The gamification module for Medicover benefit platform

According to the “Benefits in the eyes of the employees 2021” report, 75% of the surveyed declared that employee benefits are available in their workplaces. Furthermore, as many as 89% of the group said “yes” to the question: “Do you use the benefits?” It shows that a well-adjusted motivation system constitutes an essential element of the labor market.

Medicover Benefits is a platform on which employees may choose benefits offered by their employer. It is a convenient method for individual and personalized appreciation of an employee by enabling them to select the benefits depending on their preferences, passion, or life situation. Many companies use the platform, among others Nielsen, ING, Aviva, or AXA.

3e has been maintaining and supporting the development of Medicover Benefits platform for many years. In December 2020, we were asked to add a gamification element to the platform - quiz games, surveys, text questions, and other interactive events connected with rankings.

The new module, thanks to gamification, involves employees, who may exchange points earned in quiz games into bonuses available on the platform, e.g., vouchers or tickets to the cinema.
The functionality created by our company enables the employers to prepare, e.g., questions to a film (and to control whether the film was played), true-or-false questions, or multiple-choice questions. Thanks to this solution, the performance of tasks perceived as less interesting, e.g., occupational health and safety training, becomes more attractive, and additional reward motivates employees to concentrate more on the answers.
Depending on the chosen task, the system grants various numbers of points. Points are added up into rankings, for which virtual cups, medals, or badges are granted. These, in turn, can be exchanged into awards provided by the employer.

The creation of the solution was complicated, as it required the optimal use of the algorithm of the longest path in the graph with counting points during the mission. The path passed by the user is not linear; it may branch at every step of the user. This is why it had to be counted from the current place, where the user was. Every possible branch used a general recursive function, which checked the length of the way and the sum of awards to the next branch on the path. Then the fragments of ways passed between the branches were combined, the longest way and the maximum number of gained awards were calculated. To cope with that, our specialists used discrete mathematics and recursive algorithms.

The gamification module was written in PHP 7.2., which was merged with the front-end also performed by our team based on models provided by Medicover. During our work on the project, it was an additional challenge to fit two teams of programmers together. Parallel programming by two independent groups is not a novelty for 3e; however, the pandemic caused the communication to be reduced to home-office work. However, despite it, the project was conducted with no complications.

Thanks to efficient management, the working mechanism was implemented only after half a year of intensive work. Since the implementation, we have developed the module and implemented its new versions. Currently, we are working on efficiency tests so that the web page is as comfortable as possible for its users, irrespective of the number of users logged in simultaneously. The efficiency tests are an answer to the increase in popularity of the solution. Our objective is to make sure that the application works efficiently even if 1500 users log in simultaneously.