As I write this, 50MM monthly active users are engaging with the BigDoor platform across our publisher sites. For a company that started with the simple idea of making online experiences more fun and engaging, knowing that our platform reaches that many people is astounding. As we launch more and more gamified loyalty programs with larger audiences, the importance of our platform’s performance and scalability has increased as well. To stay ahead of our publisher’s needs, we’ve been making major updates to our tech stack, ensuring that our platform comfortably supports the 20MM user actions per day and 1.5MM users who access BigDoor programs during peak hours.

Knowing that our platform integrates with the websites of some of the most influential brands across multiple industries might keep some of us up at night, but it also drives us to constantly push the envelope in terms of what our clients can expect in terms of features and performance.

In the past six months, we implemented significant performance improvements resulting in an average API latency of less than 250ms.

Visitors to any of our publisher’s sites continue to consistently and reliably enjoy our end-user experience. We’ve met 100% of our SLA’s high availability requirements this year, exceeding our 99.9% uptime goals for every month in Q1.

But, we are overachievers and we aren’t done yet.

On Wednesday night, we notified our publishers and Twitter followers that the BigDoor platform would be temporarily unavailable for an hour of maintenance. The maintenance window was required for the deployment of a new version of our backend database sharding framework, which will allow us to support even higher availability, increased responsiveness and more scaling capacity for our ever-increasing audience sizes.

The updates to our backend systems have only been in effect for a short time, but we are pleased with the results they are showing already.

Posted in: Blog, Improvements, Technology, UI

In response to a growing number of current and future partner’s inquiries and suggestions, we are very excited to announce BigDoor’s newest platform feature: Internationalization.

Working with brands that achieve global reach, we acknowledge the need for rewards and loyalty programs that engage customers internationally and across languages. Unlike other vendors in the space, touting their “global” or “world leading” platforms with English-only language support, BigDoor has always prided ourselves in making our platform available in any language, but we weren’t satisfied with the complex translation progress that slowed down our typical implementation process. We decided to launch internationalization to enable brands around the world to easily implement a BigDoor Gamified Loyalty Program in any language (or combination of languages).

With internationalization the BigDoor user interface will reflect browser-specified  languages allowing visitors to seamlessly interact with a brand’s loyalty program, no matter what language version of the site they are on. Badges, quests, rewards and achievements will display in the browser-specified language throughout a customer’s session. The feature will also cover BigDoor powered redemption emails, ensuring that the entire BigDoor experience is available to customers, no matter what language they are using.

BigDoor publishers will be able to add language configurations to current loyalty programs, without affecting the existing experience. The internationalization feature will also allow publishers to break down existing analytics by language, giving even deeper access to valuable customer data and insights.

To learn more about BigDoor’s internationalization feature, or to talk with a BigDoor Loyalty Expert, please contact us at: Info@BigDoor.com.

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Improvements, Loyalty, Technology, UI, Uncategorized

If you are a frequent reader of mygamification.com you might have noticed that a few weeks ago we quietly updated the look of the BigDoor platform here on the site. Today, we want to proudly announce the newest version of BigDoor featuring a new look, better customization and updated user notifications. With both publishers and the end-user in mind, we’ve updated the BigDoor platform with more publisher features for easier and faster implementation as well as a simple interface to improve user experience.

A few highlights on the update:

Design: With the new update comes a new slick and minimalistic module. Keeping in mind that users come to a site to engage with content, we wanted to compliment a publisher’s site, without visually over-whelming it. The persistent form factor will sit on the bottom right of the page, and won’t interfere with content or the users browsing experience. Interaction happens only when users engage or perform a rewarded action.

Customization: Gamification should be flexible enough to work for a variety of publishers and their sites. With the newest version of BigDoor, publishers can choose what features to implement (be it quests, leaderboards, rewards, etc) without the worrying about user interface. The customizable dock allows publishers to pick and choose which BigDoor powered gamification apps are visible to users, which ensures that every BigDoor gamification solution is unique.

