- Platform
- Mobile App
- Duration
- 16 weeks
- Industry
- Engagement and Communication
- Read time
- 5 min read
Company knowledge, product information, and culture content reaches most employees through emails they skim, intranets they rarely visit, and annual training modules they complete and forget. The content exists. The engagement does not.
GE needed a different delivery mechanism. We built a native iOS and Android trivia platform where company knowledge becomes daily competitive quizzes. Employees answer questions about product lines, company history, and values to climb a leaderboard and earn badges. Content managers configure 200+ modules across multiple question formats. 5,000 employees use it daily. 85% complete each quiz they start.
All of the sprints were completed on schedule and on budget. We highly recommend RaftLabs.
before & after
What changed
- Company knowledge and product training was distributed across emails, intranets, and static documents that most employees opened once and ignored
- Training participation was passive: employees completed required modules because they had to, not because the format held their attention
- High-performing employees had no recognition mechanism tied to knowledge; there was no visibility into who understood the product and culture best
- Content managers could see module completion rates but had no data on where employees abandoned content or which question formats produced the most retention
- A dispersed workforce across multiple locations had no shared experience or competitive context that reinforced company culture
- Employees engage with company knowledge through a daily trivia habit instead of a mandatory training module; the format drives return visits on its own
- Leaderboards and badges give high-performing employees visible recognition tied to knowledge, creating a new status signal alongside traditional performance metrics
- Personalized quiz difficulty adjusts to each employee's knowledge level so the content stays challenging without becoming inaccessible to newer hires
- Content managers track module completion rates, question-level drop-off data, and daily active user trends from an analytics dashboard
- 200+ content modules covering product knowledge, company history, values, and role-specific information run across multiple question formats in a single platform
What we had to solve
- 01
Building gamification mechanics that a corporate workforce would return to voluntarily, not just early adopters who like games
Leaderboards and badges work when the competition feels meaningful. In a large workforce, a single global leaderboard punishes newer employees and rewards whoever had the most time, which is the opposite of what the program was trying to reinforce. The design challenge was segmenting competition by role, tenure, or team so every employee had a leaderboard they could realistically compete in, while keeping the overall structure simple enough for content managers to configure and employees to understand in under a minute.
- 02
Keeping leaderboard updates real-time for 5,000 concurrent users without adding noticeable latency
A leaderboard that updates in the background every few minutes is a report, not a competition. The engagement value depends on employees seeing their position change immediately after answering. Delivering real-time scoring and rank updates to thousands of concurrent users required a backend architecture that processed quiz submissions, recalculated rankings, and pushed updates to individual devices within seconds, while the quiz interface itself stayed responsive throughout.
outcomes
What we achieved
Company knowledge was spread across emails, intranets, and annual training modules that most employees completed passively and did not retain.
Training participation was mandatory and passive. Employees completed modules because the system required it, not because the format was worth returning to.
Without gamification, personalized difficulty, or competitive mechanics, most employees abandoned training content before finishing it.
What clients say
Most clients stay.
Some say so on camera.
Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.
USAAll of the sprints were completed on schedule and on budget. We highly recommend RaftLabs.
Your employee training is completed on schedule but not retained or returned to?
the build
What we built
The platform is built around one principle: the format has to make employees want to come back tomorrow, not just satisfy a training requirement today.
Daily experience varies — the format stops feeling predictable
200+ content modules cover product lines, company history, values, and role-specific knowledge. Questions use multiple formats (multiple choice, image-based, video-anchored, and open-ended) so the daily experience varies rather than becoming predictable. Content managers add and update modules from the admin panel without developer support.
Questions stay relevant as employees improve — it doesn't get too easy after a few weeks
Quiz difficulty adjusts based on each employee's performance history. A new hire and a ten-year veteran answering the same product knowledge category receive questions calibrated to their level. The effect is that the platform stays relevant as employees improve, rather than becoming too easy once they have spent a few weeks on it.
