👾 A gamified phygital platform for Coca-Cola that rewards discovery and repeat engagement
Timeline —
6 months
Role —
Senior Product Designer @ Bain
For —
Coca-Cola
OVERVIEW
How might we blend physical and digital life in a meaningful way, so the experience stays worth returning to?
MY ROLE
Synthesized research into a player persona, concepted and prototyped the core game loop, designed progression and rewards, and built the design system
01. Understanding the player
I ran 15 ethnographic interviews to learn what people care about, what entertainment means to them across different moments in their day, and how they use digital tools.
The findings shaped Parker, our core persona. Parker is drawn to standout experiences that bridge the physical and digital, and expects them to feel personal.
Meet Parker ✨
02. Ideating the experience
We explored several directions, including an AI-enabled music remix concept, before converging on a scavenger hunt that connects real-world exploration with digital progress.
03. The gamified phygital experience
We decided to focus on connecting to Parker through exceptional experiences in both the digital and physical world, creating a scavenger hunt experience full of moments of delight and brand loyalty and engagement
04. Key design decisions
🚨 DESIGN CHALLENGE 1
Creating a dynamic gameplay experience
Creating a game play experience that keeps users engaged through variety and challenge
💡SOLUTION
Design multiple challenges that are sequenced to vary in difficulty to balance continued engagement
Framing the experience in “Seasons”, within each season there are a variety of different opportunities for users to interact. Within each season, there are different ways for users to engage;
“Always on” — visit local spots and scan bottles to earn XP
Themed missions” — complete a scavenger hunt to earn XP and digital attire
🚨 DESIGN CHALLENGE 2
Keeping users incentivized to play
Creating reward mechanics to keep users incentivized to use the experience and keep them coming back
💡SOLUTION
Implementing a stratified leaderboard with a scoring system that incentivizes repeated use
Rewards are based on performance, and game mechanics are fully transparent to keep players can be certain of behaviors and actions they need to take in order to move them along in the ranks
05. Testing with players
We tested our hypothesis on the game play dynamics with users through qualitative IDIs, our goals were;
Investigating motivation signals: gather user impressions/preferences and their reasoning
Generative approach: triggering users to suggest how they’d prefer the experiences to be
This research served as signals about users preferences and motivations to drive discussions and hypothesis
🔑 KEY FINDING
Prestige reward feel too unattainable for users
Respondents often felt like the prestige prize would be too hard, even just from looking at the onboarding, so they already started looking at the prizes that were easier to get
⚙️ IMPLICATION
Smaller, more approachable rewards
Allow for smaller rewards sprinkled in throughout the experience that are attainable to users throughout the experience and make sure that there is a clear definition and communication
06. Craft and design system
I built a unified design system as the single source for components, patterns, and styles, so the experience stayed consistent across every touchpoint.
🚀 Results
The goal was to build long-term loyalty by blending physical and digital life. 14 of 15 players said they would find this experience valuable, signaling strong potential for repeat engagement.
“This is so cool. Sometimes me and my friends are like— where should we go? And we spend hours trying to find a place. I like this idea of having an app that lets you earn points for discovering new places”