How should rewards be designed to be just right?

Editor's Introduction: Motivation is to design different rewards as a means to stimulate users to produce different behaviors or psychological reactions to achieve the designer's purpose. And how should the reward be designed to engage users and have a deep experience to achieve the effect of the design? Let's take a look at the author's sharing.

Motivation stimulates users to generate behavioral motivation and drives users to participate in the design.

Incentive is to design different rewards to stimulate users to produce different behaviors or psychological reactions through rewards to achieve the designer's goals. Therefore, gamification design attaches great importance to elements such as rewards, such as: the design of physical rewards (cash, prizes, etc.), the awarding of medals, the design of the urgency of the progress bar...

So, how should rewards be designed to drive user engagement? At the same time, the reward design can also be just right, so that users will not participate because of the reward?

1. Types of rewards

Before getting to the point, let's first understand what are the classifications of rewards? Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, inventors of the theory of self-determination (SDT), grouped rewards into several broad categories in their research:

1. Tangible/Intangible Rewards

Just a few examples will make sense.

The medal is an invisible reward because it is virtual and not portable;

Money is a tangible reward;

Tangible, materials that can be obtained, such as physical medals, customized advice notebooks, conversion plugs with activity logos, etc., are also tangible rewards. This kind of tangible reward exists because it allows users to make some valuable associations, such as emotional value or honor, achievement, etc.;

Verbal rewards, intangible rewards;

Digital items such as points, best MVPs, etc., are invisible rewards.

2. Expected/Unexpected Rewards

If we do something and know that the "reward" is coming; sometimes the reward happens unnaturally, giving an unexpected surprise. In the field of gamification, we are more likely to use expected rewards, because gamification is designed to activate certain behaviors of users. For example, if a user visits a website X times and contributes Y suggestions, then that user receives a Z reward. As a user, this Z reward is the positive response you expect in some way.

3. Conditional Rewards

In other words, what must users do to get rewarded? Here again 4 seed categories are distinguished.

(1) Occasional rewards

That is, users will be rewarded for everything they do, for example: gooogle will issue basketball reading medals to readers who search for basketball content. The significance of this reward is too weak to remind the user of anything meaningful or valuable, and it is not used in general gamification design.

(2) Participation is rewarded

The participating delegates here begin the mission. For example, we assign a 10-minute reading task to the user, and the user starts to receive the reward for this task;

Taking stimulating user comments as an example, the designer will do some process action guidance in the process, such as rewarding the user for viewing other people's comments, liking other people's comments, etc., but the designer ultimately hopes that users will contribute valuable comments, and the process of behavior contributions will be rewarded, and some gamification design will also be seen, but the use of interesting experiences or values to users is weak, and it is recommended to use caution.

(3) Complete tasks and get rewards

This type of reward is not the beginning of the reward, but the reward for the user's participation in the process, in other words, the user's participation is not enough, and the "process task" designed by the designer is also required to get the reward. For example, a knowledge payment website launches a Y reward for watching courseS minutes, and completes a questionnaire survey of a website to get a 5 yuan WeChat red envelope...... this is the case.

(4) Rewards for outstanding performance

This type of reward is not only to evaluate what the user has accomplished, but more importantly, to see how the user has done it. In other words, instead of assessing the completion of the task, the quality of the task's completion is assessed. For example, a company's sales ranking of its sales team, TOP5 get rewards, etc.

2. Reward Program

The above-mentioned reward type is around the completion of a task to reward, in practice, we will also find that there are around the "task + time" to reward, we call it the reward plan. Behavioral studies have shown that reward programs actually produce psychological responses to users' rewards (guidance produces intrinsic drive), that is, guide users to continuously feedback a series of behaviors, which in turn hopes to promote changes in the user's psychological state.

The study grouped reward programs into three types:

1. Continuous Rewards

That is, every time a user takes an action, he or she is rewarded. For example, the common website punch card design, you can get 10 points by logging in every day; the big health step count, walking 2000 steps a day can get 100 points, etc.

2. Fixed Rate Rewards

A fixed rate is when someone acts a certain number of times over a certain period of time. Take the punch card design as an example, every 7 days to punch the card to get an additional 100 points; complete the creation of 2 articles per week, you can get 200 yuan reward. We can understand that such reward programs are timed and quantitative rewards.

3. Rewards at regular intervals

This type of reward is based on the time dimension as a periodic reward, as long as you participate in that point in time can get the reward. For example, if a website has a big order promotion and decides to issue 1,000 500 50% off coupons every Saturday at 12 noon in the next 4 weeks, then the user only needs to enter the activity page at 12 noon every Saturday to collect it, and then get the reward. Due to the scarcity of resources, this reward is often on a first-come, first-served basis.

Essentially, when we think about gamification, continuous rewards are the least driving user attention. After all, every time you get a reward, it often doesn't feel like a reward, it can only get the user's attention at best. Rewards at fixed proportions and fixed intervals have certain psychological value in gamification design. But as we foresee, the brain will slowly accept this reward pattern, which will eventually cause the person to become mentally sluggish.

