Not so fun? the challenges of applying gamification to smartphone measurement

Abstract

Gamification and engagement techniques (points, status, virtual badges, and social-sharing) are applied to a mobile and on-line data collection tool to determine if these approaches can improve respondent compliance with a requested task: recording their television viewing over the course of several weeks by increasing their engagement with the app. In a series of tests, we demonstrate that virtual badges appear to be a salient and positively viewed technique for app engagement among teens and younger adults. However, not all of these approaches have positive impact especially with older adults and, in the end, do not improve compliance with the primary task. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.