How to Design User Journeys with Octalysis: 4 Phases Every Product Gets Wrong

Most products treat the user experience as one big thing. Sign up, use the features, hopefully stick around.

This is why most products fail.

A first-time visitor and a three-year veteran have completely different psychological needs. What excites a newcomer bores a veteran. What retains a veteran overwhelms a newcomer. If you design one experience for both, you lose both.

The Octalysis Framework solves this by mapping 8 Core Drives across 4 distinct Experience Phases. That creates a 32-component analysis of your user journey, and it changes everything about how you think about engagement.

This article was inspired by Tijs van der Horst, Octalysis Prime member.

⚡ Speed Run Notes

• The big idea: A user journey is not one experience — it is four. Octalysis maps the 8 Core Drives across the 4 Experience Phases (Discovery, Onboarding, Scaffolding, Endgame), creating a 32-component design grid.
• Discovery: Earn the click before signup with Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning) and Core Drive 7 (Unpredictability & Curiosity).
• Onboarding: Make users feel smart fast with Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment) and Core Drive 3 (Empowerment of Creativity).
• Scaffolding: Keep the daily loop alive with Core Drive 4 (Ownership), Core Drive 5 (Social Influence), and Core Drive 6 (Scarcity).
• Endgame: Retain veterans — your best evangelists — with Core Drive 8 (Loss & Avoidance) and player-created content (Core Drive 3).
• Why most products fail: they design only Onboarding and ship. The 32-component grid exposes the blind spot.

About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework

Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.

Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

1. Discovery Phase: Making a Grand Entrance

The Discovery Phase answers one question: why would someone even want to try your product?

Before a user clicks “sign up,” something had to motivate them. Maybe a friend recommended it (Core Drive 5: Social Influence). Maybe the product promised something exclusive they couldn’t get elsewhere (Core Drive 6: Scarcity). Maybe their boss said they had to use it (Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance).

The two most powerful Discovery motivators are:

• Epic Meaning & Calling (CD1): Does your product connect to a larger purpose? Wikipedia attracts millions of volunteer editors because people believe they’re building the world’s knowledge. If your marketing can communicate a mission users want to be part of, you don’t need to convince them to try it.
• Unpredictability & Curiosity (CD7): Create an information gap the user can only close by trying your product. Teasers, mystery mechanics, and intriguing previews all work here. Think of how Wordle spread in 2022: those colored grid screenshots told you something happened, but you couldn’t understand the game without playing it yourself.

Actionable Tip: Audit your marketing and landing pages. Ask: “Which Core Drives are these activating?” If the answer is zero, your Discovery Phase is broken no matter how good your product is.

2. Onboarding Phase: Rolling Out the Welcome Mat

This is where you teach users the rules and tools. And this is where most products make a critical mistake.

They try to build a smart product. But users don’t want to interact with a smart product. They want to feel smart when interacting with your product.

That’s Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment in action. If a user feels confused for more than a few seconds, they leave. Period. Your onboarding needs to give people quick wins that build confidence.

The key drives for Onboarding:

• Development & Accomplishment (CD2): Offer easy wins early. Celebrate small milestones. The user should reach what I call the First Major Win-State, the moment they say “Wow, this is actually useful!” — as fast as possible. Count the minutes to get there, then cut that number in half.
• Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback (CD3): Even early on, give users small choices. Let them customize something. Provide immediate feedback loops so every action produces a visible result. This creates a sense of agency from minute one.

Insight: Think of your onboarding like a game tutorial. The best tutorials feel like play, not instruction. Duolingo doesn’t start with grammar rules. It starts with you successfully translating a sentence. That immediate success is what hooks people.

3. Scaffolding Phase: Guiding and Elevating the Experience

The Scaffolding Phase is the regular activity loop, the thing that brings users back daily or weekly. And it’s where most products lose people.

Once the novelty of Onboarding fades, you need intrinsic motivators to keep users engaged. White Hat motivation (the kind that makes users feel good about themselves) combined with Right Brain drives (the kind that doesn’t require external rewards) is the formula.

