Designing the Engage Loop: seven levels, and why not ten

The Engage Loop turns play into Experience Points and XP into levels. The design question underneath it is deceptively simple: how many rungs should the ladder have?

Too few, and nothing feels close

With three or four levels, each threshold is enormous. A new guest looks at the gap to level two and correctly concludes it is not happening this month. The ladder stops motivating anyone who is not already a regular — which is precisely the group loyalty is supposed to grow.

Too many, and nothing feels earned

With fifteen or twenty, the opposite failure. Levels arrive constantly, each one carrying a perk so thin it is embarrassing, and the whole thing reads as a progress bar with confetti attached. Guests stop reading the notifications.

Seven

Seven gives a first level-up that a guest can reach on their first or second visit, a middle that takes real commitment, and a top that a minority of people ever see. Every rung can carry a perk substantial enough to be worth telling a friend about, because there are only six of them to fund.

Levels breathe

One more decision shaped the ladder: XP decays. Slowly, and only when a guest has stopped earning, but it decays. We went back and forth on this for a long time, because taking something away from a guest is the fastest way to lose them.

What settled it was what a level is supposed to communicate. If status never fades, Elite eventually means “was Elite, once,” and the perk attached to it stops being a signal of anything. A ladder where everybody accumulates and nobody ever moves down is not a ladder, it is a filing cabinet.

The mitigation is that decay is easy to outrun. The app carries its own arcade, and playing it earns real XP against the same seven levels — slower than being on the floor of a venue, but more than enough to hold a rung. A guest who cannot get out for a month does not get punished for it.

Rookie, Player, Challenger, Pro, Elite, Champion, Legend. The names matter more than they should — a guest saying “I’m Elite at Sunset Lanes” is doing marketing that a points balance can never do.

The badge had to survive being small

One constraint shaped the visual design more than anything else: the badge has to be readable at 48 pixels, in greyscale, for someone who is color-blind. We first tried counting the level with a row of dots. It worked at five levels and fell apart at seven — below about 60 pixels the dots merged into a smudge.

So the number is simply stated in the middle of the ring. Less clever, considerably more legible, and it means the badge never depends on color or arc length to be understood.