Game Theory – Turning online surveys into games

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Game Theory
Turning online surveys into
games
Jon Puleston

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Background
• GMI interactive team specialise in the design &
development of interactive surveys
• Also conducted extensive research into how to
stimulate respondents to give more effective
feedback by making surveys more engaging
» 3 papers available on this topic

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What our research has show us?
• Making questions more game like can improves
responses levels & the quality of data
• In fact integrating any level of fun or playfulness
into a survey can help encourage more active
participation

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Some Examples...

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Impact of switching to more game like question styles....

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Played around with a lot of different approaches...

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Results...
• Less straight-lining: up to 80% lower levels in some
experiments
• Lower neutral scoring: average 25% lower
• Higher enjoyment: rating scores could be increase from 3 out
of 10 to 8 out of 10
• Lower dropout (if questions are designed ergonomically):
able to reduce from 5% to 1% in test experiments.
• Achieved good cross compatibility: Found we could achieve
the same balance of data*
* With the exception of slider & tick select based question

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Respondents invested 25% more time on task & enjoy it
a lot more – survey satisfaction ratings improved by 30%
Simple techniques like changes to button styles and how
they function can have a real impact...

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20% more clicks – 90% enjoyment - left with a feeling that that survey
was fun and so helping to build a relationship with respondents
The value of rewording questions to make them more
fun to answer...

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3 times as many actionable strap lines
Particularly valuable technique for more creative tasks….

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Found that making things competitive can have
a real impact…
3 times as many ads!
In the next 2 minutes we challenge you
to name as many ads as you can that
you recall advertising on TV recently

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Using games at the start of surveys to get
people in the right frame of mind
Opens up people imaginations – encourages
them to be more creative

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Helps to encourage respondent to take part in
future studies...
85% cross participation in 4 surveys

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We have experimented with more gamy
approaches to whole surveys...
More time spent on task and richer incite - up to 70%
more feedback!

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Conclusion
• Gamification is clearly a good way to improve feedback from
surveys
• Really the issue is finding practical ways to apply this thinking to real
surveys - Thinking needs to move upstream in our minds
• There are technical hurdle you needs to be cross too to deliver
these solutions that we are focusing on
• Currently exploring an range of game based question mechanics
and developing them into question components in our system...

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Opinion snowboarding...

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Opinion showers...

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Word cloud building....

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Guessing game mechanics....

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Scoring mechanics...

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Undertaking some research currently
to look at...
• How respondents react to answering questions in this
different ways
• The impact it has on the data
• How these techniques can be integrated adapted into
more general surveys

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Set ourselves a challenge to see how we
can improve the feedback to a really
boring bank tracking survey
“If you had to go on a date with one of these banks which would you choose?”

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Where it can go wrong?
• Piecemeal application of this type of thinking to one or two question
in a survey can be dangerous
• Gaming technique can manipulate how people answer questions so
benchmarking is important
• Potential to foster a carefree attitudes amongst respondents?
» Yes a consideration but in most of the experiments we have conducted so far
found it to be quite the opposite

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Q & A?
Thank you for your time!
Jon Puleston