Notifications: Included with our new design, we’ve updated our user feedback to provide users a clear notification when they have made a rewarded action. We believe that a gamification solution needs to clearly communicate to users what actions are valued. Notifications are a great way to draw the users attention to these actions and let them know that they are moving in the right direction. No longer will users be unaware when or why they have received points. This not only improves the feedback loop for the user, but increases the likelihood that users will onboard and join in.

We’re working on loading more quests, adding features and content all the time, so make sure to check back frequently and see this new version at work! If you have any questions about the new look, or would like to talk to one of our gamification experts about a BigDoor solution for your site, you can email us at info@bigdoor.com or check out our website for information about specific BigDoor features.

We’d love to hear what you think!

Posted in: BigDoor news, Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Improvements, Technology, UI

My daughter is currently in love with puzzles. The solid 45 minutes of her sitting still, working quietly is a welcome respite from her normally loud, “spirited,” three year old personality. It’s fascinating to watch her work. She’s very methodical in her process: laying out all the pieces (she’s up to 70+ now); turning over all the images; she typically findshe largest image and works out from there. For my daughter, playing a puzzle is a social activity, she talks to me, asks for help when she needs it and when she’s finished she wants to share her work with everyone.

Yesterday Zynga released their latest game, Hidden Chronicles. Described as Zynga’s “first social hidden object game” the game incorporates many of the things that make solving puzzles so much fun: critical thinking, memory, skill, sharing and a social aspect. It will be interesting to see if Hidden Chronicles can replicate the huge success the company had with Cityville but for now they have a few fans playing again along here at BigDoor!

–Carrie

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gaming, UI, User engagement, UX

Software usability evaluation isn’t at all a new concept, nor is it exclusively the realm of bespectacled folks in lab coats, deftly avoiding eye contact behind one-way mirrors. Far from it – “discount” usability testing methods and tools have democratized the process nearly as much as cloud computing has done the same thing to scaling a business’s online infrastructure. (User interface evaluation is even being crowdsourced by companies like UTest.). But your fast-paced market probably demands that you be incredibly nimble and “launch first, ask questions later” – and hope your analytics, some A/B variant testing framework, and direct feedback optimize an initial design. But if you don’t take time to show really early, rough sketch stuff to potential users, “head slappers” – painfully obvious mistakes visible only once you stop protecting your early design from exposure to its intended audience – will lie in wait.

We recently tested portions of a major design update to our tools for publishers who design and deploy BigDoor’s gamification solutions to their sites. The goal? We wanted to learn if our introductory “onboarding” process demonstrated this new experience effectively enough to potential publishers to persuade them to sign up.

Findings? Nope. It did not.

But that’s really good news. Because we had several potential publishers attempt to complete this sign up process and share their frustrations/confusion, we were able to:

• Remove jargon and update terminology that explained little
• Identify a point where adding a couple of previews and simple callouts to explain “this does that,” and “this works like that,” makes all the difference
• Learn that once publishers did find their way through it was fairly easy to understand how to set up the site features they wanted to use

This post should also serve as a shameless plug for Silverback, a stylish, clever tool for video recording a participant’s face and the screen they’re working on, picture-in-picture style, using a Mac laptop’s standard video camera. The impact of the results above was much easier to demonstrate to the entire company with some key video highlights, and all the raw footage was right there on my laptop to work with the moment we wrapped up testing. Hugely useful.

Some imposter dramatizes a dialog box

The barriers to quick, in-house (and crowdsourced) methods for finding out how many head-slappers your early UI designs are lower than ever before. Huge ROI for a relatively tiny investment of time and effort awaits teams of any size.

