A modular engagement system designed to increase repeat participation, mission completion, and ongoing learning across customer communities.
A gamification system for community activation inside Breakthru's customer hub
Role
Product Designer, end-to-end
Timeline
10 weeks
Scope
Research, UX, UI, prototyping, testing
Outcome
+45% task completion / +30% weekly engagement
Context
Breakthru's community hub was effective at getting people in the door, but it struggled to keep them active over time.
The product already had onboarding strength, but repeat participation and learning completion were weak. The business goal was to increase weekly return behavior without relying on heavy engineering overhead or segment-specific redesign work for every customer type.
That made the problem broader than interface polish. The system needed to create motivation, progress visibility, and repeatable engagement loops that could scale across different communities.
Problem
Users activated initially, but mission completion rates stayed low and weekly return behavior dropped off quickly. The issue was not that people could not use the hub. The issue was that the product gave them too little reason to keep coming back.
There was no compelling feedback loop for completing tasks, no visible sense of progress, and no engagement mechanic that could scale cleanly across different customer contexts.
No clear motivation to complete missions consistently.
No visible progress system connecting small actions to larger outcomes.
Engagement patterns did not scale across customer types.
Research
I ran ten interviews across active and lapsed users, surveyed more than one hundred members across four customer groups, reviewed behavioral analytics to identify drop-off points, and looked closely at products like Duolingo, Habitica, and Peloton.
The pattern was consistent. Seventy percent of respondents said they had no compelling reason to complete missions. Sixty percent did not understand how their actions contributed to anything larger. Forty-five percent wanted social elements like team challenges, and sixty-eight percent responded positively to recognition and rewards.
The opportunity was not one feature. It was a system that made progress, recognition, and return behavior legible.
Key Decisions
The first concept leaned on badges because it was cleaner and lighter to build. Testing showed that badges alone created almost no motivation. Leaderboards introduced social pressure, so I kept them and added opt-out plus a “most improved” angle to reduce anxiety for low performers.
The first prototype placed trivia prominently on the homepage. Users found it intrusive. I moved it into a dedicated Challenges tab so it became an opt-in habit loop rather than homepage clutter.
Static badge icons were too emotionally flat in testing. Switching to animated badge unlocks made reward moments feel noticeably more motivating and gave the system a stronger sense of progress.
Solution
The final system combined progress trackers for daily and weekly missions, a social layer with leaderboards and team challenges, and lighter habit loops like daily trivia. Instead of solving one engagement moment at a time, the work created a reusable framework that could be configured across customer segments.
The product strategy mattered as much as the UI. These modules were designed so they could scale without requiring engineering to rebuild the experience for every new community type. The goal was durable engagement with low operational overhead.
Impact
The engagement system increased task completion by 45 percent and weekly engagement by 30 percent. More importantly, it scaled across three customer types with minimal added engineering overhead.
The framework became the standard model for community activation inside the platform, which meant the work shifted from being a single redesign to becoming the reusable pattern Breakthru could rely on moving forward.