AI / Coaching / Gamification / Rewards
Gamified Learning and Development with AI Career Coach
Project Overview:
Objective: Enhance user engagement through gamified elements like badges, points, and leaderboards, creating a dynamic learning experience.
Open-Source Collaboration: Global community contributions drive continuous innovation and improvement.
User-Centered Evolution: The platform evolves based on user input, shaping the future of AI education and empowerment.
My Role
UX/UI Designer, Team Lead
Designed interactive, game-like elements, iterating based on user feedback.
Mapped user journeys to align gamification with user needs and platform objectives.
Team
Agile / Three months / EdTech Industry
3 UX Designer / Product Manager / Software Developer/ Contributor
Designed with Figma along with Miro
Organizational Objectives
Personalized AI Career Journeys: Design interactive career paths to guide users through AI career stages, aligned with Radical AI’s mission.
Mentorship & Practical Experience: Integrate mentorship and real-world projects, rewarding progress with badges and points to foster collaborative, open-source AI career development.
Skill and Gap Analysis Tools: Create visual tools for progress tracking and personalized learning paths, evolving with community input.
Strategic Insights
Core Analysis
Aspiring AI professionals often face unclear guidance, skill gaps, and limited practical experience. Current platforms lack personalized, engaging learning journeys. Radical AI addresses this by integrating gamified elements, offering structured career guidance, skill assessments, real-world projects, and mentorship, boosting retention and effectively preparing users for AI careers.
HMW
How Might We create a dynamic, personalized AI career platform that visually maps career paths, integrates skill assessments, gamified elements, and social interaction to motivate and engage users, fostering long-term learning, habit formation, and career progression?
Research
User Interviews
User interviews revealed four key motivators: personalized challenges aligned with career goals, social interaction through leaderboards, progress tracking with clear indicators, and balanced gamification for long-term retention. These insights informed a personalized, engaging, and community-driven platform design.
Key Findings - Comparing Career Development Platforms
Based on our analysis of other career development platforms, we identified several trends:
40%
Effectively balance gamification elements to ensure long-term retention.
50%
Offer personalized learning paths, but many lack career-specific challenges.
60%
Incorporate social competition features such as leaderboards and peer challenges.
70%
Use progress tracking tools like badges and milestones to drive engagement.
Craft Product Requirements to Optimize User Experience
PERSONA : AI Enthusiast and Career-Driven Learner Valeria
Age: 28
Occupation: Aspiring AI Professional
Location: New York, NY
Education: Bachelor’s in Computer Science, pursuing advanced AI certifications
Tech Proficiency: Advanced
"I believe the key to long-term user engagement lies in combining personalized challenges, social interaction, and clear progress tracking with balanced gamification strategies."
Valeria Thompson is an ambitious AI professional focused on advancing to a senior role. She seeks personalized learning paths, practical experience through projects and mentorship, and thrives in environments with clear progress tracking, social interaction, and gamified rewards like badges and streaks to stay engaged and motivated.
-
Valeria engages regularly with educational platforms but is selective, sticking to those offering tangible benefits and a clear progression. She values immediate feedback on her progress and thrives in environments that offer social challenges or peer-based recognition.
-
Advance to a senior AI role
Gain real-world experience through projects and mentorship
Stay motivated with clear progress tracking and immediate feedback
Engage through social interaction and gamified rewards
-
Difficulty finding personalized learning paths aligned with AI career goals
Lack of continuous feedback and clear progress tracking in current platforms
Feels unmotivated without visible social interaction or competition
Finds overly complex systems overwhelming and disengaging
User-Centered Functional Requirement
Based on user personas, we crafted functional requirements to optimize the experience for both beginner learners and mid-career professionals.
Beginner AI Learners:
These users are new to AI and need structured, beginner-friendly learning paths. They aim to master fundamental AI skills and build confidence through clear progress tracking and gamified rewards.Mid-Career AI Professionals:
These users are looking to advance their AI careers by upskilling. They aim to gain and apply advanced AI knowledge through real-world projects and mentorship while staying motivated with personalized recommendations and competitive social features.
Personalized Learning Paths
Progress Tracking and Feedback
Social Interaction & Competition
Gamification for Engagement
Use Cases
We developed functional requirements rooted in user personas, focusing on refining the MVP to emphasize gamified learning paths, progress tracking, and rewards. This approach ensures an engaging experience that fosters career growth and real-world skill development for both beginner and mid-career AI professionals.
-
We can confirm that our solutions—such as rewards systems and mentorship programs—are effectively meeting the users' career development needs.
-
Demonstrate how gamified elements cater to specific user needs, ensuring the platform remains intuitive and relevant for both beginners and professionals.
