PointClub brand development
PointClub was the rare treat every designer hopes for. It was a completely blank page. No legacy logo to protect, no old rules to inherit, just the freedom to decide who this brand got to be.
I filled sheets with sketches chasing a mark that felt friendly and a little bit fun, something that could wink at you from a survey invite or the corner of the webpage. The concept was a simple stand-in for what a survey really is: a target, measuring how close each question can land to the truth.
That both the P and C fit in there was a bonus.
Meet Captain PC
Every good narrative universe needs a hero, so I gave PointClub one. Captain PC started life as a mascot on a few stickers and promptly took over the whole operation, becoming the friendly face who talked directly to members and asked them how their day was.
I drew him, built his world, and handed him a mission: prove that taking a survey could genuinely matter. It was all tongue-in-cheek, borrowing straight from the Marvel playbook, where one charming character can carry an entire universe on his shoulders.
Over time, the cast and the story grew together. Panelists got written onto the team, taking surveys to push back the confusion building up in the world. Eventually a member could even become a superhero in training, earning a name and power
Branding Impact
The friendly approach didn't just feel better, it tested better. In an eight-week A/B test against a control group of 1,000 panelists, engagement climbed 80% once Captain PC was the one delivering the system and announcement popups.
The sentiment scores moved just as sharply. Over the same two months, NPS leapt from 33 to 87, and the CSAT score on how engaging members found the site more than doubled, from 23% to 68%. And when I tested the flip side and pulled the smiling superhero out, retention and satisfaction both dropped. Running the numbers across the full dataset, I found a statistically significant correlation between Captain PC's presence and member satisfaction: the more he showed up, the happier people were.
As it turns out, a brand with a heartbeat is one people actually want to stick around for.
Every hero needs a villain
A hero is only as good as what he's up against, so Captain PC got a rogues' gallery. I designed a cast of villains, each one the face of a specific habit that quietly wrecks survey data: speeding, straight-lining, and bots. Putting a name and a face on those behaviors did what a policy page never could. It turned an invisible data-quality problem into a story members could see, root against, and help beat.
I then turned training the panel into a game. Each month put one villain was thrust into the spotlight, and the community earned its way to rewards by cutting down the behavior that villain stood for. Bad habits became something the panel community beat together, not just a rule handed down from the site admins.
That was the community-facing side of a serious, three-month quality initiative aimed at solving some of the common problems inherent in online panel site. The payoff was real: across the effort, user quality rose 57%.
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