Dependent Badges
With badges, goals that seem distant tend not to be as immediately motivating as goals that are perceived as reachable in the near term. Setting up some badges as quick wins creates positive reinforcement early, which is encouraging.
However, motivation for a particular behavior may wane once the quick-win badge is earned. Setting a new, higher goal for the same behavior that earned the quick-win badge can keep motivation high.
Dependent badges is a new Spotlight feature designed to enable setting of progressively higher targets for users to strive for. A set of related badges can be chained together in a sequence.
Upon activation of the chain of badges, only the first badge in the sequence appears as earnable; the other badges in the chain are hidden. When a person earns the first badge in the chain, the next badge appears to the user in their list of earnable badges.
Progressive chain of badges
The above picture demonstrates an examble of this.
Suppose you want to encourage users to create more original microblog posts. You can set up a progressive chain of badges that are awarded for microblogging, the first of which is awarded after the user posts 25 microblogs.
At the start, users only see the badge for reaching 25 microblogs in the Available Badges web part. When a user earns this badge, it disappears as usual from the Available Badges web part (moving into her display of earned badges), and a new badge, awarded for posting 50 total microblogs, takes its place.
Upon earning that one, the badge for posting 100 microblogs now appears as available, but the one for posting 200 microblogs remains hidden.
Finally when the 100-microblog badge is earned, the 200-microblog badge is revealed as available.
At this stage, all prior badges earned in the chain show among the user's earned badges. Badges are not hidden as their successors are earned.
A badge's immediate predecessor in such a chain is called its prerequisite badge, while the badge that comes immediately after it is called its successor badge.
In this example, the 25 microblog badge is the prerequisite of the 50 microblog badge, and the 100 microblog badge is the successor of the 50 microblog badge.
These chains of badges can be branched, as in the picture below. This can become difficult to manage, especially if part of the tree is deactivated. It can be hard in this case to track whether you’ve “orphaned” a successor badge by deactivating one of its prerequisites. The recommended practice for dependent badges is a chain of badges with no branches.
Branched chain of badges