Eli is a French start-up that has developed & commercialized Software as a service (Saas) to help involved a huge group of people in the same strategy for reducing their company's carbon footprint. By using Gamification’s principles, Eli let companies set competitions and challenges in a mobile app and manage their actions in a web app.
A bit of context on Eli: I founded this company with 2 associates & worked 3 years as CMO, HoS & UX/UI Designer.

As a founder, I had a lot of various missions. But all related to users: marketing, branding, UX & UI designs. I was in charge of finding the product/market fit for this new project.

My role was to design these applications from scratch and find the best way to involve people in them. By doing surveys, beta-test with a batch of 80 users, reading a lot of psychological & motivational studies and finding the best gamification principles for the purpose of Eli.

🖌️ The Brand identity

As an environmental brand, we wanted a brand that speaks for itself with a recognizable logo that sticks in the public mind! So we naturally choose green as the principal color of the brand.

The name chosen was too long to be remembered correctly (Everyday Life Impact), so we shorten it to Eli.
We made 2 logo designs, one with the word Eli and one with just the E. The E of Eli includes a leaf in its center in reference to nature and its protection.

As we pivoted to companies market and made a benchmark, we changed a bit our identity because all the concurrent were green and it didn’t help remember the company. As we gain visibility and expertise in the gamification field, we choose a more joyful and optimistic color: orange.

With this identity, we decided to design a mascot that will help users in their journey through our mobile App. I decided to make a rounded little creature that carries a little tree to symbolise nature and its protection.

🔗 Webflow Website

To gain visibility, I created a website using Webflow to help the brand and the company being known and found for the clients and optimize this website with SEO ranking and a blog con articles.

You can check the website at : www.eliapp.io

📱 Mobile app for B2C : (V1.0)

After doing a survey with 500 responses to better know the needs of people in their quest to reduce their footprint.
We launched the first application for individuals after 2 months of development and conducted a 1-month beta test with 50 people. The aim of this application was to help people takes new habits by repeating actions in their daily life for 1 to 2 weeks

Core features :

• List of actions with environmental details & product recommendations

• Add to the user list for one or two weeks week

• List of environmental products

• User profile & progress statistics

After the test, we found that we got 2 types of users, people who wanted to make actions to reduce their environmental footprint & people who wanted to make it by buying better products.

📱 Mobile app for B2C : (V2.0)

But in all cases, the users didn’t stick more than 1 week on the applications.
So we developed a new app, in 1 month, with a daily habits tracking for our actions and more recognitions for the users with trophies and badges when they completed actions. Another month of beta-test with 80 people and the retention wasn’t better.

💼 Pivot to B2B

With this second version and some communication & prizes won, a company contacts Eli to discuss the potential of this app for footprint reduction strategy in enterprises and involved every employee.

But the application wasn’t fitting the company's needs yet. And with the retention of Eli V.2, it wasn’t a good idea to let this app to 1000 employees.

The initial survey showed us that people didn’t want to be compared to each other. So, the mobile app stick with these answers and made an individual path for the user. But we knew that people easily give up if they aren’t supported by peers.

So we developed the third version of Eli's mobile app. A challenge app that people loved.

Core features :

• Weekly challenges with leaderboards (individual or team competitions)

• Group discussions

• Algorithm of proof verification

💻 A web platform to take control of the challenges

To help companies, we needed to let them monitor the challenges on the mobile app.
So we developed a web platform for administrators.

Core features :

• Group administration

• Message box

• Creation of actions, programs

• Creation of challenges

In conclusion, Eli is my biggest and most complete project that needed a lot of conversations with end users and developers to find the perfect solutions to launch a beautiful and lovable product as easily and quickly as possible.

You can find a quick example of the Agile/ test&learn development process by reading the article "Eli: mobile app focus".