-
By comparing outcomes with functional requirements, we can pinpoint any gaps or improvements needed to further enhance the user experience.
-
It will provide real-world scenarios to test how well the platform guides users through personalized learning journeys and helps them track progress effectively.
This case-driven approach ensures that our functional requirements are practical and responsive to users evolving career paths.
IDEATION
With a clear understanding of user needs, we entered the ideation phase, focusing on defining functional and technical requirements, creating information architecture, and developing process flows. This led to wireframes and user flows that formed the foundation for a smooth and intuitive design, aligned with user expectations for navigating personalized AI career paths.
Functional specifications
Personalized AI Career Journey:
Design a user experience with interactive decision trees and scenario planning tools to guide users through personalized AI career paths.
Skill and Gap Analysis:
Develop analytics tools to assess skills, identify gaps, and provide tailored learning paths with progress tracking and project recommendations.
Career Development through Mentorship:
Integrate mentorship programs and real-world projects, using gamified elements like badges and points to reward progress and showcase expertise.
Design Inspirations
Competitive Analysis
To better understand the current landscape of gamified learning and career development platforms, I conducted a competitive analysis. The goal was to evaluate their approaches to gamification, user engagement, and personalized learning paths. By identifying their strengths and gaps, I aimed to position the Radical AI platform with differentiated features that enhance personalized career journeys, skill assessments, and social interactions.
Duolingo, Apple Watch, Gloat, Fuel50, Forage, 10Eighty, Walmart Academy, G2, LinkedIn Learning, and ADP Mentors.
User Flow Diagram
I created a comprehensive flow diagram outlining key user journey stages, highlighting decision points where users engage with gamified features like badges and streaks. It visualizes user interactions and integrates gamification to ensure a smooth, intuitive experience that encourages long-term retention.
Wireframes
Developed interactive UX wireframes on Figma, incorporating gamified elements such as text, icons, and buttons, to bring early-stage design concepts to life. These wireframes were used for iterative testing and refinement, ensuring an engaging and motivating user experience.
Design Library and Components
Leveraging the company's provided UI kit and assets, we designed a sleek, dark-themed component system to elevate the visual appeal and functionality of the gamified progress feature. This design choice not only aligned with modern aesthetic trends but also enhanced user engagement by providing a visually striking, immersive experience that complements the platform's gamification elements.
Design and Prototypes
I started with sketches to define core user flows, progressing to low-fidelity wireframes for initial testing on navigation and functionality. User feedback guided iterations, leading to refined high-fidelity prototypes that incorporated detailed visuals, gamification features, and improved usability. Each iteration was tested to ensure alignment with user needs and goals.
Finalizing UX designs is crucial through mutual agreement. The initial draft sparks creativity, enabling idea exploration without perfection pressure. Iterative design, driven by feedback, refines the product to meet user needs.
Iteration Feedbacks
-
We broke down the AI Career Map into smaller, more manageable stages to improve user clarity and ease of navigation.
-
We introduced smaller, immediate rewards for task completion to keep users motivated throughout their learning journey.
-
We simplified the mentor connection process by incorporating goal-based filtering to make it more intuitive for users.
-
We focused each iteration on enhancing the platform’s intuitiveness and overall ease of use for a smoother user experience.
-
We added specific, personalized recommendations linked to learning resources to help users close identified skill gaps.
-
We refined designs continuously based on direct user feedback, ensuring that the product met users' needs and expectations.
-
We made visual progress indicators more prominent on the main dashboard to help users track their advancement more effectively.
-
We adjusted the final design to ensure it provided a seamless, tailored user experience that aligned with key user objectives.
Soultions and Final Designs
User-Driven Solution: Delivered a comprehensive solution tailored to user needs.
Seamless Navigation & Gamification: Prioritized intuitive navigation and engaging gamified elements.
Framework for Iteration: Established a scalable foundation for future enhancements.
Inspiring Future Contributions: Laid the groundwork for future development by the open-source community.
Scalable Product: Created a user-centric product that will evolve within the Radical AI community.
REFLECTION
Initial Uncertainty: When I first started, I had little understanding of what an open-source project entailed and how it operated within the design and development space.
Internship Opportunity: Securing this internship allowed me to dive deep into the world of AI, giving me hands-on experience in collaborative and iterative design.
Exploring and Growing: Through this project, I gained valuable insights into the AI community, learning from others and contributing meaningfully to a project with real-world impact.
Sense of Contribution: Being a part of this project has given me the satisfaction of helping build a platform that supports others in their AI career journeys.
Personal and Professional Growth: This experience has expanded my understanding of open-source work and how user-driven design can make a significant difference in building inclusive, scalable products.