- Matt Shobe, BigDoor Chief Design Officer & early stage mistake-maker

Posted in: API, Blog, Development, Improvements, Startups, Technology, UI, UX

We’re pleased to announce that BigDoor is hiring! Are you an unconventional Black Box Tester? Can you use your reporting and analytic skills as a rockstar Business Intelligence Analyst? Are you a creative and strong Web Designer with web UI skills? A killer Content Manager? BigDoor is looking for YOU!

We’re a Seattle-based startup looking for individuals to help us create the next big killer company. Our platform helps digital publishers create loyalty programs and game mechanics into their site or application through points, badges, levels, virtual currency and virtual goods as well as building economies for our partners. We’re developing a game mechanics and virtual economy ecosystem based around our RESTful API to interact with our MySQL database for clients and we perform high transaction volumes. Our customers include digital publishers, content providers, app developers, goods vendors, and advertisers. Our platform is extensible in order to allow a wide variety of apps to be built on top of it. Sound interesting? Send your details to HR@bigdoor.com.

Posted in: API, BigDoor news, Blog, Development, Startups, Technology, UI

I regularly root for the home team, even when they may be a bit inferior to the competition. On many occasions I cheered for the Mariners during a losing season, I was among the small group of people who was stoked to see the Seahawks make the playoffs (despite being the first team in the history of the NFL to do so with a losing record), and I typically find myself singing the praises of Microsoft – largely because they are here in our proverbial back yard and it feels like they are the home team. However biased I am to want to like Microsoft products, I have finally concluded that Internet Explorer is a horrible product that is wasting countless hours of web developer’s time and it is time that Microsoft own up to this reality.

Here are two examples of what I’m talking about.

1. Acid3 is the standard upon which the world has agreed how browsers should render images, animations, etc. (100 is a perfect score). Chrome scores 100/100, my current version of Firefox scores 94/100, the crappy little browser on my Android phone even scores a 93/100. Internet Explorer 8 scores 20/100. That’s right, the flagship browser shipped every day by Microsoft, a company with 89,000 employees and with a market cap of $240 billion gets an “F-“ with the product that they want everyone in the world to use as their window to the Internet. But don’t worry, IE 9 is coming soon – early versions of which score a 32/100.
2. Have you heard of HTML5?  It’s pretty exciting because all kinds of cool new things are coming down the pike that will allow the Web to do all sorts of amazing things that it couldn’t do before. HTML5 has a long way to go in nailing down its standards, but browsers already support the early standards and there is a good, objective HTML5 test to see how well browsers support these new standards (300 is a perfect score). Are you ready for the results?  Chrome gets 242/300, Firefox gets 139/300, my mobile Android browser gets 176/300, Internet Explorer 8 gets 27/300.

As a result of Microsoft’s refusal to adhere to industry standards, developers are forced to do all sorts of unnatural things in order to build web apps that look good and actually work across all browsers. Usually that means building fast, good looking, stable web apps for Chrome and Firefox, and then bloating those apps with all sorts of crazy IE workarounds in order to make sure your site doesn’t completely break when used with IE. Right now there is an unprecedented amount of wasted developer time and energy being spent wrestling with Microsoft’s albatross of a browser. And if that wasn’t bad enough, IE doesn’t have a built-in auto-upgrade mechanism like all the other browsers, so almost 40% of their IE install base is on old browsers like IE7 and even IE6. If you think IE8 is bad, just try and write a modern web app that actually functions with older versions of IE.

We are a startup with 17 highly talented employees. We do weekly sprints with rollouts every Wednesday and generally speaking we bust our asses to build cool, modern web apps. Two weeks ago, a bit before midnight, our team was huddled around their computers fixing a bunch of weird IE related bugs that suddenly became apparent during our post-release user acceptance testing. These of course didn’t show themselves during our automated unit testing, our automated system testing, our outsourced user testing, or our internal user testing (all of which we do religiously every week prior to a release). We have an amazingly advanced testing process, and yet despite these efforts we seem to regularly be wrestling with IE bugs and issues. The wasted man hours dealing with IE specific bugs – just in our little startup – can be measured in the thousands of man hours. IE has become an enormous tax on anyone building modern web apps, but this tax is felt especially hard by startups that are moving quickly and iterating often.

