Growing Engagement with Treeapp's Community Leaderboard
A sustainable-tech product focused on reforestation across the globe.
Sustainable-Tech
London
25-30
Problem
Treeapp empowers users to contribute to reforestation.
Company Link: https://www.thetreeapp.org/
Our challenge: boost engagement and retention. How to foster community and incentivize continued app use?
My Role
UX/UI Designer for the "Community" leaderboard feature,by coordinating with Product Manager, Front-end developer and the CEO/Founder.
57%
34%
75%
Design Directions
We explored gamification, social connection, and impact transparency. The leaderboard emerged as a powerful combination of these elements.
Visibility (Hick's Law)
Prominent navigation placement ensures easy access, minimizing decision fatigue.
Ranking (Social Proof)
Visual rankings to encourage users to emulate top performers.
Transparency (Info & Help)
Displaying the total trees planted by the community reinforces collective impact and provides positive feedback.
Visual Hierarchy (Gestalt Principles)
Clear guides to key information (ranking, total trees), employing Gestalt principles of proximity and similarity.
Iteration & Refinement
User testing revealed areas for improvement: clarifying ranking criteria, enhancing user profiles, and refining visual appeal.
User Flows
A detailed user flow was created to map user interactions with the "Leaderboard" feature, from discovery to sharing, identifying potential friction points. This flow informed usability testing, revealing areas for refinement in ranking criteria, user profiles, and visual design.
User testing then directly influenced iterative design improvements.
Building Prototype
Guest User
Building Design Systems for Scalability
Inconsistent UI elements and a lack of a unified design language were hindering development efficiency. To address this, I contributed to Treeapp's design system...
Metrics Tracking
We tracked app engagement, retention, tree planting activity, and social sharing.
57%
34%
75%
Results & Key takeaways
This project demonstrated the power of combining gamification, social proof, and clear feedback to drive engagement. User-centered design, informed by UX/UI and psychology principles, was crucial to success.