Different point badges in Google Maps Contribute

How Google Maps leverages users’ contributions to driving its database

Gamification is nothing new in tech companies trying to engage their users while also achieving some of the business metrics. Gamification increases user engagement because humans need validation from others and they want to be winners in the end. Hence, gamification can drive an instant dopamine hit after making users do some work.

Though it is important to manage the level of gameplay that the users go thru’ to win some points and eventually win the level or mega prize in the end. If the levels are too hard throughout then people will lose interest since winning is so hard and giving up is easy. On the other hand, if winning comes too easy then users tend to become disengaged since there is not enough difficulty involved. It is very easy to set up a gamification framework that is bound to fail.

Here’s how good gamification is formed instead:

1. The trick is to first teach users how to do and perform a relatively easy task.
2. Followed by some repetition of the same task performed to build it into a habit.
3. Every time a user performs the task successfully, provide a small dopamine hit to them. Give them some points, tell them what to do to increase their points, and congratulate them on their effort. These dopamine hits will become the reason why people will keep coming back to your product for more hits.
4. Next, provide level-ups to your users based on their point accumulation. The product needs to have level-ups set up at varying degrees of difficulty. The initial levels could be easily reachable but it can be difficult to achieve the ones in the end.
5. While levels provide a good way to start engaging with the users, micro-levels and badges deliver a way to tie down more of the business metrics to the gamification framework. Badges can be designed for high and low-effort difficulty. Similar to the overall framework, some badges can be easily gained while others can be hard. There can be a bunch of colorful badges or there can be just a few with 3–4 steppers built into each badge. Steppers treat badges similar to a Pokemon evolution: Charmander — Charguana — Charmeleon — Charmodo — Charizard.

Image from source

McDonald’s coffee stamp card is the simplest implementation of an effective gamification framework. It’s easy to buy coffee, consumers buy 5–6 cups of coffee to get the next cup for free. After getting their first cup of coffee for free, users can easily return to buy into the looped behavior and keep getting a free cup of coffee after investing in the business 5–6x times, probably buying a more expensive coffee each time. After the success of its physical cards, the company has now converted them into a digital loyalty scheme within its mobile app.

Google Maps Contribute (GMC)

Google Maps also has a loyalty program where the product uses crowdsourced data to improve its mapped locations, add missing places, and verify information provided by other creators. The best part about this loyalty program is that it doesn’t provide any monetary benefit for the user to contribute. It purely relies on digital metrics and gamification to motivate users and keep them going for a long. As far as gamification goes, the users can level up by following multiple routes. Some routes are slow, while others are faster. Let’s discuss some of the mechanics that are responsible to motivate users to keep going.

Points

Points are the base metric that drives the GMC system. All users gain points to take them to the next level. Points unify all users using levels, the higher the level, the more points a user had to gain.

Points are divided into ten levels, but there are just seven levels. The first three levels are there to help the user break thru’ the initial inertia moment. Once the user gets to 250 points or level 4, the real gamification kicks in. Here is a tally of all the points broken down into levels —

Points & Levels Breakdown

1. Level 1 — [0] points — No badge
2. Level 2 — [15] points — No badge — Base
3. Level 3 — [75] points — No badge — 5x effort of the last level
4. Level 4 — [250] points — 3.33x
5. Level 5 — [500] points — 2x
6. Level 6 — [1,500] points — 3x
7. Level 7 — [5,000] points — 3.33x
8. Level 8 — [15,000] points — 3x
9. Level 9 — [50,000] points — 3.33x
10. Level 10 — [100,000] points — 2x

It’s intriguing to see that levels increase in their points either by 2x or 3x last value. More commonly by a factor of 3x. But how does the user get to earn these points? What are the business metrics that the Maps team wants to accomplish using the Contribute framework? What is already in abundance and what is scarce? Which form of media upload increases trust in the listing and people of GMaps enjoy the most?

The answer to these questions lies in the points split that users get based on the type of contribution they make to the Google Maps system.

Points per review split

• Ratings, answers, and fact-checking are cheap
• Photo tagging, responding to Q&As, adding a photo, editing a past review, and adding a description to a photo is a little more effort
• I am assuming there aren’t many videos in the system and hence, adding them gains more points. The same goes for adding a legit review and when the review is detailed that is more than 200 characters long.
• Lastly, the most number of the points are given for adding new places and roads. Google Maps as a system already contains a dense network of roads, traffic conditions, and places. By letting people add new places and roads, the system is rewarding people with digital currency while making the product even more accurate, dense, and complete. For a maps system to succeed, it needs to have more locations & data points than yesterday.

Badges

To get to a high level of points per review, users will have to contribute using detailed reviews — text, photos & videos — media, and be a fact finder by adding places and answering Q&As. To supercharge these, users are enticed with badges in each of these categories. Users ultimately climb the ladder of badges and get points due to which they level up.

Users ultimately climb the ladder of badges and get points due to which they level up.

Here is a breakdown of all the badges that GMC has —

Stack of badges

1. Novice Photographer — Photos of 3 places
   Expert Photographer — 100 photos, 25 places, 100,000 views
   Master Photographer — 1,000 photos, 100 places, 10,00,000 views
2. Novice Director — Videos of 3 places
   Expert Director — 100 videos, 25 places, 100,000 views
   Master Director — 1,000 videos, 100 places, 10,00,000 views
3. Novice Reviewer — Reviews of 3 places
   Expert Reviewer — 25 places, 5 reviews of 200 chars, 5 likes on reviews
   Master Reviewer—100 places, 50 reviews of 200 chars, 50 likes on reviews
4. Novice Fact Finder — 3 approved edits, verify 3 edits, answer 25 questions
   Expert Fact Finder — 25 approved edits, verify 25 edits, answer 250 questions
   Master Fact Finder—100 approved edits, verify 100 edits, answer 1,000 questions
5. Novice Trailblazer — the first photo of 1 place, the first review of 1 place, 1 approved place
   Expert Trailblazer — the first photo of 10 places, the first review of 10 places, 10 approved places
   Master Trailblazer —the first photo of 50 places, the first review of 50 places, 50 approved places

It is mostly a numbers game here. Google is trying to make Maps a more valuable product as compared to any competitor like Apple Maps. A master user would have achieved a lot more for Google by making the product even more complete, without ever providing any monetary value to the user, but that’s what gamification goes. It creates a system around the product to highlight certain features and drive business metrics upward for both startups as well as matured products.

That’s the end of this short yet hopefully insightful read. Thanks for making it to the end. I hope you gained something from it.

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