Mello App: Gamification challenge
My final project.
In this collaboration I worked directly with the Mello Team to deepen the gamification aspects of the app. Mello is a social network for families that helps them to connect with other families in their neighbourhood and support each other.
Anna-Lena Gerber, CEO and founder of Mello says “Mello is an app for parents to support each other in their neighborhoods. For new friendships, alternating childcare and much more”
Challenge
The aim of Mello is to incentivize the users to engage with the newsfeed on a daily basis by incorporating gamification into the app.
Mello is a place where parents of all genders can find the support they need to enjoy raising children with a greater sense of ease and happiness. Mello means supporting one another through this adventure called parenthood. Mello can accompany families in the various stages of raising children.
It is used by women at the first pregnancy and by mothers with children under three years old to obtain information and to find comfort in the community.
At the same time, mothers with children from 4 years of age and upwards are looking for networking to create spontaneous playdates and get to know like-minded parents.
Empathize
Why do people want to connect with other parents?
Becoming parents for the first time involves a great social change: habits, goals, friendships often change after a pregnancy. In this phase of life a new mother can feel disoriented and for this reason it becomes important for her to find people who can understand and support her.
There are already many platforms where parents can connect and network. To name a few: Peanut, Mamaleave, Momco, Hellomamas, along with many Facebook groups and Meet-up, where parents interact, exchange opinions, but also organize play dates.
“I wasn’t looking for best friends — my hours are totally wacky. But I was looking for casual play dates and advice.”
“I was looking for moms who I could ask, ‘Is this normal?’ and I just wanted someone I could joke about parenthood with.”
Insights from stakeholders and Mello users interview.
After talking with the Mello team and having access to all the information material made available for us, we came to some key points in our research:
- Users mostly reply or comment on posts that are actually relevant to them in terms of content, kids age compatibility etc.
- Newsfeed posts triggers users to connect with each other eg: other user doesn’t need to make the first move, they are reacting to someone who already made the first move.
- Parents with more than one photo and with a more completed profile have more chances to find a match with other families.
- The ambassadors are posting and then getting responses, but Mello team wants users to post without being an ambassador.
- Understand what your user wants, is necessary to deliver these wants through gamification.
- Most people, when given a choice, will attend other’s playdates instead of actively arranging one.
Define
Personas
After defining the persona and consolidating all the research we came to define the following statements:
How might we?
Problem Statement
Parents need to meet other like-minded parents who are nearby, with children around the same age, because they want to expand their network and through playdates build meaningful and long-lasting connections for them and their children.
User Flow
The happy path of our user flow is to create new real encounters between parents who want their children to play.
Gamification
The Objective
To get people to create playdates instead of just attending others.
Mission
To get the majority of people create playdates instead of just attending, and for them to have fun doing so.
Before using gamification in the enterprise world, it’s a good idea to understand how your players like to approach playing games. Good news — there is a simple measure designed by Richard Bartle, the Bartle Test of Psychology, which breaks up the way people play games into four simple categories.
- Achiever: they are all about points and status. They want to show off their progress with their friends
- Socializer: they experience fun in their games through their interaction with other players
- Explorer: they want to see new things and discover new secrets
- Killer: they want to see other people lose. They’re highly competitive
We requested mothers and fathers of children under 6 years of age or ready to be mothers to complete the survey. The goal is to understand the attitude of parents towards gaming elements, useful to consider during the ideation phase.
The most dominating trait resulted explorer. The second one socialiser.
Ideate
Designing the playing field
Being the explorer a discoverer, a constant on the lookout for new parts to unlock, it has become clearer for us how to use gamification inside Mello. Explorers really enjoy the surprise that’s possible in a game. These are the players who will feel extremely motivated in a game by accessing a secret passage; their satisfaction on doing so is what makes them play, they do not care on bragging to their friends about their discovery. They just want to find more. Explorers are open to new horizons, to discoveries, to… surprises! They are not afraid of change, they’re embracing it.
The idea is the Tribe: an exclusive community within the app where you can access spontaneous and improvised events, where parents can easily connect with each other in respect of privacy and in total security.
How to get into the Tribe?
With the Mellos! A virtual currency that is collected by users following their number of iterations within the app. Each action (comment, post creation, playdate creation) has a different value and allows the parent to acquire this currency to pay the monthly access to the Tribe and have all the advantages of the community.
Challenges
By working with en existing design system posed some challenge: the stakeholders asked us to minimize the refactoring of the app. At the same time we have found the necessity within the Feed to create a distinction between Post and Playdates, in order to make it easier for the user to join the events. We can see below what the app currently looks like.
Prototype
In the following video I want to guide you inside the prototype of Mello.
Conclusions
In this project I focused on the use of gamification to bring users to interact and meet. As next steps we will need to think about how to successfully launch the tribe. Influencers already working with Mello could be the first to interact with this new feature. There is still a lot to do and a lot to discover, despite this I am very satisfied with this project. I want to thank the Mello Team for their support, availability and speed in providing me with all the material requested.
I hope you enjoyed this article.
Thank you!
