24-Hour Challenges on Chorus

Overview

After successfully onboarding teams onto Chorus, we saw that after some time, people weren't always engaging with their teams and still thought of Chorus as an app to log individual efforts. We needed a way to reinvigorate team participation so that we could continue to learn about collective action and social accountability.

Challenges are fun, short term efforts that give teams a more immediate sense of accomplishment and more structured ways to participate together. Unlike other apps, Chorus challenges focus on collective action towards a common goal. The experience has 4 parts: An initiating action, flexible ways to participate, the ability to see others gathering, and ways to respond and give feedback along the way - not just at the end. Our learnings from this small feature impacted larger product initiatives like team formation, planning, and goal setting.

Product Guidelines

After working with the team to brainstorm and think through possible directions, I synthesized our conversations and created an initial set of product guidelines as well as the 4-part UX framework. These guidelines were based on things we knew to be true from research, as well as things we wanted to learn. Challenges must:

• Depend on collective action
• Lots of small wins > 1 big win
• Goal oriented
• Inclusive and user defined
• Breadth not mastery
• Any contribution matters
• Fun not games

Team pow-wow

4-parts of "Challenges" on Chorus

Brainstorms

creating a challenge

We knew that if people set their own goals, there was a higher likelihood they would pursue them than if they were "assigned" or not relevant to a team's interests and goals. We also knew that a very defined structure would motivate participation. The design had to be highly constrained and highly flexible in order to be successful. We designed a Challenge experience that provided definitive structure that helped people know exactly what to do and at the same time, gave teams flexibility.

Participating in a challenge

Once a challenge was created, the entire team could see it in the main space. There were ways to see people gathering and participating and easy ways to participate that didn't rely on quotas or expectations. Everyone could participate together, at their own level and speed, and feel part of a collective effort.

What we learned and what we did about it

Overall, 24-hour Challenges was successful. It re-engaged some teams and helped us understand more about collective action and accountability. We learned that Challenges work best for teams with existing goals and that teams with a shared purpose participated more. Teams with varied interests or who did different activities didn't participate as much. These insights and others from user-research helped steer future product plans in planning and team formation.