Consistent performers get visible recognition alongside standard performance processes
Employees compete within segmented leaderboards (by team, role, or tenure) so the competition is meaningful rather than dominated by whoever has the most available time. Badges mark achievement milestones and surface in employee profiles. Both mechanics give consistent performers a visible recognition layer that operates alongside standard performance processes.
Content managers see where employees abandon content — future investment targets what holds attention
Content managers see daily active users, module completion rates, question-level drop-off points, and engagement trends over time. The data shows which modules drive return visits and where employees abandon content, so future module investment targets the formats and topics that actually hold attention.
Engagement
How we worked together
- 01Weeks 1–2
Discovery and scoping
We map the problem before writing code. Two weeks of technical audit, stakeholder interviews, and prototype — so both teams align on scope and risk before sprint one.
- 02Ongoing
Two-week Agile sprints
Each sprint ends with working software, not a status update. You review a real build, request changes, and approve before we move forward. No surprises at handover.
- 03Ongoing
Daily async updates
Slack for daily progress, Asana for task visibility, weekly video calls for decisions. You have full visibility without needing to attend every meeting.
- 04Final
Handover and warranty
Full code handover with deployment runbooks and documentation. Thirty-day warranty period for production issues at no extra cost.
stack
Why we chose this stack
- 01Native Kotlin gave us the performance for real-time quiz rendering, push notifications, and leaderboard updates at 5,000+ concurrent users. Cross-platform frameworks introduce latency on the range of enterprise Android devices a large workforce uses; native eliminated that variable.Kotlin
- 02The same performance requirement applied on iOS. Direct access to Apple's notification and hardware APIs meant quiz transitions and real-time leaderboard pushes fired consistently across every device in GE's iOS device pool.Swift
- 03Delivering 200+ content modules including video-based questions to thousands of simultaneous users required a CDN and auto-scaling compute. Lambda handled quiz submission scoring and leaderboard recalculation without dedicated server infrastructure to maintain.AWS
- 04Quiz content models vary by question type: multiple choice, image-based, video, open-ended, role-specific. A document model let content managers add new question formats without schema migrations or developer involvement.MongoDB
Common questions about employee gamification apps
Standard e-learning modules get completed because the system requires it. Gamification platforms get opened voluntarily because the competitive mechanics and visible progress make return visits feel worthwhile. For GE, the shift from mandatory modules to daily trivia produced an 85% quiz completion rate, not because completion was required, but because the format was worth engaging with. The business case for gamification is not that it makes training more fun; it is that it produces higher retention without enforcement.
The platform tracks each employee's answer history per content category. Employees who consistently answer product knowledge questions correctly receive harder variants; employees who struggle in a category receive questions pitched at their current level. The adjustment is automatic and continuous: it does not require employees to self-select a difficulty setting, which most people either avoid or pick incorrectly. The practical outcome is that the platform remains challenging enough to be worth competing in even for employees who have used it for months.
Content managers access a web admin panel to create and publish modules, configure leaderboard segments, view analytics, and manage the question library. New question formats are added via the module builder without code changes. Analytics show daily active users, completion rates per module, and question-level drop-off so content managers can see which formats produce the most engagement and invest future content effort accordingly.
Yes. The module structure is content-agnostic: the same quiz mechanics apply whether the content covers company history, product specifications, compliance requirements, or regulatory procedures. For compliance use cases, completion tracking and audit-ready reporting can be added so HR or legal teams have a record that each employee completed specific modules. The content itself is managed by the customer's internal team, so compliance modules can be updated as regulations change without involving development.
We delivered the native Android and iOS apps, content library, personalized difficulty engine, leaderboards, badges, push notifications, and analytics dashboard in 16 weeks. The native-first decision extended the timeline compared to a cross-platform build but was the right choice for the performance and notification reliability GE's workforce size required. For smaller workforces where cross-platform performance is acceptable, a React Native or Flutter build would be faster. Contact us to estimate based on your workforce size, content requirements, and device mix.