How to measure user engagement and gamification

(content subject to updates – improvements)

Gamification is one of the hottest buzzwords and concepts being thrown around with the connotation that it may be the holy grail to solving all motivational – human engagement – problems in learning, and other societal issues such as poverty, global warming, and energy conservation.

The lack of a unified and clear definition has muddled the concept leaving it open for interpretation. Its application has thus been skewed to suit the various areas where it has been applied. The engagement spectrum (below) charts possible engagement categories – depicting the attributing motivational aspects in each.

The engagement spectrum:

NB: Engagement (and its sustainability) decrease when moving downwards in the spectrum above. However, the two do not necessarily increase on moving upwards since extrinsic motivation doesn’t necessarily result to intrinsic motivation.

Optimal engagement (I1, E0) – caused by the engagement in actions out of intrinsic motivations – personal interest in a specific phenomenon, including how and with who they do it with.

Case study example: democratic education affords students the freedom to decide individually how, when, what, where and with whom they learn and to have an equal share in the decision-making as to how their learning environments are run.

Diluted engagement (I1, E1) – caused by the interference of intrinsic motivation by the introduction of external – extrinsic motivational elements.

Case study example: the truth about what motivates us [Video] describes studies that have shown that the introduction of monetary rewards reduces performance in cognitive tasks. For physical/manual tasks, extrinsic motivations may increase performance until the limits of performance are reached.

Concocted engagement (I0, E0) – caused by the invention and or introduction of extrinsic motivations as an excuse, explanation, or story to ‘deceive’/ make someone do something

Case study example: Milligram’s experiment may be taken as an extreme example of extrinsic motivation, suggesting that extrinsic motivation does not necessarily result to intrinsic motivation. Participants in such phenomenon do not assume ownership of the rationales for doing an action.

Coerced participation can be seen as an act of aggression according to Peter (2011).

McGonigal explains that when we are forced to face negatively stressful situations, we become angry and our stress response make us want to disengage and withdraw emotionally from those situations. Furthermore, Karasek & Theorell model of safe work point that stress accrued from the lack of autonomy in dealing with challenging situations can result to chronic illness.

Control, manipulation and guidance of individuals by their authority only serves to remove their autonomy, making the controlled emotionally and intellectually dependent on their superiors. This, Carse (1986) says requires a veiling of oneself, a suspension of one’s freedom, the lack of acknowledgement of one’s intrinsic motivations by oneself and others.

Notably and perhaps of essence in extrinsic motivators are the concerns that have been raised over the effects of the hidden curriculum in education systems. Gatto (1992) and Neil warn that control and guidance of students by their teachers only serves to remove their autonomy, making the students emotionally and intellectually dependent on their superiors. Gamification can be said to have similar effects (Zichermann & Cunningham 2011) since, matter how subtly it is applied or its impact are recognized its outcomes including stages of success and failure and the actions to them are predetermined before participation commences and as a result a participant only follows established footsteps without necessarily being able to forge a route that suits them. Carse (1986) compares this to play, where a learner’s actions are not their own but a theatrical act of the role that they are required to play by their educators. This, Carse (1986) says requires a veiling of oneself, a suspension of one’s freedom, the lack of acknowledgement of one’s intrinsic motivations by oneself and others.

‘The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots’. – A.S. Neill

 

Zilch engagement (I0, E0) - caused by the lack of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.

Case study example: energy conservation can be seen in some individuals as a phenomenon where there is no intrinsic  or extrinsic motivation, and thus those individuals do not take actions to reduce their energy consumption.

To put the various categories of engagement in perspective, the matrix below charts their causes and effects respectively:

Intense engagement: the most pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful emotional state we can experience. (McGonical 2011, p.45)

Sources:

• Pink, D. H. (2010). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.
• McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world.
• Karasek, R., & Theorell, T. (1992). Healthy work: stress productivity and the reconstruction of working life.
• Gatto, J. T. (1992). Dumbing us down. Philadelphia: New Society.
• Carse, J. P. (1986). Finite and infinite games.
• Wikipedia. Avoidant Personality Disorder

Measuring engagement using the Engagement Spectrum

Various motivations for participating in different situations can be categorized either as extrinsic or intrinsic. As a result, it is possible to measure engagement for a population of participants taking part in phenomena and chart it on the engagement spectrum.

