Meesho’s product team is constantly solving problems for our entrepreneurs to make them consistently successful on our platform. But, to truly add value to our entrepreneurs and improve their reselling experience on Meesho, we need to regularly Think 10X and build innovative product constructs.

In a recent attempt to do the same, we introduced Journey Gamification, which would track the progress and actions of our entrepreneurs on the app, reward them for “levelling up”, and enhance social recognition of their achievement

Read on to find out how the product team ideated this extremely ambitious project and implemented it in way that would positively impact our entrepreneurs:

Intention

One of the clear goals for us at Meesho is to instil in our entrepreneurs a strong sense of motivation. Our users don’t always get a lot of appreciation and celebration in their day-to-day lives, hence their ability to earn an income through a platform like Meesho is closely linked to their sense of identity and empowerment. At the same time, like all entrepreneurial efforts, this journey of Meesho entrepreneurs is tough and there is a strong need to keep the motivation levels high, to gain recognition and to always see growth.

Looking within

We are always in touch with our users and always trying to understand what gives them joy. We also undertook a user research study to deeply understand the motivations of our users. Some of our interactions with them showed us these interesting insights:

  • Feeling recognised and valued is very important for our entrepreneurs. They feel great joy in getting certificates and awards. They love seeing their names on the boards.
  • They always want to track their progress and are obsessed with getting better at what they do.
  • A lot of them have made peace with the fact that the fruits of their labour will not be instantaneous but that they will have to work hard, and be consistent and disciplined in their efforts to get ahead.

We also looked inwards at our own techniques of engagement and realised that they had been very short term and transactional upto that point. We decided that true to one of the core Meesho values, we wanted to Think 10X. We were ready to take a bet on something more long term and, which can lead to habit building for our users.

Looking outside

The next phase for us was also to study some of the successful loyalty and gamification programmes that had been launched with a similar aim to achieve long term retention and improve user motivation. We looked at apps such as Duolingo, Strava and Pinduoduo, and even tried to decode constructs by Nike, Starbucks and Sephora.

We also studied Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework and created a mapping of our user base and which intrinsic motivations they have exhibited strongly, to build out our program.

The execution

Our vision was to combine all of the above findings into a project which aimed at providing a sense of identity and empowerment to our entrepreneurs. We launched an ambitious project called ‘Journeys’ and identified some of the building blocks of such a program:

  • Level system based on Points: We created 5 levels in the app and Points milestone for each level. The level names were selected based on user input on words they identified with and found aspirational — Beginner, Learner, Graduate, Expert, Legend
  • Actions win you Points: We linked Points for doing critical actions such as Orders, Sharing and Opening the app on a regular basis, Referring and other such actions.
  • Pyramid distribution: Existing users were distributed into level basis their past performance such that top-level was opened up to a select few users only
  • Exclusive Benefits for each level: Each level has some associated exclusive benefits — such as in-app Meesho currency reward, New Spins every month, access to Leagues, access to exclusive panels on Community etc.
  • Social Recognition: We made sure that that level badge will appear at all places in the app next to the entrepreneur’s name — next to their reviews, their community posts and all such places. The intention was to create a sense of achievement and social influence for users.

The next phase was the design. Since this feature was very cross-cutting and highly experiential, we spent a long time in getting the right experience for our users. The big challenge in front of the design team was to create a design that was informative yet intuitive. At the same time, we wanted to make sure that it can be a source of pride and identity in the long run. We created many sub-elements which will serve as easy indicators for our entrepreneurs about many concepts:

Current Level and Points info on Accounts Screen and their own Profile:

Progress Bar to indicate next level and points to reach it:

Information regarding the Benefits at the next level:

Information on how to earn points and history of points earned:

Once our designs were ready, the feature moved to technical execution. The developers were also super excited to work on something which is such an ambitious and long term bet. But that also meant that the entire project would’ve taken a huge amount of time. Given Meesho’s guiding principle (another core value) of Speed Over Perfection we all worked together to figure out how to reduce the scope and put this feature into the hands of the users at the earliest.

The impact

The whole team came together to ensure a smooth rollout of this feature. But releasing it was only half the battle. The important part was measuring impact. And that we did through an A/B Test. The results were really great as we saw an increase in engagement and retention. But what was even more delightful was the qualitative feedback we received.

A lot of responses indicated that they felt the motivation to cross the levels. They also appreciated the recognition of their hard work through earning points and getting awarded a level badge. We also received great feedback to improve our benefits program which guides our further roadmap for the Journeys feature.

Mayank Gupta is a Senior Product Manager at Meesho.

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