Gamification or gameful design attempts to raise participation through the application of game design patterns and principles in non-game environments. It has successfully been applied but in many cases gamification fails due to different kind of design phase pitfalls. Several game and gamification design taxonomies and guides exists. But it is hard to select the right one for a specific application of gamification. One of the causes is probably the fact that engineers try to implement what experienced game designer should do. % Außerdem ist nicht klar ob man einfach alle Erfahrungen und Erkenntnisse aus der Game Design welt übertragen kann. We propose to apply data mining on user interaction data of gamified applications to extract insights to support and adapt the application of gamification. Therefore we started the Infoboard experiment -- a two phase gamification study of a cutting-edge enterprise information sharing system.

1. Learning Gamification Design –
An Usability First Approach for the
Enterprise Infoboard Experiment
Michael Meder, Till Plumbaum and Sahin Albayrak

2. Current State of Enterprise Gamification

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► Farzan et al. (2008, 2009): points and status levels motivates more activity by IBM
employees within their SNS Beehive (But only for some users and for a short
period of time)
► Thom et al. (2012): significant decline of user activities after removing gamification
features
► Hamari (2013): users who actively inspect their own badges become more active
► Stanculescu et al. (2016): combination of leaderboard and badges will result in an
even greater effect than using only one of the two game design elements
Current State of Enterprise Gamification

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► We could not find statements about the usability or user experience of the
gamified systems before or without the application of gamification
► No dataset is publicly available
► We aim:
 to examine pure effect of gamification by minimizing disruptive factors such as
bad usability of the system itself
 to provide a gamification dataset of user interaction data
 to apply machine learning to get insights on how to apply gamification
Current State of Enterprise Gamification

5. Gamification Design

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► Player Types
 Users are all individuals driven by different input factors like age, gender, education, social skills
and cross-cultural influences
 Several player typologies: evolution seems went from Bartles 4 and later 8 player types to Yee's
3 motivation components or 10 motivation subcomponents
► Game Design Elements
 Ping Zhang (2008): Motivational affordances: interface design patterns with a stimuli to action
 Deterding et al. (2011): five levels of game design elements: game interface design patterns,
game design patterns and mechanics, game design principles and heuristics, game models and
game design methods
 Robinson et al. (2013): taxonomy built on levels of expected engagement and the required
commitment of the user.
Gamification Design
It is hard to map player typologies to game design elements
It is hard to assign a specific user to a player type

7. The Gamification Design Problem: We consider the gamification design problem
as the problem of assigning each user (at least) one game design element that
maximizes their expected contribution to achieve some goal.

8. Infoboard Experiment

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► The Infoboard displays and arranges information from different data sources:
 News: irml.dailab.de, blog.kaggle.com, blog.echen.me, techcrunch.com,
fastml.com, searchengineland.com, research.microsoft.com, www.scs.cmu.edu,
www.eecs.mit.edu, technologyreview.com, theverge.com,
forbes.com/technology, forbes.com/most-popular, plumbaum.wordpress.com,
gawker.com/lifehacker/full, www.berlin.de, www.parlament-berlin.de
 Research Activites: WikiCFP, Förderportal Bund, CORDIS, GEPRIS
 Paper: DBLP
 Intranet: DAIKnow (Bookmarking), File Server, Wiki
► This is facilitated by several IRML services (by CC-IRML). IRML services analyze
different types of data sources and make them searchable in consideration of
access rights (if necessary).
Infoboard Application
Information sharing and discovery at work

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Infoboard Application

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Infoboard Application - Reader

12. “During the experiment, a few users in the control group asked us
why they couldn't see their points and submitted bugs [...]“
Farzan, R., DiMicco, J., & Millen, D. (2008). Results from deploying a participation incentive mechanism within the enterprise.
In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 563–572).

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Infoboard Application – Two Phase Experiment
► Phase I: Warmup
 functionality is usable, understandable and
free from major bugs
 announcement email to all 120 employees
and coffee kitchen release party with donuts
 started: May 11, 2016
 45 different users (at least one log in)
► Phase II: Gamification enabled
 has not yet been started

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Infoboard Application – Phase I: Warmup – FAQ

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Infoboard Application – Phase I: Warmup – FAQ

16. The Infoboard achieved a System Usability Scale (SUS) of 62.96 (N=16)
which is rather lower marginal usability.
Unfortunately, this confirms our presumption, that the usability of the
application needs to be improved.

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Infoboard Application – Phase I: Web Analytics
Domstream Tracking:
• mouse movements
• scrolling
• key-presses

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Selected Game Design Elements:
► Achievement: points; badges;
leaderboard; progress bar; levels
► Social: feedback messages; user
activities stream; group
achievements (total points)
► Immersion: customization (color
themes); redeemable points to buy a
booster (a points multiplier, positive
feedback loop)
Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Game Design Elements
Yee's Model of player motivation (2007): Yee, N. (2007). Motivations for play in online
games. Journal of CyberPsychology and Behavior, 9, 772–775.
 "empirical grounding and refinement of Bartle's four player types"
 3 main components and 10 subcomponents
Phase II has not yet been started

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Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Messages

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Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Statistics

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Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Points and Levels

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Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Badges

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Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Feedback Loop

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Infoboard Application – Phase II: Gamification Enabled – Customization

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► Research on enterprise gamification is still in the early stages.
► No gamification dataset is available
 We aim to create a user interaction dataset on game design elements for further research
► We think that machine learning approaches would be helpful to determine the best game design
elements for a user
► We introduced a two phase enterprise gamification experiment
 Avoids confusion of users, like in control group experiments through discussions about missing
features for some users
 Phase I: non-gamified version to detect and fix influences of errors and usability flaws.
 Phase II: gamification enabled to see how users interact with game design elements and to
examine their motivational effects
Conclusion and Future work

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