One of the features we’re most excited about in the upcoming v2 release of Challenge is a leaderboard we’re hoping will really capture the essence of accountability and bring it to the web.
In designing it we wanted to satisfy a few key criteria:
- It had to be versatile enough to work with almost any kind of challenge, like reading, not just the usual suspects like running, biking and swimming.
- It also needed to elegantly communicate three different types of data per participant: the total amount of progress posted, the number of times progress was posted, and the size of each progress post.
- The leaderboard had to be fun. Our good friend and beta tester Chris St. John suggested that the focus be less on the raw numbers and more on the natural drama of competition, that is, who’s beating whom. This is why we chose to visualize the three data types. Each creates an opportunity for drama to unfold as participants compare their performance throughout the challenge.
The following images are in chronological order, starting with my initial sketches and ending with a finished comp designed by the very talented Jacob Morse. The dots, hops, and rectangles you’ll see represent individual progress posts (e.g. “5 miles, 3 miles, 7.5 miles…”). Hopefully this will give you a sense of the “evolution of a leaderboard.”
