Case Study
Upliance AI
Enhancing Upliance.ai’s user experience through a gamified framework that incentivizes cooking consistency, creativity, and exploration.
Upliance.ai
Duration
Nov 2024 - Feb 2025
Team
Me - Experience Design Specialist
Dhanashree Raut - Experience Design Lead
Prateek Pagore - Creative Technologist & Project Manager
TM Developer Partners - Development and Backend
Main Responsibilities
UI / UX / Graphics
Background
Upliance is an AI-powered cooking assistant and smart kitchen appliance.
Upliance.ai helps users simplify meal preparation and explore diverse cuisines with advanced features like AI-driven recipes and versatile cooking modes.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Objective & Goal
Building an Engaging Gamification Ecosystem
Increase user engagement through gamified features.
Encourage consistent use and exploration of Upliance’s versatile functionalities.
Foster a community-driven approach with social and festive challenges.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Understanding the Product
Driving Strategic Insights by Conducting Stakeholder Interviews
During stakeholder interviews, we explored the long-term vision for gamification and available data to guide strategy. We also examined
user interaction patterns, social connectivity potential, and gamified feedback to enhance cooking engagement.
This provided insights into aligning features with the product’s vision
and prioritizing user engagement strategies.
Questions Asked:
What is the long-term vision for gamification?
What existing data do we have to guide strategy?
Can features like image recognition and voice assistants be integrated into the app?
How frequently do users currently interact with the device and app?
Would a "friends" feature help enhance social connectivity and engagement?
How can gamified feedback (e.g., XP or rewards) motivate users to cook more frequently?
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Talking to Users to Identify Barriers to Engagement
Through user research and data analysis, we identified the challenges affecting engagement and explored what motivates users. We examined pain points reducing interaction, reasons for limited feature exploration, and the role of competition, rewards, and progression.
This helped us uncover the core issues affecting user engagement, understand motivational drivers, and refine the approach to encourage broader feature utilization and consistent product use.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Setting the Approach
Designing the Framework and Aligning Goals
Goals were established by carefully analyzing user needs and insights from stakeholders. Informed by successful gamification models like Duolingo, scalable solutions were identified to work within Upliance.ai’s technical framework. Scenarios were developed to evaluate engagement-driving features such as streak systems and festival challenges, ensuring a robust and user-centered design approach.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
User Experience (UX) Design
Designing an Engaging and Versatile Gamification Framework
A multi-faceted framework to incentivize users through rewards, challenges, and social interaction, all while maintaining Upliance.ai’s intuitive design.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Tasks and XP System
Rewarding Culinary Achievements
Users earn XP for completing a variety of tasks, such as trying new recipes, using specific device features, and engaging in challenges. Maintaining streaks and achieving milestones grants additional XP, which contributes to user ranks. These ranks symbolize expertise, incentivize consistent usage, and foster a sense of accomplishment. By providing tangible rewards and recognition, the XP system enhances user motivation and encourages long-term engagement with the product.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Badges System
Celebrating and Acknowledging Milestones with Badges
Badges reward users for unique and meaningful achievements, such as mastering specific cuisines, utilizing advanced features like AI-generated recipes, or completing thematic challenges tied to seasonal events. Each badge is visually distinctive and designed to create a sense of pride and accomplishment. These badges not only celebrate milestones but also act as motivational tools, encouraging users to explore different functionalities of Upliance.ai and engage more deeply with the platform. Additionally, the badge system fosters a sense of progression and social recognition, further enriching the user experience and strengthening their connection to the product.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Streak System
Building Discipline and Encouraging Consistency with Streaks
Daily streak rewards encourage regular and disciplined use of the platform by offering incremental incentives for consecutive days of activity. The streak freeze feature provides flexibility, allowing users to pause their streaks during unavoidable breaks without losing progress. This system balances motivation with practicality, ensuring users feel rewarded for consistency while maintaining a user-friendly experience. By integrating streaks and streak freezes, the feature fosters long-term engagement and helps users build a routine around using the product.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Festival-Themed Tasks/Challenges
Engaging Users Through Their Festive Spirit and Tastes
Seasonal and culturally resonant tasks, such as creating Diwali specials, Christmas treats, or dishes for New Year celebrations, encourage users to connect with festive traditions. These challenges not only make cooking more enjoyable but also create opportunities for users to explore diverse cuisines. By tying these tasks to celebratory moments, the feature fosters emotional connections with the product, enhances cultural relevance, and keeps users engaged during important seasonal periods.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
User Journey
Enhancing Onboarding and Providing Progress Feedback
With Coachmarks, step-by-step tutorials seamlessly introduce users to gamification features, offering a guided experience that reduces learning curves and ensures users understand functionality with ease. This approach helps new users quickly familiarize themselves with the platform’s features, increasing engagement from the start.
Real-time feedback provides users with immediate gratification by showcasing progress and achievements as tasks are completed. Detailed visualizations of progress keep users motivated to stay engaged, helping to reinforce their connection to the platform over time.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Collaboration
Driving Collaboration for Efficiency, Balance and Strategic Goals.
Collaboration was fundamental to the success of this project. Developers were engaged to ensure technical feasibility, addressing design constraints while balancing user and business needs. Stakeholders provided vital, continuous feedback, helping align every step of the design process with strategic goals. Multiple iterative design sessions further refined the user experience, ensuring it catered to diverse user needs and maintained high engagement potential.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
Conclusion
Building a Tangible Vision for Gamification for Upliance.ai: to help them win.
The gamification initiative enhances Upliance’s value by integrating features that encourage exploration, creativity, and consistent use. This framework aligns with Upliance.ai's goal of enriching the cooking experience, ensuring users find both practicality and enjoyment in their daily culinary activities.
The Challenge
Businesses across various sectors faced a trio of interconnected problems that hindered their growth and customer understanding:
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© Darin Menezes, 2025
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© Darin Menezes, 2025
I'm Available to Work
© Darin Menezes, 2025
I'm Available to Work
© Darin Menezes, 2025