Retention, Part Sixteen: Completion Feeds Accomplishment

By Sanya Weathers

In a game that never ends (well, at least you hope it never ends, but collects sub fees and microtransactions until each investor has their own private island), or a social media product that doesn’t have any goal beyond that of collecting eyeballs that can be parlayed into advertising dollars, one of the keys to retention is making users feel as though they have accomplished something. We’ve discussed many ways to reward accomplishments in this series, but we haven’t yet covered the ways by which we create opportunities to achieve.

The most efficient thing from a develop perspective is to turn your actual needs into accomplishments. To get the most mileage out of each element that you design, break it down into smaller parts, and make each step an accomplishment of its own.

The most famous example of this is the profile progress bar. A website wants users to fill out a full profile with lots of information in order to customize the user’s experience (and serve up the best possible advertising). Filling out a name and a location gets the user a little graphic, partly colored in, that says “You’re 20% done! Why not add a picture or your favorite band?”

But this is where most products stop. Once the profile is complete, there is no more progress to be made, and using the service/product/site is supposed to be its own reward. Too bad most products need a little more time to cement a bond between themselves and the customers.

The solution is to keep moving the goalposts. If the user completes a profile, congratulate him, and let him know he’s unlocked a new series of achievements. These might include:

–    Forming connections with other users

–    Adding five more items to a profile

–    Introducing three new members to the site

–    Posting suggestions

–    Voting in polls

Show progress bars for all of these elements, provide mini-rewards for each incremental bit of progress, provide major rewards for completing each thing, and always have something new to unlock whenever the step in progress is finished.