Transforming high-pressure decision moments into engaging, game-inspired challenges that boost performance and collaboration.

Fraud Detection: Gamifying real-time decision making

SNEAK PEEK

Curious about what I made? Here’s a quick peek before we dive into the details.

The challenge

Design ACME PHOENIX 2.0—an advanced fraud-detection platform that presents critical data in real time and helps investigators make timely, accurate decisions with the aid of thoughtful gamification elements.

Product type:

Enterprise, FinTech

My Role:

UX Lead, Product research, deriving user requirements, concept building, prototyping.

Project Goals:

  • Convert high-stakes fraud reviews into clear, interactive workflows through a gamified interface.

  • Provide real-time feedback—leaderboards, timed challenges, concise scores, and visual cues—to speed decisions, ease mental load, and sharpen investigative accuracy.

Duration: 12 weeks

Toolkit: Axure RP, FigJam, Zoom, GSuite

Design System: IBM Carbon

Conceptualizing the solution

The key challenge

The biggest challenge for this project was to identify the elements that I could gamify and their implementation.

The PSYCHOLOGY of motivation

For this project, Nicole Sharratt, Head of Product Design at Leidos (ex FICO) acted as our customer. I used the design brief as well as my conversations with her as a resource to better understand the goals of financial fraud investigators. Three big ones were-

  • aid investigators to perform better

  • break up monotony of day to day tasks

  • encourage collaboration.

I tackled this by identifying some intrinsic and extrinsic motivators for eg. feeling a sense of belonging to a community or fearing loss of goods or rewards as a way to identify what game mechanics best support the goals.

This also proved to be a unique opportunity to be creative and resourceful when I did not have access to actual users of the product.

Gamification strategy

Why gamification?

  • Boost Engagement: Transforms routine tasks into rewarding experiences.

  • Encourage Adoption: Motivates consistent use of important features.

  • Promote Collaboration: Spurs friendly competition and teamwork.

  • Drive Results: Provides clear goals, immediate feedback, and measurable outcomes.

By weaving game-like mechanics into complex enterprise tasks, I helped users stay motivated and engaged, ultimately enhancing overall productivity and satisfaction.

Injecting ✨Delight✨

Since the goal was also to break the monotony of the tasks for investigators, it was important to make regular tasks more FUN! This was done by building a mystical narrative where investigators take on the personas of hobbits, knights and mages to defeat fraud dragons and monsters while saving the customers.

A gamified approach

To transform routine investigative work into an engaging and rewarding experience, I developed two interconnected games that drive faster, more accurate decision

This dual-game approach not only mitigates the repetitive nature of the job but also builds a sense of responsibility and achievement. The gamified system encourages precise, rapid responses, fosters team collaboration, and provides an engaging framework that directly ties performance to tangible rewards—ultimately empowering investigators and driving business success.

Testing impact

Although this was an academic project that did not have a test plan to evaluate the design there were many questions that came up during my design process. Here’s how I would answer them for an actual client…