It's time for the third entry of Journaly TLDR; Weekly and this one is really, really exciting – I'm excited to announce a huge feature update that I've been thinking about for about 2.5 years and actively started working on back in November, 2021. I even spent months taking online courses to learn digital illustration in order to finally turn this one into a reality, and it's finally done!
A Complete Re-Design & Expansion of the Journaly Badge System
Yes – finally! I know that so many of you have wished and been waiting for a better and more robust experience around badges and achievements on this platform. We had badges all the way back in the Alpha testing phase before launching Journaly Beta on December 31st, 2020, but these were the early, early days of Journaly and back then, the badge system was more of a proof of concept. We only had 7 badges in total and they hadn't been fully designed yet, unlike everything else in the app. We found that users actually loved them and ever since then I've been dying to add tons of new badges with beautiful, custom designs that you would be excited to earn and have displayed on your profile.
That's why I'm so excited to share that today, Journaly has gone from having just 7 badges to 62! Not only that, I've created a Journaly Badge Design System that contains a selection of custom designs along with a color palette that encodes 3 "levels" – where more gold is introduced into the badge design as you advance to higher tiers for badges that include numbers. I had such a wonderful time finally diving into digital illustration and, although I know they could be greatly improved, I feel really happy with how they turned out and can't wait to continue working on custom illustrations for Journaly design assets!
NOTE: Many of you will have already earned some or even lots of these new badges. All you need to do is perform any of the actions found below and our system will see any related badges you have earned and award them to you. For example, if you have already written 52 posts, right now your profile will only show the "10 Posts" badge, but the next time you publish a post our system will automatically award you the "20 Posts" and "50 Posts" badges :)
Introducing Your New Badges
First, let's take a quick tour of the new badge designs! I loved the design concept of making them feel like the kind of physical badges you would sew onto a sweater, uniform, or backpack – so that was part of the inspiration here. This image showcases each unique design at the middle color-tier with a gold icon:
Next, here are all the badges available today:
Achievements | Special badges for specific achievements on the platform. |
Alpha User | Participated in the Journaly Alpha testing. |
Beta User | Participated in the initial phase of Beta testing. |
Bug Hunter | Has helped us make Journaly a better place for everyone by reporting one or more bugs. |
Code Contributor | Has contributed code to the Journaly codebase. |
Spam Reporter | Has helped us maintain our wonderful community and culture of meaningful content by reporting one or more spam posts. |
Necromancer | Gave new feedback on a post that's over a week old – use our "Needs Feedback" filter on the My Feed page to find old posts that still need feedback! |
Odradek | A mystery badge... |
"Count" Badges | Badges to celebrate you achieving a certain number (X) of actions. |
Wrote X Posts | 10, 20, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 250, 350, 500 |
Corrected X Posts | 10, 25, 50, 100, 150, 250, 500, 1000 |
Left X Inline Feedback Comments | 10, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 5000 |
Left X Post Comments | 10, 50, 100, 250, 300 |
Received X Thanks | 10, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 1250, 1500, 2250, 2500, 5000, 10000 |
Gave X Thanks | 10, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2250, 2500, 5000, 10000 |
I also created a master sheet of all the badges which you can find here :)
What's Next?
I'm also very happy to share that more wonderful updates are coming! As of now, you'll just receive an email notification when you achieve a new badge, but very soon we'll be creating a nice in-app notification for a much smoother experience.
Furthermore, I have lots of ideas for many more, really fun badges, here are just a few of them:
- Novelist: Write a post over 1,000 words long
- Multilingual: Write posts in 2 languages
- Polyglot: Write posts in 4 or more languages
- Content Creator: Write a post in your native language to provide learners with authentic reading content
We'd Love To Hear From You!
What do you think of these new badges!? Do you have a favorite one? Do you have any cool new badge ideas you'd like us to consider? I'd love to read your feedback and thoughts in the comments below!
As always, thank you all for being here and making Journaly such a special place and such a warm community. I wish I could show you the app that Journaly is going to be one day... You all will always be the special users who were here for these moments, watching Journaly grow up, one feature at a time.
