How stars helped motivate users

Hello.

After reading the headline, you might involuntarily think: “But will it be a question of horoscopes?” No, not about horoscopes. It will be about quite earthly and understandable, about how to make sure that the user performs the actions you need on the site.

Developing the mechanisms of the site, we build a possible model of user behavior, based on our own experience of visiting resources and, perhaps, on some statistics. In any case, these are only assumptions about possible behavior in practice.

A lot of problems can arise from inept planning and just errors in the calculations, users may not visit those sections of the site that they did not understand, or they do not see any benefit for themselves in their visit. Anything can be considered a gain, from monetary reward to satisfaction of interest. And the task of the developer is to create a trap for the user. Or better to say - dessert, sweet, which will be served immediately after the main actions needed by the developer.

When I started my project, there was a problem - users did not want to rate the work (I wrote about this in one of the previous posts) Not that they didn’t want to, they just didn’t do it very actively. Grades were given only to good work or the work of friends and acquaintances. To increase activity, I was offered to make all kinds of tricks, the main idea of ​​which was to make the user vote. But it is impossible to force in any case, this is the glory of God we understood. And then an idea came up that has been successfully working to this day, for a year and a half already for sure.

The specificity of our resource is that the creative works that the user exposes on it are subsequently deleted. The best ones remain. The best moderators choose. But it is clear that no number of moderators will be able to objectively evaluate the work. The voice of the people is one of the most truthful tools and the majority of modern socio-thematic communities are built on it.

Therefore, it was decided to allow users to "save" their favorite work. Any user could put a “star” to the work, and when the work gained a critical mass of “stars”, it became inviolable to the moderators.

In turn, the stars did not come out just like that. They could be obtained by performing a small and simple action - to vote for all the same work. Voted a dozen times - got a star - went and put her favorite work. Everyone is happy, and the authors of the "stellar" works, and users, and the administration.