Some back ground

Having designed a home energy display gamification service as a user engagement concept for home energy device/display and participated in a project that attempted to design games to make learning fun and interesting for kids inspired me to ask 2 basic questions:

1. Why is learning boring and uninteresting?
2. Why are people not interested in doing tasks even though they know doing them is beneficial for them?

An energy conservation (gamified) engagement concept

In search for answers to these questions, I have sent some time crawling the web and books for something to give. Democratic education has been quite inspiring both while the Karasek & Theorell’s model for safe work has solidified the grounds for engagement. Discussions on resource based systems design such as the Zeitgeist movement, the Venus Project have been an eye opener in painting a holistic picture of status quo and how to design systems that move beyond that.

As a result the two questions has merged into one; what are we trying to achieve through extrinsic motivators? Or in other words, in what situations are we seeking to lower performance, to deprive individuals their sense of purpose, mastery and autonomy and a sicker society if optimal engagement only happens in the absence of extrinsic motivators?

Is it an attempt to increase productivity and consumerism? Because if its the former, then we are failing by all means as the emergent beast of burden – the robot will beat us at productivity/efficiency in most ‘jobs’. Furthermore, research has shown that engagement is inherent in intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivators reduce performance. If its the later, I rest my case for then we are deluding ourselves – when we inhabit a planet with finite resources. Resource based system designs such as the Venus Project are suggesting alternative designs based on the scientific tool…

In closing this article, lets indulge ourselves further and look at some critical perspectives on gamification and engagement:

Zichermann & Cunningham have perhaps the simplest yet comprehensive perspective on gamification

Uniquely, games are gamification is able to get people to take actions that are not always in their best interest, without the use of force, in a predictable way.

(also see) Zichermann G. & Cunningham C., (2011) Gamification by Design. Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps. O’Reilly.

Deterding and Wond suggest that:

“Intrinsic motivators create greatness, while extrinsic motivators are nothing more than pellets dropped for rats in a cage,” “creating virtual food pellets for you to eat“ Deterding S. (2011), Wond D (2010)

Anderson fears that gamification is a vehicle that will accelerate consumerism to the next level;

Gamification seeks to turn the world into one giant chore chart covered with achievement stickers — the kind of thing parents design for their children — though it raises the potentially terrifying question of who the parents are. This, I fear, is the dystopian future of stupid games: amoral corporations hiring teams of behavioral psychologists to laser-target our children’s addiction cycles for profit.

Anderson, S., (2012) Just one more game – Angry Birds, Farmville and other hyperaddictive stupid games. The New York Times.

James P. Carse gives yet another simplistic view that sums the effects of extrinsic motivators;

It is an invariable principle of all play, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.

Derterding S., (2010) Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

Robots – the new breed of beasts of burden

Beasts of burden – are animals that are domesticated, bred, built and trained/programmed by humans to perform work (Wikipedia). The term animal here can be taken to refer to animals, humans and machines. Lets keep this in mind while we further explore the concept of beasts of burden.

The 3 phases of beasts of burden:

1. Working Animals

Tasks performed by the beasts of burden can range from light/service, to physically intensive tasks such as logging. The use of animals for work has considered by some as animal slavery and concern for their rights have been raised as a result. The concern about animal rights here can be seen in a number of ways but perhaps the fundamental one is the withdrawal of the animals’ freedom to live as they see fit without having to be productive for humans.

Animals served well as beasts of burden enabling humans to (harness their dominion over other animals and) overcome their incapacity in carrying tasks such as travel over long distance, huge load bearing and other cognitive/perception tasks. In addition, humans mastered the art of training animals for entertainment purposes.

2. Human Workers

Population increase and the development of society gave rise to the need for a more sophisticated breed of beasts of burden – one that could be quickly trained to perform a number of tasks that required a ‘higher’ cognitive/perception ability over that of most animals. The human beasts of burden has worked in poor conditions – dirty, low paying, hazardous, long-hours, in master-slave and sweatshop environments. This also resulted to similar welfare concerns that have been voiced for animals.

As beasts of burdens, humans really struggled to be productive as there was really no way to overcome their fallibility as the tasks they were involved in became more mechanical. As a result there was a need for beasts of burden that could simply perform work as efficiently, and effectively as possible without there being any concerns for its welfare – as was the case with animals and humans.

