Designing The Mini App Ecosystem

Mini Apps are lightweight experiences embedded directly inside World App, giving users access to education, rewards, services, and everyday utilities without leaving the ecosystem. As World grew, Mini Apps became an important layer of the product, enabling internal teams and external developers to build new experiences for a global audience of verified humans. With 3.8M daily opens and 6.7M impressions, they created a growing surface for new utility, engagement, and experimentation.

Company: Tools For Humanity
Role: Lead Product Designer
Services: UX/UI, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team: Me, 3 Engineers, 1 PM
Year: 2025

Building Utility Inside World App

World App already gave people a place to prove their humanness and manage digital assets. Mini Apps created an opportunity to go further, giving people more reasons to explore, participate, and return. WLD coin added a powerful growth lever, allowing us to reward participation while introducing more people to the broader World ecosystem. The challenge was making those incentives meaningful. We didn’t want people to open a Mini App just to claim a reward and leave. Each experience needed to provide value on its own and turn incentives into lasting engagement.

My Role

As a Lead Product Designer within the Studios team, I worked across multiple Mini Apps focused on growing engagement and bringing new utility into World App. I shaped experiences from early concepts through launch, working closely with Product and Engineering. Beyond individual apps, I also helped define the shared patterns and guidelines that kept the growing Mini App ecosystem consistent and recognizably part of World App.

Minimum components for maximum results

As Mini Apps grew inside World App, one challenge became clear: how do we scale an ecosystem without losing consistency? Different teams, and external developers were building experiences inside the same product. Without a shared approach, Mini Apps risked becoming fragmented, harder to trust, and more difficult to use. To support this growth, I helped define a dedicated UI kit and design guidelines for Mini Apps. The goal wasn’t just consistency, but creating reusable patterns that could scale across different use cases while still feeling native to World App. It transformed a growing collection of features into a cohesive ecosystem.

Miniapp guidelines

Learn — Turning Learning
Into Participation

Learn was designed to make complex topics around World, digital identity, and crypto easier to understand through short, reward-based lessons. Users could learn at their own pace, test their knowledge, and earn WLD as they progressed. The challenge was turning that initial incentive into continued learning. We kept lessons lightweight and progression clear, giving users a reason to move from one lesson to the next. Overall impact 12+ months

Lesson opens: 0.0M+
Users completed a lesson: 0K+
Users completed a course: 0K+

Beyond initial participation, the follow-up rate grew from roughly 40% to around 60%, suggesting that users weren’t only completing individual lessons but many continued learning over time.

Learn lesson completed screen with a reward to claim

The Intro to World course in Learn, shown on a phone held in hand

Article 1/3

Your verified World ID

The latest tab in World App, shows your World ID. If verified, you’ll see a unique gemstone, checkmark and your username

Quiz 1/3

How can you tell your World ID is verified?

World ID Rewards — Making verifications valuable

Being verified as human is powerful, but its value becomes much easier to understand when it unlocks something tangible. World ID Rewards introduced a different way to reward participation in World. Instead of making the reward a transferable token, newly Orb-verified users received points that could be redeemed for services they already use from streaming and mobility to productivity. The idea was to make World ID more tangible: verify once, discover benefits, choose what matters, and redeem it. Additional points were made available over the following months, giving users a reason to return beyond their initial verification. The shift was less about replacing one reward with another, and more about changing what the reward meant: from a financial incentive to a tangible benefit people could immediately understand and use. Early impact in the first 3 months

Users claimed at least one reward: 0K+
Claimed within 7 days of verification: 0%
rewards claimed by users verified during the period.: 0K+

The early signals were encouraging: more than half of users claimed within their first week, with a median time-to-value of just seven hours. Across the initial cohort, 35K+ users went on to claim 125K+ rewards showing that the value of verification was understood and acted on quickly.

World ID Rewards gift card for one month of Netflix Premium

Redeeming a Netflix Premium reward in World App, shown on a phone held in hand

Love Or Bots — Making Proof Of Human Playful

Love or Bot started as a Valentine’s Day experiment: could we make the growing tension between humans and AI something people could experience rather than explain?

The idea was simple. Swipe through profiles, decide whether you’re looking at a human or a bot, and compete with other verified humans. Behind the game was a much bigger message: as AI becomes harder to distinguish online, knowing there’s a real person on the other side starts to matter.

From Idea to Launch in 72 Hours

What made this project different was the pace. We went from idea to a working Mini App in just two days, designing and building across Europe and San Francisco time zones in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.

The constraint forced us to focus on the core interaction and move quickly between design and engineering. There was no room for unnecessary complexity, the experience had to be understood immediately, feel fun, and still communicate why proof of human matters.

What started as a small Valentine’s experiment quickly became part of a broader World campaign. Love or Bot moved beyond World App and into physical spaces, with the concept and its message appearing on interactive displays across World flagship locations.

The experience gave the campaign a simple way to communicate a much larger idea: in a world increasingly populated by AI, being able to prove you’re human has real value.

When it comes to love, there is no algorithm. World’s human-only survey on AI and online love.

Love or Bot leaderboard and prizes for verified humans.

Love or Bot prize details on a phone held in hand.

Dating is hard. Proving you’re human shouldn’t be. World.

Summary

The Studios team gave us room to move fast, experiment, and find new reasons for people to engage with World App.

Not every idea had the same goal or needed the same approach. The challenge was knowing when to go deep, when to keep things simple, and how to ship quickly without losing the consistency of the broader product.

For me, the biggest takeaway was that growth isn’t just about getting people in. It’s about creating enough value to make them want to come back.

Designing The Mini App Ecosystem

Building Utility Inside World App

My Role

Minimum components for maximum results

Learn — Turning Learning
Into Participation

Your verified World ID

Adding credentials

World ID ecosystem

It’s time to test
your knowledge

How can you tell your World ID is verified?

World ID Rewards — Making verifications valuable

Love Or Bots — Making Proof Of Human Playful

From Idea to Launch in 72 Hours

Summary

Hey there, I’m Federico

Your verified World ID

How can you tell your World ID is verified?