages the user to win the next season.

RESULT

How about the result?

Though it started as an experiment, LINE Ramadan 2019 was one of the projects that can successfully attract more than 1million++ user base with an average retention rate was over 50% in just 1 month. However, we found that our product couldn’t block cheaters from coming into our product which might damage LINE reputation as a company. At the very least, we know our homework for the next Ramadan 😉.