3. The Robot worker

The computer gave rise to this new breed of beasts of burden; the robot. The computer for once made it possible for the robot to be trained to ‘trained’ (programmed/learn) how to perform various mechanical and cognitive tasks surpassing what had previously been achieved. Moreover, the miniaturization of computer components and sensors and the increment of processing power meant that the robots could perform even more sophisticated tasks requiring more cognitive/perception abilities and physical maneuvers.

Librarians are being replaced by vast systems for automatically storing books—but it’s Wikipedia and the internet that are the real threat.

Even though animals were the first ‘true’ beasts of burden, they were soon replaced by human workers as work became more sophisticated – and thus requiring more intricate manipulations and cognitive abilities. And now, for the first time, humans position in society as workers is threatened by their own creation.

The new breed of beasts of burden is set to revolutionize societal dynamics

Skilled worker, without the worker: One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.

 

as a footnote: the story of human farming

The puzzle of motivation; Dan Pink [TED]

As long a task involves only mechanical skill, bonuses work as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance

But once the task calls for ‘even rudimentary cognitive skill‘ a larger reward ‘leads to poorer performance

The elephant is now in the room; its time to start changing values and altitudes.

How to teach creativity

One of the 21st Century skills that ‘education designers’ have put forth is creativity as a skill that learners should acquire. This has been expressed loosely as: creativity and innovation skills, curiosity, creativity, and risk taking, critical and creative thinking.

“Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.

They:

• apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes. 
• create original works as a means of personal or group expression. 
• use models and simulations to explore complex systems and issues. 
• identify trends and forecast possibilities.”

(Dede, C. (2010). Comparing frameworks for 21st century skills. 21st century skills: Rethinking how students learn, 51-76.)

Does creativity come naturally or is it a skill that can be taught or acquired?

According to the bullet descriptions (above) of what creativity is and how it may be applied, creativity can then be referred to as engagement –  the voluntary willingness of an individual to focus on a task or situation, to exert one’s energy (cognitive and physical ability) to it, in order to learn from it, change it or simply enjoy it…

Engagement as such would then be inherent of an individual’s interest in the task or situation, else the energy exerted into it may be minimal if any and thus the ability to learn from it, improve/destroy it or simply enjoy it may be reduced or non-existent.

Intrinsic interest has the ability to result to engagement or creativity as energy exerted towards a phenomenon can be said to be ‘optimal’. Engagement methods that result to or involve getting people to take actions that are not always in their best interest, without the use of force, in a predictable way undermine intrinsic motivations and lessen derived human experience – and kill creativity.

Children are born with the ability to engage in continuous action without being aroused by artificial outside stimuli. There is no such thing as a bored newborn. If children are allowed to pursue their innate drives to master their environment, they will never be bored with this task, since it is inherently endless and fascinating. I cannot stress enough the basic fact that children who are free to use their minds without externally imposed restrictions, will from birth onward engage unceasingly in the activity of model building.

Do schools kill creativity?

So perhaps the objective for 21 Century learning should be how to design learning environments that foster the development of learner’s interests because it is only in them that creativity may be nurtured.

Best user engagement in energy saving

While governments and industries have forked out money for research and development of smart homes, smart grids and home energy devices (HEDs), one engagement surpasses these efforts by far for driving energy consumption – operant conditioning.

What one may refer to as positive punishment – where the frequency of a behavior is decreased by the introduction of a stimuli. And what stimuli could result to positive punishment better than cost.

Simply put, if governments raised ‘sin taxes’ it is needless to say that the ‘sin’s’ frequency will decrease.

Of course there are immediate drawbacks in such a design with the most obvious being that the motivation for energy conservation would be extrinsic and the can be characterized as design for (economic) disability - individuals with higher purchasing power have more ‘sin-allowance’ or would simply be exempt from this limiting design.

However, rather than invest in the production of HEDs which have little impact if any in energy conservation, and spend more energy in their production, reproduction (keep in mind planned obsolesce is also key in cyclic consumption) and keeping them in full-time powered states, governments can cut to the chase and actually generate funds simply by raising taxes.

Of course it is true what they say, pass a law and create business, whether the law passed serves the needs of those affected is another question.

And as long as the ‘rush to save energy’ is on, can current economic paradigms contain their energy hunger? Should effort and resources be funneled to renewable energies rather than energy conservation in any case?

Emergence, ownership is universal, godly

Everything has been copied transformed and made a new..

Given similar conditions; information, knowledge, training, tools, resources and experiences, different people living in different environments can, when facing a specific challenge come up with similar solutions.