Happy journaling,
Robin
I like design! Thank you, Robin :)
ohhh i'm dying to know what the odradek one is for 😭
Ooh I love this! This is great motivation for using the site more too. I love the idea, and the "novelist" and "multilingual" badges sound exciting! Thanks for all your hard work!
This is very exciting, and I agree that the badges will add motivation for me and other users to use the site more often. I see that I'm a necromancer, how cool!
Thank you! I have got a bunch of badges🎉I thought that everyone except me knows who odradek is..
This is incredible!
@juliana and @Dora_Serge - @LindasLinguas wrote a great post about Odradek that you might enjoy! 😆😄 https://journaly.com/post/14731
Adoro! (But yes, I still would like to find out what the Odradek is...I have no idea what I did...it kills me)
Thanks so much for the wonderful initial feedback everyone! I'm so so happy that you all like the badges and it's really exciting to read that some of you are already finding the new badges motivating to use Journaly more 🥳
Odradek... a mistery indeed. I still wonder what that word even mean
@all: The post Robin has linked above is in German, so I suppose not everyone is able to read it. In general, I recommend you use DeepL.com to translate posts you're interested in into a language you speak 😊
Here's a super short version of my post: You receive the badge Odradek for editing a post of yours and clicking on save without actually having made a change.
@LindasLinguas Thank you for explaining 😁😁
I'm really curious about the odradek one ;))
@Linda Oh, thanks Linda! I would've never figured it out ahah
Great to finally see the badges in the user profile page! They look nifty 🔥.
A more technical note: The order of the badges seem weird to me, so I looked at the code and saw that it's in the order of their creation. I guess this chronological ordering is fine for newly earned badges, corresponding to their natural order.
I'm guessing that the thing that assigns the already earned badges (migration + mail) didn't have the right ordering, because looking at several user profiles I see the same sort of thing: The 1000 thanks appear first and the 500 thanks last (on top), for example. Is there any way to fix that?
I love the badges, thank you :)
And I just noticed that you made Journaly an open source projects. Much love for that <3 And I would be proud to become a contributor myself one day.
@LindasLinguas How did you find out? I tried and it worked ;D
@Lokus: As I stated in my post about Odradek (https://journaly.com/post/14731), it was @edufuga who looked into the code to find it out. You can find all his findings here: https://journaly.com/post/5701
@edufuga Thanks for the feedback, I'm happy that you like them! 🔥
Yeah, as you noted, under normal circumstances the chronological ordering works much better because the natural order people typically earn badges in means that the higher numbers would always be at the top, and most likely there would be some mixing assuming a user is doing a variety of actions (writing posts, leaving comments, giving & receiving thanks, etc.).
@LindasLinguas has also suggested "stacking" badges of the same type with the highest number at the top which I think is also potentially a good idea, but we will need some time to make these updates because we have a three BIG feature updates that are going to take an enormous amount of work but will have a huge impact on the whole Journaly User Experience (in particular as a community) so I've gotten started on those now to hopefully make sure we get them all done this year.
@flauschtrud thanks so much for the love and support! We'll be happy to have your help anytime :)
Yeah, I thought about the stacking/grouping into categories myself as well. An alternative to that could be to just show one badge for the currently higher amount of comments a certain user has achieved, etc. So, instead of having N entries per category, you could decide to show only the highest achievement of it. In the end, it's obvious that if you have a badge of 500 comments, you earned all the previous ones as well. I also think that would make the UI less packed with badges, which may be a bit overwhelming as the number of achievements grows. That also gives a more dynamic feel to it (i.e. you see how your "badge of comments" grows by having a higher number and stronger colors, etc.). But again, this is just a possible idea, which I'm sure you considered already. Just my two cents.
@edufuga Yeah I think that's also a good idea and would be quite simple to implement. I'll add that to our Badge Followups ticket and see if I can squeeze in some time for it very soon :)
@robin Will it be possible to like general comments?