Two weeks ago as I watched our team perform the familiar ritual of working well past midnight in order to squash IE bugs, I wrote (but didn’t post) the following:: MICROSOFT, YOU NEED TO STOP MAKING BROWSERS. YOU ARE WASTING MILLIONS OF HOURS OF DEVELOPER’S TIME EVERY YEAR. THE STALE, MOLDY BAGEL ON MY DESK COULD BUILD A BETTER PRODUCT THAN THAT PIECE OF CRAP YOU’VE ATTEMPTED TO CALL A BROWSER FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS. A PUBLIC APOLOGY FOR BEING INEPT AND EVIL WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED!

I knew better than to post that when my blood was still boiling, but I included it here to demonstrate how much anger and resentment the developer community is amassing toward Microsoft because of Internet Explorer. I regularly speak with other developers at other startups about the IE challenge, and I typically hear an equally passionate disdain for Internet Explorer. As a result, Microsoft is doing long-term damage to its brand because they are quickly coming to be seen as slow moving, obstinant and inept by the very web developers they need so badly to continue writing apps on their platforms. As developer confidence erodes, so will their market dominance.

Case in point. Our solution was to stop supporting Internet Explorer for our gamification CMS used by our business customers. Our business customers are typically much more sophisticated than a typical web user, and as such we now prompt all of them to upgrade to a modern browser (either Chrome or Firefox will work wonderfully) when using our gamification CMS. This solution is increasingly becoming the norm amongst web developers, and I think we’ll see the trend accelerate in the coming years.

BigDoor will, of course, continue to make sure all of our consumer facing applications (like our gamification MiniBar) work with every browser out there. It isn’t easy to do, but we can’t afford to turn away consumers using IE. But when it comes to our B2B products, we are taking a stand, deciding to move faster, and deciding to no longer let Microsoft’s sorry excuse for a browser slow this startup down. 

I’m still hopeful that Microsoft will realize how damaging it is to their entire franchise to alienate and anger web developers by their lack of support for standards. I’m hopeful that they will get religion around web standards and that IE 9 will comply with those standards. Microsoft, are you listening? I’m begging you – I want to again root for the home team!

Developers and startups, do you agree? Or are we just a bunch of angry curmudgeons shaking our virtual fists in the air and yelling at the neighbor kids to stay off our lawn?  Comment and tell us what you think.

–Keith

Posted in: Blog, Development, Startups, Technology, UI

Earlier this week during our weekly demo a conversation came up about intuitiveness and play, specifically how much CityVille nails it on every level. For those who don’t already know, CityVille is the hugely popular game that allows users to build their own custom city. The game launched a little over a month and just announced more than 100 million active users.

The game is simple, intuitive and encourages people to share and build their city so effortlessly that it’s addictive. Zynga’s CTO recently said, “The company’s ‘secret sauce’ lies in taking mechanics and themes from the gaming industry and making them simple, social and easy to learn.”

The BigDoor team began talking about how much we admire CityVille’s incredibly fun and easy game mechanics and how we’d like to emulate those same mechanics across the BigDoor API. We’re constantly iterating on our platform; we have weekly sprints in which we prioritize feedback from our partners and make upgrades to our tool set.

We can truly aspire to create something as great as CityVille. Their  numbers are astounding and really show the opportunity that lies in truly great game mechanics and social gaming! So the team was challenged with two things: continue working to create an intuitive, fun and simple user experience for the BigDoor API, and get to Level 10 in CityVille.

The challenge has been thrown down, now what Level are you?

Posted in: API, Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gaming, Improvements, UI, User engagement

So you’ve already decided you want to reward your users for performing certain actions by giving them points and badges. Level up! But you’re stuck on the next step: “Now how do I make my stinkin’ badges?”

