As the Kin product team builds technology to support the earning and spending of Kin, they have limited background information to work from.

Without a pre-existing Marketplace of different partner apps and services, some questions have come up in the development process have been difficult to answer — such as:

When presented with several different types of ‘earn’ opportunities, what draws users to pick one activity versus another?

What qualities do the selected activities possess?

What factors influence user behavior?

To strengthen our framework for activities within a Kin Marketplace, we need to answers to these questions (among others).

So to better understand our users’ thought processes when choosing from different Kin earning opportunities, we embarked on a small qualitative study with potential users. The research was designed to understand how participants prioritised activities; and what they looked for when presented with potential options to earn.

Sessions Overview:

Our sessions were broken into 5 major parts:

INTRODUCTION: After receiving a brief introduction, participants were presented with wireframes of a Kin marketplace.

TASK ROUND 1: Participants were asked to select 1 spend activity from a small list. They were then taken to the earn page where they were asked to select up to 3 earn activities.

TASK ROUND 1A: Participants were asked to explain why they selected those specific activities.

TASK ROUND 2/2A: Participants experienced a second round of different earn/spend activities and were asked to explain their choices.

CONCLUSION: Lastly, participants were asked some behavioural economics based questions in order to understand the decisions people make using everyday scenarios.

There were three potential rounds of earn opportunities participants could see: a round of different survey options (above), a round of different videos, and a round of different tutorials. Spend activities and costs were also changed in each round. Disclaimer: Details included intend to illustrate possible, easily understood scenarios to participants and are not final

Through our sessions, we saw:

Interest in activity drives engagement. Participants in these sessions were primarily focused on selecting activities that were relevant to their interests rather than simply maximizing Kin earned. While they did take other factors into account — such as time and Kin earn amount, this was not necessarily the primary motivation.

Time is relative. Responders were generally willing to complete tasks even if they were longer than others, if it was interesting/simple to complete.

Maximizing Kin becomes a priority when all else fails. If there are no interesting activities for participants, they begin to think about how to best make use of their time and allotted 3 activities per day.

Implications:

As our product and partnerships teams think about potential earn activities and opportunities, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no standard all activities must abide by (which may be a benefit to our partners!).

When users begin to use our product, we will be able to better see how some activities perform versus others. For now, we can start by understanding that earn tasks need to appeal to different interests and can be of varying length and Kin amounts. Participants in this study were willing to engage not only because they could earn and use Kin, but also because of the experience itself.