• Ownership & Possession (CD4): By Scaffolding, users should feel like they own something in your product. A customized profile, accumulated progress, curated content. The more they invest, the harder it is to walk away. Offer advanced customization and loyalty-based features that reward long-term engagement.
• Social Influence & Relatedness (CD5): This is where community becomes critical. Encourage sharing, collaborating, or competing. Strava’s segment leaderboards, Discord server communities, and Notion’s template marketplace all show how social layers keep Scaffolding users engaged.
• Scarcity & Impatience (CD6): Introduce features or rewards that unlock over time. Genshin Impact’s daily login rewards and weekly boss resets are Scaffolding design at its finest: they give veterans a reason to return on a predictable schedule.

Strategy: Keep the user journey dynamic by alternating between challenges and rewards. If you look at a chain of desired actions in your product and see no emotional reward between them, that’s exactly where users drop out.

4. Endgame Phase: Maintaining Long-Term Engagement

The Endgame is the most neglected phase in product design. Most companies don’t design for it at all, and that’s a massive mistake.

Your veteran users are your best evangelists, your most valuable community moderators, and your primary monetization vehicles. Losing them is expensive.

• Loss & Avoidance (CD8): By the Endgame, users have invested significant time and effort. Remind them of their streaks, achievements, accumulated status, and the community relationships they’d lose by leaving. This isn’t manipulation. It’s making the real value they’ve built visible to them.
• Unpredictability & Curiosity (CD7): Introduce high-level surprises or events to keep veterans intrigued. World of Warcraft has sustained 20+ years of engagement partly through regular expansion packs that keep the Endgame feeling fresh.
• Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback (CD3): This is the Core Drive that matters most in Endgame. When users have mastered your system, they want to create within it. Minecraft doesn’t need new content from the developers because players generate it themselves endlessly. Give veterans the tools to build, teach, and create.

Advice: Regularly refresh Endgame content and take feedback from long-term users seriously. They know your product better than your designers do.

Watch Yu-kai Chou walk through all four Experience Phases of the player journey:

Why Most Products Only Design for One Phase

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most product teams design the Onboarding, ship it, and hope for the best.

They never ask what happens when the tutorial is over. They never ask why a three-year user should stay instead of switching to a competitor. They treat the entire experience as a single monolithic thing.

The Octalysis Framework exposes this blind spot. When you map 8 Core Drives across 4 Phases, you get 32 separate components to design for. In the 5-Step Octalysis Design Process, we generate 3-5 ideas per component. That’s 100 to 200 potential engagement ideas per product.

Most products ship with maybe 5 of those 200 ideas implemented.

That gap between what’s possible and what’s built is where your competitor will eat your lunch.

Design Principles: Synthesizing Insights

• Iterative Feedback: Across all phases, keep channels for feedback open. Listen, adapt, and refine based on real user insights, not assumptions about what users want.

• Motivation Energy: Users arrive with a finite amount of motivation. Every click and every scroll costs motivation energy. If the next step doesn’t replenish motivation through a Core Drive, they leave. Treat motivation as a concrete, measurable resource in your Strategy Dashboard.

• Stay Agile: User preferences evolve. Be ready to pivot or introduce new features. A product that was perfectly designed for 2020 may need significant Scaffolding and Endgame adjustments by 2026.

A Player’s Journey is Never Static

Just as in games, your users’ journey with your design is dynamic.

By combining the Octalysis Core Drives with the 4 Phases of the Player Journey, you can create an experience that users don’t just engage with once but return to again and again.

Design with intent, iterate with feedback, and always keep the user at the heart of your creative process.

An introduction to the OP Member who initiated this blogpost: “My name is Tijs. I love to be inspired. To brainstorm and run through ideas. Including my study ‘industrial design’ I have been increasingly interested in the broad sense of design: its process, concepts and its influence on us as consumers. I’m hoping I can use my experience and knowledge to create designs that are compelling, meaningful and enjoyable, and maybe even in itself inspirable again.”

— Tijs van der Horst

Related Reading

• The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
• Gamification Design: 4 Phases of a Player’s Journey
• The Strategy Dashboard for Gamification Design
• The 5-Step Octalysis Design Process
• White Hat vs Black Hat Gamification
• What is Gamification?
• Books by Yu-kai Chou

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