Case Study #3 (Problem Solving)
18 October 2023
Summary
Giki Zero is an employee engagement platform that uses steps for lowering your carbon footprint to encourage engagement within organizations. A step’s status can be categorised as either Trying, Already do this, or Not Applicable. These allow users to accurately track their progress on the platform.
While competitions are a common feature on the Giki Zero platform, there has long been a problem with cheating. This occurs in a number of ways but most commonly when users take on more steps than are realistically achieveable. This is most frequently reported by organizations themselves, particuarly when a prize is offered outside of the product for the user that commits to the most steps.

Problem Statement
As an organisation, I want measures to be taken that will make it harder for users to cheat during a competition.
Approach
My first task was to meet with the engineering team in order to brainstorm the different solutions that were technically possible on the platform. From this session we idenfied 5 possible solutions of different levels of difficulty:
• Create a hard time limit custom to each step that will prevent the user completing a step currently in progress until the set time has passed • Create a soft time limit custom to each step that will alert the user they are completing the step too quickly and recommend assiging a step status of ‘Already do this’ • Implement a step count that would prevent users from completing more than a certain amount of steps per day • Implement a rule that would prevent users from having too many steps in progress at the one time • Implement a feature that would allow admin users to flag suspicious activity that would remove the account from the competition leaderboards until further notice
My next task was to identify all the different areas likely to be affected by each solution and how these would impact the different types of users. From here, I was able to create wireframes for the different ideas that were initially presented to the Product Owner and Head of Product explaining the user flow and level of difficulty for each of the solutions. After providing feedback, we then identified the best solutions to take forward to the organizations by performing a risk and reward assessment to measure the impact and effort required.

After organizations provided feedback on the presented solutions, this was implemented and tested before UI designs were created.
Timescale
Brainstorming solutions: 1 day Research and initial wireframing: 2 weeks Gathering and implementing feedback: 2 weeks Risk and reward assessment: 1 day UI designs: 1 week
Results
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