Building the Effort & Competition Feature (week 11)

Last week I designed a new feature inspired by a game I play daily, a daily competition where you finish 7 levels to win a prize. It’s addictive, but I was careful: in a learning app, competition can easily become unhealthy. I didn’t want the competition to overshadow learning; effort had to remain the focus.

This week was all about building it.

Surprisingly, the coding itself wasn’t as hard as the design. The main challenge was integrating effort points into the existing lessons flow without breaking anything. I wanted learners to be rewarded for trying, but not forced, so I made effort points optional: if the learner typed an answer instead of just selecting one, they earned points, but they could still move on without penalty.

I also revamped notifications. Previously, I had just one evening reminder, which was too passive. This week, I added:

• Morning notification: a nudge to start the day with learning

• Urgency notification: if a learner started a competition but hadn’t finished it, this alert reminded them before the competition closed

These notifications were designed to create gentle urgency and motivation, without feeling spammy.

By midweek, V1.2.0 was ready and my brother got the update. For the remaining days, he didn’t open the app but that’s okay. One or two days isn’t enough data to judge whether the feature works.

Even without immediate results, this week was valuable. I learned that designing for habit formation requires balancing: motivation, effort, autonomy, and timing. Every small choice, how points are earned, when notifications appear, the language used, can impact whether a learner comes back or not.

Next week, I’ll give him a few more days to interact with the app and start collecting meaningful data on this new feature.

Thanks for reading, see you next Tuesday! 🚀