I recently had the pleasure of working on a pretty unique project, something unlike anything I've worked on before, an idea that eventually became known as Adaptive Enticement.

The problem

Before going into what Adaptive Enticement means, let's talk about the problem we were facing.

Metafy has gone through a lot of changes, and most recently, we're aiming to become a broad community platform for all gamers. This includes four key areas of the product, each of them covering all of Metafy, but also individual game communities:

1. Sessions — Our bread & butter, 1:1 coaching for players

2. Videos — YouTube meets Netflix meets gamers

3. Articles — Your typical blog but way cooler and with game specific widgets

4. Feeds — Timelines where communities can engage, chat, and share

You may have noticed that all of these main areas depend primarily on one thing: user generated content. The difficult thing about user generated content, is that without a lot of it, content platforms can feel empty and not-engaging, which in turn reduces the incentive for folks to post new content, and the cycle repeats.

The solution

We needed a way to break this vicious cycle, a way to entice users to post content in areas that were near or entirely empty, while making these areas also feel engaging and rich for users looking to consume content.

That's where Adaptive Enticement comes in. As the name suggest, this is a way to entice users that adapts to the quantity and type of content on each of our main areas.

Approaching the problem

To get a sense of how to break down the pages and design them appropriately, I took a look at our current data to create sensible breakpoints for each key area of the product.

How many articles do each of our games have? How many authors? Where do our current pages fall short when they're content starved?

Articles & Videos

These two key areas functioned very similarly, with the goal of heavily promoting early creators to incentivize them to post content in games that only have a handful of creators, or even none!

The four key breakpoints for Article pages are:

• 0 authors

• >0 authors

• >4 authors

• >10 authors && >45 articles

While on Video pages, the breakpoints are:

• 0 creators

• >0 creators

• >4 creators

• >10 creators && >75 articles

Feeds

Our approach to Feeds was different than Videos and Articles, because unlike the other two, communities require a certain level of participation and engagement to even be viable at a base level.

For this reason, we designed a vouching system/flow, whereby folks who were interested in kickstarting a community (say a Street Fighter 6 community) would need to vouch for the community and gather 100 more vouches.

Once the 100 vouches are reached, the community is unlocked, with the 100 people forever immortalized in the Founders Wall, and the communities already filled with their vouch messages.

Sessions

Finally, our most robust and well tested area followed a similar approach to Videos and Articles. This is because our Sessions are a much more developed area of our product, and also less dependent on a mass of available coaches.

For this reason, the Sessions designs currently only have 2 breakpoints (with more likely to follow as we refine and rethink Metafy Sessions)

Adaptive Enticement will be rolling out slowly as we build and release our new core pages, so stay tuned to check them out!

Happy designing ✌️