Rewards

Encouraging users to contribute data by incentivizing them with rewards they value.

Overview

Delphia’s mission is to make data an asset class and in order to fulfill this vision, we need to acquire a large amount of user contributed data. Delphia’s app was made up of three features: investing, data contribution, and the sweepstakes lottery. The purpose of the sweepstakes was to incentivize users to contribute data, however there were many issues we identified with the current state.

The goal of the rewards team was to redesign the rewards program and it’s mechanisms to more effectively reach our data contribution goal.

Product Design Lead

Ryan Smith, Senior Product Manager, Dan Boulos & Kevin Yuen, Technical Leads

Duration: November to December 2022 (2 months)

Responsibilities: Discovery, user research, UX design, interaction design, information architecture, product vision, QA testing.

Customer problems

  • Customers found the sweepstakes to be a polarizing feature that caused distrust, especially for experienced investors. They considered it a gimmicky marketing scheme in contrast to our sophisticated AI investment platform.

  • It did not encourage users to contribute data and brought in low-retention users who were trying to make fast and easy cash.

  • Maintaining the feature required at least 16 hours of repetitive and cumbersome work every week by our backend developers.

  • Delphia released a new utility token, PHI, which would replace the rewards mechanism while also having compliance requirements to fulfill.

Business problems

  • One of the constraints that the Rewards team had was that the rewards program must be designed using the PHI token. PHI was developed and released for the purpose of incentivizing desired user behaviour.

  • To comply with regulations, PHI needed to have a form of utility provided to those who held it. At the time of the release, the team initially only offered a surface level reward which was allowing users to change their app icon. However this was not considered compliant.

  • The leadership and legal teams pushed forward an objective to create utility for the PHI token by “gating” access to the Delphia 500 investment portfolio. Our team had concerns that we were introducing a high-friction experience into investing and worked to validate assumptions about this approach.

Leveraging other mental models

One of my primary concerns about the “Capacity Gating” solution was due to its complexity and ensuring that users understood the concept. I facilitated an internal Design Jam with the Rewards team to align on how the system worked and how we might explain it to a user.

Out of this workshop, I identified a possible method to leverage other mental models like credit cards, credit limits, or tax-free contribution limits to explain how deposit limits work.

Understanding user motivations to inform rewards

Before we explored the capacity gating solution, I wanted to get a better understanding of how our users perceived rewards and PHI. I developed a research plan focused on answering the following to inform how we could build the new rewards program:

  • How PHI is perceived and understood (mental models)

  • What rewards and rewards programs are considered valuable to users

  • What would motivate users to contribute data

  • Are there problems related to a user’s financial situation, beyond investing, that rewards could potentially solve?

Research Study

  • Surveyed 149 current customers

  • Interviewed 13 current users and 5 non users who our target persona

Concept testing capacity gating

As part of the user interviews, I wanted to quickly test the viability of the capacity gating concept to validate and invalidate some of my assumptions and concerns:

  • Value: My assumption was that simply earning access to a new portfolio strategy was not something that users would value

  • Aversion to crypto: Our customers included many users who were apprehensive or uninterested in crypto. Introducing a new token may turn off users the same way the sweepstakes did.

  • Comprehension: The token system was difficult to explain simply for those who were unfamiliar or new to crypto tokens.

Key Findings

  • “Deposit Limit” instead of “Capacity Gating”: Framing the capacity functionality as a deposit limit makes the concept more understandable and relatable to users.

  • Users try to save money where they can - nominal dollars saved is beneficial as it accumulates over time and therefore investing with no fees is valuable.

  • Users need to value the reward to continue to feel motivated to “work” for it.

  • Rewards should feel achievable and we should set expectations on how much work they’re required to do

  • Users want to earn or monetize activities they are already doing; desire to earn passively

  • Small number of users are willing to pay a fee (if the fee is reasonable and ROI is worth it)

  • Speculation about the potential value of PHI is enough motivation for crypto-savvy folks to play Consensus and earn PHI

Introducing “Deposit Limits”

After completing multiple rounds of new design concepts and validation, I began to apply the key findings to the new Rewards experience. Capacity Limits was transformed into “Deposit Limits”, a rewards mechanism that would give users management fee-free investing every time they contributed data.