Gamifying a confidence coaching experience
Two gamified flows for Hopstair, a coaching platform that builds confidence through daily nudges, designed with the Octalysis Framework before its MVP launch.
- Role
- UX/UI designer
- Team
- N. Vania Muriuki, Dorsa Mokhtari, Jack Fletcher, Jack Fargher
- Duration
- 3 week sprint
- Type
- Client brief, General Assembly, mental health
- 50survey respondents
- 8interviews
- 32test participants
- 2testing rounds
- 3iterations
- 51screens
Confidence is built daily. Keeping people coming back is the hard part.
Hopstair is a coaching platform that builds confidence through daily nudges. Before its MVP launch, it wanted gamification built on the Octalysis Framework.
My work: competitive analysis, interviews and analysis, wireframes for progress, timeline and onboarding, the high fidelity prototype, visual design, usability testing and the presentation.
Double diamond, from survey to journey map
- A screener survey with 50 respondents
- 8 interviews, synthesised with affinity mapping
- A competitive analysis of 5 coaching apps and 4 habit apps
- A journey map and an empathy map
The competitive analysis showed accomplishment in every app, social influence in nearly all, and ownership in over two thirds. The good apps did not need all eight Octalysis drives.
The double diamond
Discover
- Screener Survey
- User Interviews
- Octalysis Framework
- Competitive Analysis
Define
- Affinity Mapping
- User Journey
- Jobs to Be Done
- How Might We
Develop
- Design Studio
- User Flows
- Wireframes
- Prototypes
- Usability Testing
Deliver
- Usability Testing
- Prototype v3
- Learnings
- Recommendations
Research methods
- Screener Survey
- User Interviews
- Octalysis Framework
- Competitive and Comparative Analysis
Screener survey
- 54%Millennials (25 to 34)
- 28%Gen Z (18 to 24)
- 70%described themselves as a confident person
- 80%said they had not always felt like a confident person
- 88%are interested in improving their confidence
Jobs to be done
- When I want to improve my confidence but I am struggling with motivation, I want to use the insights and advice from others to energise me so that I can practise and build my confidence for the real world.
- When I am on a journey to increase my confidence, I want to reflect on my successes, failures and lessons learnt so that I can stay motivated to continue.
- When I am working on my confidence, I want to go out into the real world and do things that make me feel confident and improve my confidence.
Two gamified flows, four drives
We designed 2 gamified flows that use 4 Octalysis drives: Accomplishment, Unpredictability, Social Influence and Ownership.
The Octalysis framework
- 1Meaning
- 2Accomplishment
- 3Empowerment
- 4Ownership
- 5Social Influence
- 6Scarcity
- 7Unpredictability
- 8Avoidance
1 to 3 White Hat 6 to 8 Black Hat Our focus
- 8 Core Drives to analyse challenges and find ways to create human motivation.
- White Hat drives (1, 2, 3) make people feel powerful, fulfilled and satisfied, but create no sense of urgency.
- Black Hat drives (6, 7, 8) make people feel obsessed and anxious, but also create the urgency often needed to reach goals and change behaviour.
- We focused on two main drives: Accomplishment and Ownership.
- We later added Unpredictability to push motivation, and Social Influence to meet the need for community.
51 screens, tested and refined
We tested the prototype with 32 participants over 2 rounds and refined it across 3 iterations, ending with 51 screens.
Pick the drives that fit
Good products did not use all eight drives. Choosing the few that match what users need gave the flows focus.
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Let's make something people can actually use.
Available for contract work from October 2026. Tell me about your product and the people who use it.