Gamification wasn't a single project — it was a thread that ran through Volt's entire history. Over the years I designed goal and stats dashboards, competition UIs, leaderboard variations, and reward concepts that lived in my design graveyard before the final version took shape.

That history mattered. By the time we were building the badge system in earnest, I had a clear sense of what solar reps actually responded to, what stakeholders wanted to see, and what had been tried and abandoned.

The competition and leaderboard features were already live in the app — reps could see rankings, stats, and head-to-head results. The badge system was the next layer: persistent recognition that lived on a rep's profile, visible to them and to their team.

The new Volt 2.0 design system gave the gamification UI a home it had never had before. I designed the badges and their unlock states within the new visual language — dark gradient surfaces, the "swaggy" brand direction, and the sharp-corner component library that defined 2.0.

The thing I kept coming back to when thinking about gamification was this: the most effective rewards cost nothing. An animation. A sound. A haptic buzz. Programmed into the app — no budget, no prize fulfillment, no logistics. Duolingo built a $5 billion company on that premise. Slot machines have been exploiting it for decades. The machine makes enormous noise for the smallest monetary payout, and it makes you want to keep playing.

Solar sales is exhausting work. Reps are knocking on doors in the heat, getting rejected constantly, working on commission. My goal was to find every opportunity to celebrate the small stuff — a door knocked, an appointment set, an assist logged — with a moment of reward that felt good enough to keep them coming back.

Competitions and prizes were already part of the culture — stakeholders had been running their own sales contests long before Volt existed. Those cost real money. What I was interested in was the in-between: the daily behaviors that don't win a trip to Vegas but still deserve acknowledgment. The badge system was the vehicle for that.

The longer-term vision — one I had on the roadmap and got into early design on — was a Sales Journey mode built into onboarding. The idea was that a new rep's first experience of Volt would put them on a guided path, earning badges for completing the actions that would set them up to succeed: knocking their first door, setting their first appointment, getting their first assist. It would have made the app's value immediately tangible and tied first-time behaviors to reward. We didn't get there. But it shaped how I thought about the badge system we did build.

Here's where the work got interesting. While the rest of the team was programming the badge thresholds — set by marketing — into the backend system, I used our AI data query agent with access to our internal databases and Mixpanel and started asking a simple question: could our actual users earn these badges?

The answer was mostly no. A significant portion of the thresholds were out of reach for the majority of our active users. Some would have taken years to achieve. That was a direct contradiction of everything I believed the system should do. Badges that feel impossible to earn aren't motivating — they're demoralizing. And a system designed to celebrate daily behaviors was about to reward almost nobody.

I brought that back to the team with the data to back it up, and went through the badge set and corrected the thresholds. But I also noticed a second problem: the system was almost entirely oriented toward closers — reps who made sales. It had nothing meaningful for appointment setters, who were a large and important part of our user base.

These were junior reps whose job was knocking doors, setting appointments, and getting assists — scheduled appointments that converted to sales. I added a set of badges specifically for that workflow — recognition of the behaviors that drive the top of the sales funnel.

The achievement badges were part of a few connected features, each owned by a different developer. An admin tool that let the team upload badge images, names, and descriptions. Native push notifications so reps were alerted the moment they earned a badge. And a Wins tab added to the existing activity feed, where reps could share their achievements socially with their team.

Each piece had its own developer, but they all had to come together on the same timeline — the features were interconnected and had to ship as a cohesive whole. Most of them were already underway before Volt 2.0 had fully shipped, which made them a natural test case: real features, real code, real developers — and a chance to apply the new design system and AI skills to work that was already in motion.

The workflow I landed on was a revelation in efficiency. Instead of writing up feedback and waiting for another test build from a developer, I could pull the branch to my local environment, run my Volt skill against it to catch any design system violations, do a round of UI polish directly, and push it back just how I wanted it.

At one point a developer was stuck on a UX problem in the admin tool. The common pattern for resizing images in a frame seemed to be getting lost in translation. I gave it a shot myself with Claude and we got past the blocker easily — one the developer assumed was a real constraint. Being a Product Designer who can open the code and solve a problem a developer couldn't see brings something neither role covers alone.

The gamification work never shipped in its final form. The company filed for bankruptcy while it was just at the finish line.

What I'd take from it: the most important design decision in the whole project wasn't visual. It was the moment I pulled the data and found out we were about to hand users a system that would make most of them feel like failures. Catching that — and having the data to change it — is the kind of work that doesn't show up in a screenshot.

My philosophy on gamification hasn't changed: the cheapest rewards, done right, are the most effective ones. An animation that plays when you set an appointment costs nothing and means something. That principle scales from a badge system to onboarding journeys to AI coaching tools — anywhere you're trying to shape behavior through design, the same logic applies.