In our system, awarding the progressive badges as users hit different thresholds of activity used to require a little bit of tinkering. You would create URL objects for the badge images, and then you had to tie them to the different Level objects in a Level Collection, which was tied to a Currency, etc. It worked great and kept track of everything for you, but simply wasn’t very user friendly to set up.

With that difficult experience in mind, we’ve introduced the Badge-O-Matic to our account tools. This new quick start tool ties together the different objects in our system so that you can easily create and edit Badge levels without having to jump around in your Economy settings. It’s even got a few template badge level tracks that you can use directly in your own gamification experience, or that you can just feel free to play with to learn how things all work together.

Even if we don’t have a premade template that matches exactly what you want to do, remember that Badges in our system are entirely customizable with your own creative since you can always point URLs to your own image resources and define them any way you want. Want to create a badge set that awards 25 different levels of custom Unicorn Horn badges for users who add more and more virtual Glitter to their profile page? Badge-O-Matic can do that. But it may feel a little bit embarrassed and not talk about it at home.

Check it out now to get yourself some stinkin’ badges. Or watch the video below for more details.

- roy

Posted in: Badges, BigDoor news, Blog, Gamification, UI

And now another word from the developer side of the house:

With many years of experience in the Microsoft static development world with all their fancy programs and business models I have found it quite difficult to make the initial pivot into the dynamic world of Python and Javascript. That being said, it has been quite exciting to not have everything handed to you on a silver platter. This post describes the initial design and structure of the code behind a flexible UI.

Javascript

In the Javascript world, one of the big points I keep hearing is that Javascript needs to be written from the prototypical mindset. As I have learned in past experiences, it almost always less of a headache to not fight the design of the paradigm but instead learn it’s intricacies and use it to your advantage. Hence, I have slowly learned how to incorporate duck typing to accommodate a style of coding that enables other developers to plug-in to the same objects being passed around and extend the current system.

With this belief in mind, I have come to a point where I believe the best course of action is to use a classic OOP design. The hardest part of implementing inheritance is that I constantly wonder if there is a way to be just as efficient in the dynamic/prototype paradigm. For most developers this is quite hard to put aside due to curiosity and performance improvements but my first lesson of operating in a startup, has been to focus on glaring, rather than possible problems. A difficult task but there are more interesting problems to solve at this point.

Events and State

One of my favorite parts of Javascript and Python is the ability to pass functions around as variables. Growing up in the Microsoft world, this was quite difficult to do with type restrictions on delegates. It was still possible but not nearly as easy. (It will be much easier with their upcoming dynamic keyword.) Seeing as how we need a way to link the state of a control to a particular action which occurs on the page (not necessarily attached to the state of the dom), I needed a way to call multiple functions when one action occurred. Basically, I needed Javascript to support event-driven design.

At this point all the event manager does is use an associative array to store function signatures in an array and then sequentially call those functions when the event is raised.


var onrender1 = function() { alert('Render receiver 1'); }
var onrender2 = function() { alert('Render receiver 2'); }
var manager = {
events: {},
    trigger: function(event) {
        for(e in this.events[event]) { this.events[event][e](); }
    }
}
manager.events.rendered = [onrender1];
manager.events.rendered.push(onrender2);
manager.trigger('rendered');
// Render receiver 1
// Render receiver 2
 
Download [zip]


Finally, the manager could be designed as a class to enable instances and attached to objects, allowing objects to enable events using duck typing if necessary.

This is only a basic implementation but works for are requirements quite well. It might be better to implement in the prototype model at a later time…but that’s for another time.

The entire purpose of enabling events is to call functions as soon as something happens This is extremely important when there are multiple controls/components whose visual state depends on a particular action (user initiated or not). A model similar to this is the UI state manager in Silverlight which handles events as well as supports dynamic transitions.

Personally, this is an exciting and interesting beginning to the UI development cycle.

- Collin

Posted in: Blog, Development, Technology, UI