Team Event Engagement Tool

What is Covet Fashion?

Covet Fashion is a mobile fashion game where players style looks with real brands. The core loop is simple and social:

What is Runway Rally?

Layered on top of that loop, Runway Rally is a highly competitive, community-driven team event — and one of Covet Fashion's largest revenue drivers. Players compete as Fashion Houses, which makes the event only as strong as the communities running it.

The importance of Fashion House leaders

• Leaders are the drivers of participation, not just participants.
• They manage coordination, motivation, and accountability.
• When leaders churn, entire groups lose engagement.

Reduce churn among Fashion House leaders

One sentence framed the whole project: reduce churn among Fashion House leaders — the power users of this social system. Every design decision was measured against whether it lightened their load.

Leading a Rally happened outside the game

Our UX research showed leaders doing much of their Rally work outside the game entirely — a fragile, manual workflow stitched across two products.

Three pain points fell straight out of this — leaders had limited visibility into participation, no reliable way to act on it, and no in-game channel to nudge their members.

Designing with leaders, not just for them

I partnered with UX Research to define the testing methodology and content, then studied the people who feel Rally's pain most acutely.

Their stories ranged widely — from a leader who transformed a struggling Fashion House into a high-performing community, to a player using Covet as a social outlet and community space after personal loss, to a recently-promoted officer deep in day-to-day team management. The design had to lift all of them.

Two design directions, tested

Research compared two approaches — and pointed decisively at the more ambitious one:

Key findings on Approach 2: it saved 27 minutes–8 hours of manual management time, and increased leaders' willingness to actively manage participation. One leader's verdict —

From passive reporting to real-time management

Each pain point got a direct design response, built to simulate what leaders were already doing outside the game — but in-game, in real time.

Make participation visible, on the main feed

The participation tool lives right on the main feed — easy to access — and orders members from “action needed” most to least. A fold function keeps it from overwhelming the feed, giving it an extendable structure with minimal impact on everything else.

Replace the Facebook workaround

Instead of matching IDs and messaging on Facebook, leaders can now notify active and inactive members to participate directly inside Covet — addressing the external tracking and ID-matching steps at once. A post-Rally report and management tool then gives leaders a holistic view to plan the next event, including the ability to toggle off inactive members' participation.

Design trade-offs & decisions

The interesting decisions were in the details of the nudge interaction — balancing social tone, spam prevention, and differing goals for leaders vs. members.

Leaders stayed — and so did their houses

The feature landed where it mattered most: the health of the communities that drive Rally.

Closing the loop on adoption

Shipping wasn't the finish line. To drive discovery of the new nudge action, I ran a post-launch optimization: a targeted in-game message — “Let leaders know: Nudge is here!” — with instructive visuals showing leaders and officers exactly how to find and use it.

What I'd carry forward