Mcoins—Moneyview Rewards
Launched a gamified rewards ecosystem (Mcoins) that reached 10 million coins rewarded within weeks of launch and boosted cross-product adoption by 7%.
Business Impact
This project delivered the following value:
Drove cross-product adoption and boosted engagement across digital gold purchases and UPI transactions through streak-based design interventions.
Introduced a task-based rewards strategy and value-linked redemption logic that helped lower acquisition costs for other products, making Mcoins a source for scaling product metrics.
Laid the groundwork for rewards scalability, long-term engagement, retention and rewards-based gamification strategy.
Loyalty rewards
Featured on the quarterly digest for reaching this milestone and increasing cross-product adoption within weeks.
The Objective
Introduce Moneyview’s new reward structure and build a UX foundation for this initiative, "Mcoins", that could seamlessly incentivise user behaviours like cross-product conversion, and on-time payments, while aligning tightly with business growth and user engagement goals.
The Problem
Users primarily interacted with Moneyview for transactional needs, not emotional connection. In the competitive Indian fintech landscape, this left us vulnerable to higher bounce rates. To build enduring loyalty, we needed to move beyond feature parity and create a system of reciprocity, where users felt rewarded for long-term engagement. Mcoins was envisioned as a way to tie everyday usage to meaningful rewards, reinforcing habit loops and fostering brand affinity through value-backed recognition.
Challenges
A key challenge was defining a clear and motivating value proposition for Mcoins. Users had to perceive the monetary worth of the reward as worth the effort—striking the right balance between effort and reward was essential to building sustainable engagement.
There was a strong push to restrict redemption visibility in order to force more engagement. Instead, we aligned the team around transparency as a design principle, and used concept testing and pilot experiments to show that bottlenecking redemption introduced dark pattern risks.
While delight was a UX objective, attempts to include moments of joy and delight (through visual polish, microinteractions, and gamified feedback) met internal resistance due to timeline concerns and the perceived lack of a measurable ROI. We had to make a case that not everything impactful is immediately quantifiable.
The Mcoin-based rewards onboarding
Research Phase
Benchmarked reward systems and patterns across fintech and non-fintech products to surface best practices in designing rewards, reward fatigue mitigation, and redemption psychology.
Mapped the end-to-end reward journey—from task discovery to reward redemption—through the lens of user motivation and product intent. This made friction points and emotional drop-offs visible across surfaces and devices.
Visualised scenarios of how different user types would engage with the rewards system. These storyboards were instrumental in building narratives for stitching the designs together, cross-product stakeholder empathy and aligning the team around specific narratives (e.g., casual saver, aspirational gold redeemer, etc).
Deployed structured surveys at multiple phases—pre-concept, mid-design, and post-launch— and further tested concepts to validate assumptions, rank preferences, and gauge response to perceived value and redemption friction.
Design Phase
Before jumping into UI, we explored how users might interpret a reward system within a credit-focused app. This meant defining Mcoins, their meaning, and how they behave. The goal was to amalgamate delight and utility in a mental model that felt intuitive and easy to learn, without requiring a dedicated tutorial or onboarding flow.
Sketched reward journeys with emphasis on hierarchy, interaction patterns, and emotion. These early frames included raw animation markers and placeholders for delight indicators (like burst effects or “the classic confetti”) to communicate intent early on.
Converted sketches into tappable prototypes to simulate basic task-reward cycles. These were used for quick concept testing, allowing us to evaluate whether users noticed rewards, how they reacted, and what they understood. The visual language for delight was refined based on feedback from these tests before investing in full design.
Co-designed with our UX Writer, UI designer and animator to co-create pixel-level interactions with clear messaging—celebratory events, refining animation concepts, and microinteractions in the redemption journey. This ensured consistency while giving us the tools to evoke a subtle sense of joy without distracting from core reward-earning tasks.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Learnings
Choosing methodologies based on constraints (timeline, access to resources and circumstances) was key. In fast-moving cycles, tactical feedback collection through concepts and storyboard walkthroughs outperformed deep-dive interviews, allowing us to move forward confidently.
Quick, low-fidelity explorations often carried the most weight. A couple of crude sketches with static visuals and animation cues sparked 60 %+ validation of design decisions. This raw concept testing fostered alignment and unlocked faster buy-in than polished decks. Early sketches acted as catalysts for team momentum.
