Increasing retention without adding friction or moderation cost.

Its_Beth 🐬

20h in game

600 designs

Lvl 12

Minimalism style

The Problem

Every night, Beth closes Venue and opens Facebook.

She's been playing for months. She designs rooms, submits them to be voted on, collects rewards. She's engaged. She's good at it. But when she wants to feel something — to share a result, to see if anyone noticed — the game has nothing to offer. So she goes elsewhere.

The problem wasn't low engagement.

The Insight

Most social features in mobile games rely on explicit actions: joining groups, adding friends, or posting content. But this creates friction. Players like Beth don’t want to perform social interaction; they want to feel it naturally.

Two things follow from that:

Low cognition load

The moment you ask someone to join, you create a moment where they can say no. Opt-in mechanics are opt-out risks. Every explicit step leaks.

No moderation required

Social mechanics that rely on moderation or settings to stay non-toxic will eventually fail. Toxicity needs to be structurally impossible, not just manageable.

The Design Challenge

SuperBloom’s brief: design a group-based social system for Venue that encourages collaboration, Improves player retention (D7 / D30), requires zero moderation and ddds no extra cognitive load

Anonymous voting

Players can't choose whose work they see

Casual play

No tolerance for extra homework

No chat

no text, no moderation overhead.

Design Principles

Before touching a single screen, I defined four non-negotiables that every mechanic had to pass.

The Solution · Design Studios

Design Studios is a passive community membership system embedded in Venue's existing game loop.

Players contribute to a shared Studio by playing normally

submitting designs

voting

completing chapters

Shared goal

No new behaviour required.

Each Studio has 10–20 members matched on design aesthetic, a shared weekly goal, a Studio Room that grows as the Studio levels up, and a collective gallery where members' submitted designs appear for each other.

The Studio is named and curated.
Ours: Casa Bloom 🌸

These constraints aren't new.

The best games already solved them, just never combined them.

The Joining Mechanic · "Frictionless Belonging"

This was the most consequential decision in the entire system.

In the first two weeks, Beth is technically a volunteer. She contributes without changing anything she already does, without label, expectation, or visibility.

After two weekly cycles, the transition happens automatically. A quiet status line change appears in her Studio view.

Product decision: Removed all opt-in steps to eliminate friction and increase early engagement.

The D7 Discovery Flow · 7 Steps

How does Beth first encounter her Studio? Not through a banner. Not a push notification. Through a milestone.

At Day 7, Beth has completed several chapters and been through the voting loop many times. The leaderboard just unlocked. She's reward-loop trained — red dots work on her.

The trigger:
10 designs submitted. Emotional peak. She's claiming a reward when the system opens a door.

Expand

1. Milestone moment

• Reward claimed.
• A brief system message appears.

Emotional peak — high receptivity.

2. Studio reveal

• Full-screen overlay.
• "You're ready to join a Design Studio."

Maybe later always visible. No pressure.

3. Studio intro

• Three concepts only.
• Warm language.
• No mechanics dump.

Understood in under 10 seconds.

4. Browse Studios

• 3 curated suggestions based on design style.
• Last-design galleries show an already-active community.

5. Confirm join

• Studio tagline and member faces before the CTA.

She's joining people, not a system.

6. Studio home

• First view of Casa Bloom.
• Key tiers visible.
• Goal bar live.
• Activity feed already moving.

Alive on arrival.

7. Back to her game

• No nudge. No new task.
• She plays as usual — keys flow automatically.

Same loop, new meaning.

Excited

Curious

Informed

Intrigued

Warm

Belonging

Settled

Product decision: Integrated feature discovery into existing user flow instead of using notifications or external prompts.

Retention System Design

The system runs on two currencies that operate on different clocks — and that distinction does most of the retention work.

Weekly progression

Key

Unlocks the weekly reward tiers:

Spark Bloom Glow Radiant

Resets every week.
Earned automatically through normal play:
submit a design (+1),
complete a vote session (+1),
earn a 5-star (+2).

This week. Effort that matters now.

Permanent progression

Arrow

Accumulates across weeks and never resets.
Earned exclusively by completing the weekly collective challenge as a Studio.
Each Arrow level unlocks a new shared Studio Room permanently.

Forever. Leaving means leaving behind a space she helped build.

Product decision: Separated engagement loops (weekly vs long-term) to support both retention cycles.

Making Anonymous Voting Feel Human

Voting in Venue is random and anonymous by design. This meant the Studio feed and the voting pool are structurally separate. I couldn't build connection through votes. So I built it elsewhere.

Feedback tags: When Beth votes, she can leave a preset tag alongside her vote. Not a score but a signal.
For a few seconds, she's not optimizing a result.
She's honoring someone.

Gallery reactions:

In the Studio gallery, she can react to her mates' designs with preset feedbacks. No text. No moderation required. But suddenly, recognition is possible between people who know each other.

←

→

Zero moderation overhead. Structurally safe. Emotionally meaningful.
The preset palette is the design decision — not a limitation.

Product decision: Eliminated free-text interactions to remove moderation needs while preserving emotional feedback.

Outcomes

This is a design concept submitted for Phase 2 development evaluation, based on observed player behavior and validated assumptions.

What I'd Do Next

The Other feed was never built

The Social tab introduces two views: My Studio's feed and Other feed; a familiar pattern of following first, then broader exploration. Beth sees designers she follows, then system-recommended ones based on style.

The Phase 1 leaderboard remains as a placeholder, while the next iteration builds on the existing (but previously underused) following system.

Feedback tag visibility.

Do tags feed back visibly to the designer's profile, or do they disappear into the algorithm? This question has UX and business implications and isn't resolved yet.

Permanent inventory monetization.

Studio rooms unlock permanently, which creates real leaving cost.

Whether that can also be a monetization surface (cosmetic Studio items, limited room decor) is a viable direction that's been deliberately parked for now.

What I've Learned

JTBD changes the quality of every decision downstream.

Breaking down user journeys into key moments (join, contribute, stay, leave) improves decision-making.

Good references are systems, not screens.

Looking beyond design feeds shifted the question from "how should this look?" to "what problem has already been solved at scale?"

Borrowing architecture, not aesthetics, led to more confident and grounded decisions.

AI compresses the gap between hypothesis and clarity.

Using Claude Code enabled rapid prototyping and faster iteration cycles between concept and implementation.

Key Principles I'll Carry Forward

Tools & Methods