4. Variable Rewards

As the name suggests, there is no reward with a fixed time period. Variable rewards are fun.

First of all, variable rewards can create a sense of competition, if the reward is based on the user who has won some matches, gets the highest score on the leaderboard, must beat some users to get the reward, etc., then this kind of reward must be variable. There are many different ways to construct competitive rewards in gamification: it can be a zero-sum game, or one person wins, one person loses, or it's to overcome a certain threshold set by someone else...

Second, the certainty of rewards can also make variable rewards interesting. If you know that the reward you get depends on completing something, and the reward may vary depending on the extent to which the activity takes place.

For example, in the Korean hot squid game, the final jackpot is 100 million won, but it takes 100 people to stand out and win in the end. From the perspective of the ultimate jackpot, it is constant, but throughout the game, who wins and how to win is variable. You have a certain chance, but you're not sure if you can get it. It all creates a sense of surprise for our brains.

Third, the significance of rewards is to bring meaningful experiences to users

When designing gamification, consider different possibilities and propose the most effective reward (combination) design. The key to being "effective" is to ensure that these users are driven through time and time again behavioral feedback so that they have a meaningful, rewarding, and valuable experience.

Zhihu's creative punch card challenge

Knowing that we have just finished the third phase of the event, we can first hold the third session, we can first default to the recognition of a certain part of the user, at the same time, can also achieve the official expected effect.

Since it is to discuss the design of the reward, we must first enter the designer's thinking and speculate on the original intention of the design activity.

The purpose of the activity is content contribution (UGC). Completing two or more 100-word answers or articles per week, as well as obtaining 5 approvals, is considered to be the completion of the week's punch card task. The more users participate in the creation, the more rich the content of the platform itself will become.

Around the core goal of UGC, different audience groups, the official driving purpose for them will be different.

For new users, the official hopes that they will start experimenting with creation. If you can write the first article or answer of more than 100 words, it proves that the user has been groping for the basic operation of the platform, and even has a certain research on the basic posting mechanism, and has overcome his own "procrastination" and made a single behavioral feedback on the official external incentive.

For old users, the official hopes that they will continue to create. Through a large cycle, eight consecutive weeks of punching, the official hopes to guide users to develop the habit of regular creation, which is a process of "habit cultivation". At the same time, the official also hopes that through such activities, some high-quality creators who are beneficial to the task of monetization of the platform are also discovered. Therefore, there will be a list of "Punch Card Stars" that will be exposed at the same time in this event.

So, what's so clever about the reward design of this event?

First of all, this is a variable rewards program.

Complete any week of punching can participate in the division of 30,000 yuan bonus, the weekly task completion threshold is low, so that a large number of users have the desire to try, but how much bonus can be divided after completing a week's punch? Uncertain, maybe 1 yuan, maybe 100 yuan, depending on the number of participants in the current period, this unknown in the known (30,000 yuan) (each period of the bonus is not fixed), to a certain extent, stimulate the user's curiosity, look forward to how much they can divide after the end of the activity.

Secondly, the activity can give immediate feedback in a timely manner.

The campaign does not give rewards after completing tasks every week, which is what we said above about continuous rewards, which is also mentioned above, and continuous rewards are the least able to drive users' attention. But the absence of rewards does not mean that there is no immediate feedback, and the campaign can give a progress display on the website when the user completes a certain task (e.g., complete 2 creations (2/2), get 5 approvals (5/5)) to guide people to continuously change the result of their set behavior.

Moreover, the encouragement behind the event itself is to make users associate with valuable experiences.

Creation itself is to make a person manifest themselves, to send out articles, not sure how many people see, how many people like and agree (and perhaps despise and cause controversy). Content creation itself is to express oneself and speak for oneself, which is a valuable thing in the eyes of most people.

Fourth, avoid addictive reward design

The most powerful variable reward machine in the world is the one that everyone is familiar with – slot machines.

Consume a certain amount of money each time in exchange for a chance to turn the wheel. You play, you play, you play, most of the time, you pull the handle and nothing happens, but just before you give up, you get some sweetness. Every once in a while, someone in the casino wins the jackpot, so that people who play it will have the hope that "I will continue to play and will hit JACKPOT".

This game is played to the end, and the player becomes playing for the sake of playing, playing mechanically. This kind of addiction is not the original intention of our gamification design in business, because of this addictive investment, users do not know what they are doing and cannot make good judgments.

Write at the end

In each of our gamification designs, just like Zhihu's "Creation Punch Card Challenge", while designing an external reward mechanism, designers also need to think about whether the activity itself can really drive user participation and get some meaningful and valuable experiences.

Taking into account the gamification design driven by internal + external motivations, with appropriate reward mechanisms (especially the design of variable reward programs), we can see the essence through the phenomenon and allow users to continuously and positively participate in the design.

Author: Li Jingyu, WeChat public account: Gamification test field, is currently the operation director of Fantai Geek, with many years of product and operation practice experience, theory + practice of new ideas for user growth.

This article was originally published by @Li Jingyu on the premise that everyone is a product manager, and reprinting without permission is prohibited

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol