Reward Systems in Web Design

By Joshua on November 04 2009

I was recently introduced to thesixtyone, which is a great way to discover interesting new music, especially if you appreciate indie efforts.

They have a great user interface. But what most intrigued me was the way they had built a reward system into the site. As you explore, you are assigned "quests" which you can complete to earn more hearts (the ability to favorite something) and reputation points.

In fact, it resembles nothing quite so much as an old-fashioned D&D style role-playing game complete with "levelling up" to unlock new abilities.

Each of these quests seems carefully crafted to help users familiarize themselves with how the site works. For instance, the "Similarity Complex" quest encourages you to use the "similar" link found beneath each song listing.

This excellent usage led me to wonder about other ways that we could use reward systems in web design.

Of course, most reward systems are implicit rather than explicit, like comment counts on a blog or number of followers on Twitter. Both explicit and implicit rewards can be extremely powerful in shaping user behavior.

Have you seen particularly good or bad implementations of a reward system? Tell us about them below.