Space Invaders released in 1978 started using a list to show top scorers, since then everyone has followed the suit.
What is a leaderboard?
The fundamentals are simple it’s a list of score or some quantifiable action. The idea is to pit one against another and then let the human nature takes it course. Our zest to compete is an evolutionary behaviour hardwired into our brain. We compete with our peers, neighbours, family and friends all the time.
"Forbes billionaires 2022" is a leaderboard, "US billboard top 20" is a leaderboard. There are all kinds of lists that we run only in our head. So it’s nothing new.
Why do we need leaderboards?
They are an effective way to motivate users through competition. What do we get out of that motivation? we get long term user engagement and retention. It makes a single player experience more social.
A study was conducted to understand the effects that a point-based incentive system (i.e., points, “status” levels, and a leaderboard) played in a social network site, and found that some users were driven by leaderboards to keep up with others—an effect that did not suffer significant decay even after the leaderboard was removed. Their findings suggest that the usage of leaderboards could play a role in transferring extrinsic incentives to intrinsic motivations—at least for some users.
Also players were more likely to re-play a game when they attained positions at the top or bottom of leaderboards.
Note: One of the secondary role leaderboards play is getting familiar with the system. A place in a leaderboard gives me a realistic picture of the progress, how well I fared as a first time user, It gives the person a realistic way for goal setting and the climb ahead.
When do you need one?
So a leaderboard can't exist without primary engagement, in video-game parlance the "core loop". That primary engagement is the quiz, the calories burned etc. Only when enough number of people people are taking the quiz, tracking their steps or playing the game you should introduce a leaderboard. So it can't cold start a system, the system should be up and running well. Thus it's a meta, a metagame.
How do you create one?
It's a list of score in decending order. What we need is a user name and a corresponding score. In a simple situation it's easy to pick the score normally it will be the only score, but what do do when you have various kind of scores?
Find the right metric/score :
Let's use ios Apple Fitness app as our test subject :
So We have Move, Exercise, Stand and Sleep. It helps if you have only one score/metric or a one which is overarching.
The app picks calorie (Kcal) as the score, it doesn't sorts things in any specific order. All we have to do is make this more competitive.While you can share your daily progress with your friends and check how they are progressing. it's no leaderboard.
Rule #1:
The competitive activity used to seed the leaderboard should be designed to bring a sense of fairness for users.
Calorie is the only score we need, Since everyone can set their own calorie goals progress rings and percentage will differ for everyone. Now this is little more competitive.
Ideally Adam and Joe should try and beat Kate next day but what if Kate walks to work everyday and burns calories very frequently. The result will be very stale and static leaderboard which everyone will stop checking out after sometime.
Rule #2:
The leaderboard should be tied to a score that changes frequently.
So we can add Sleep and Exercise to Calories and create an overall Health Index. Let say we now give 30% weightage to Calories spent and 30% weightage to Sleep and 40% to Exercise. Now Adam and Joe have more ways to beat Kate, they can sleep and exercise better and add to their score. So now we have more variables and we are hoping that the leader will be dethroned more frequently.
Now we know Adam is the new leader, let's say he keeps winning 3 days in a row, now how do I beat him? Now to even the odds we need to give some clue how Adam is nailing it.
So Adam is exercising more than everyone else. Similarly we can do this for everyone.
So without revealing much we can indicate who is doing what better. How does this help lets say Now lets say Kate want's to beat Joe and Adam she should try and exercise more and sleep better, that something to go about.
So lets say Kate beats everyone consistently. Now what ? As I mentioned earlier the leaderboard shouldn't be stale.
Now we'll add more competition.
So what we have done is added people in your area. It would be a good idea to first add people in your area so that you are competing with people with similar climate, weather conditions and situations.
Now this can overwhelm Kate, it will be hard for her to stay motivated. A leaderboard with lots of people will make the climb a daunting task. What we can do is create classes or leagues.
Talk on leaderboards will be continued in the second part. We'll talk about how to add more complexity and depth to a leaderboard while retaining the users.
Continued in PART II.