Gamifying the World of Languages: an advanced quiz platform for ESL – Language Travel
The brief
ESL – Language Travel, a leading international education provider, contacted us about creating a quiz to engage language geeks by inviting them to identify over 100 languages from all around the globe. The game was to convey, in a ‘show, don’t tell’ way, ESL’s commitment to offering the broadest range of languages and destinations.
ESL wanted its quiz to be easy enough for everyone to have fun on their first go, but difficult enough that the most dedicated users would stand out. The goal was to host regular competitions and award prizes to the top scorers. In addition, the game needed to:
be available in seven languages; display real-time stats about players; collect contact details from participants; be connected to a user friendly dashboard where content, data and competitions could be managed by ESL’s marketing team; and be easy to share through social media and partner websites.
The challenge
When designing the gameplay, we identified what critical factors could make or break the playability. It was decided that the concept would have to:
balance language diversity and randomness with a progressive learning curve; define the difficulty of a language relative to the user’s own language; and result in a flexible quiz that could easily be updated and reused by ESL’s team.
For an education company like ESL, it was important to balance professionalism with engagement. Ultimately, we needed to offer every player a progression curve fit for their linguistic background, yet diverse and filled with surprises.
The Drimtouch
We took the game experience to the next level by introducing fun but educational rewards: badges in different language families or groups, each supported by a quick fact.
After careful consideration of all the factors and discussions with ESL, we defined our strategy:
Gamify the quiz with relevant rewards and fun facts. The algorithm automatically detect the user’s language and direct them to the scenario that matches their language family. Set a controlled amount of randomness – right mix of random vs badge. Create an engaging design that’s playful but in line with the ESL branding. Use a shareable widget that can be embedded on partner websites.
The result
“We are very happy with the final result! We especially appreciate Drimlike’s flexibility and availability during the whole time, the clear and detailed way in which they explain things, the creative solutions to problems and quick responses. We obtained a good piece of content and we will definitely look to develop it more in the future!”
Maëlle De Bernardini, Global Online Marketing Manager
ESL – Language Travel
ESL now has a powerful communication tool it can use and grow without further technical development. It is able to create new competitions and decide when to turn them off in one click. It has control over the content, and can continue to build the game’s collection of voices and accents from all over the world.
A rich, rewarding game experience across platforms. Two game modes: casual and competition. Thousands of contestants from different countries.
The quiz
By combining ESL’s knowledge of languages with our gamification expertise, we have built an engaging game that sums up ESL’s ethos and has their customers hooked.
“This platform allows us to quickly create different versions of our interactive quiz, helping to boost our social networks, our website and our events with regular contests. The statistics generated by the game allow our marketing teams around the world to better understand our international audience and potential customers.”
Krister Weidenhielm, Head of Products and Partnerships
ESL – Language Travel
We’ve also learnt to tell Khmer and Hmar apart! (Some of us, anyway).