This implies that the solutions are not dependent on people but the environment within which the problems arise and are addressed.

This brings to mind a fundamental question; Can/should anyone own an idea?

Following the scenario above, tools and know-how, which basically evolve via emergence – the multiplicity of relatively simple interactions to form complex systems and patterns [Wikipedia], may not really be a product of an individual but the sum of various actions by many agents. Moreover, the environmental triggers that lead to emergence are systemic and result from the environment which is shaped by emergence and by itself is emergent.

The extrapolation of ideas and information may also be referred to as emergence, the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions [Wikipedia]. In the beginning there were few and simple rules and tools but their extrapolation or rather emergence led to the construction of more complex rules and tools. The information resulting from emergence has however not been created, but has existed from the beginning.

No matter how complex ideas and tools have become as a result of emergence, they can always trace their origin from the simple rule and tools and as a matter of fact a combination of them.

So, how can I claim ownership of an idea or tool which is as a result of what others have done? For without their collective actions, it may have been impossible for me to arrive to that idea.

Moreover, given that emergence is a ‘natural’ phenomena, how can I claim to own something that would have resulted anyways with or without my intervention or involvement.

After all, we are creatures that are good in copying ideas and adapting them to our needs, and it is the state of our needs and the capability of existing tools and ideas that determine what ideas we combine and what emerges from that.

How can I claim the ownership of this article when I have basically used a tool (language) and ideas (concepts) which are not mine to write it, and the need to write has been brought forth by the collective action (copyright battles that individuals and companies have cultivated in the current economic paradigm). Furthermore, this is something that others can (already have) thought/written about and acted upon. Where in the world can I lay claim that I own any of this?

I would have to create something in its entirety to claim its ownership. As such I would have to be God.

This leads to my second question; Should I attach my name to any piece of work that I produce and should I ask others to put my name next to ideas they have taken from me?

But if I cannot own ideas or tools, how can I attach my name to them or ask others to when they are not mine to begin with?

How ideas spread:

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

Einstein

Can people learn by themselves? The future of schools

Methods for visualizing contextual inquiry & ethnography results

A huge collection of material can amass from what may seem like trivial or everyday activities of contextual inquiry and or ethnography studies. More often than not, these materials are usually textual, and as they amass leave a debris of stuff that is impossible to go via leave alone sort and make sense of.

It is therefore important to capture the material in visual formats or to visualize it to make it usable for designers as well as other parties interested in it. Visualizations can serve the purposes of sorting information, presenting patterns, giving a gist of the phenomena of study and essentially minimizing the amount of text to be read. Of course the latter may not apply if the visualization is textual or includes large textual elements.

With CI and ethnography results acting as boundary objects between designers and users, visualizing them enhances their ability to serve this purpose as users can sketch and reflect on what is being visualized about their contexts with ease.

Needless to say, CI and ethnography are intended for identifying existing work practices – PATTERNS – and visualizations are a great tool for this. However, the visualization(s) used in a study depend on the phenomenon of interest as well as the intention of the resulting data.

While using a formative rather than a normative approach to design work practices, visualizations can serve the purpose of providing a basis for formative co-design or participatory design minimizing time and effort taken to delve in current practices.

Below are some methods for visualizing CI results

1. Work flow, process flow

Work or process flow visualization are useful in depicting several elements in a given context including actors, artifacts, work or information paths, traffic flow and actor journeys. Such visualization can enable the identification of communication good practices or grid locks in a work or process flow.

2. Body maps

Body maps essentially map inventories of artifacts worn, carried, installed or implanted on a body of interest. Body maps can be used in revealing artifacts worn or pocketed by a worker and how they can best be designed or placed to enable effortless movement, dexterity and interaction with other artifacts and people while at work.

Example of a constructor’s body map artifacts can include safety helmet, dust mask, safety jacket + gloves, tool belt, toughened work pants and steel toe + hard soled shoes.

Body maps are of great interest now with the rise of wearable devices as well as smart fabrics. In application to healthcare and sports, they can help reveal suitable designs that can enable the detection of intended signals from the body as well as the presentation of these to the user.

3. Context cards

Context cards are used to capture the gist of a work or life context including actors in the context, what they are doing, how they are doing it and the environment around them. Context cards are usually image cards with short description text of the context in the image. They can help give an understanding of the user’s context as well as develop empathy for designing tools be used in that context.

A collection of context cards can be made into a collage, to depict regular or irregular patterns in a context.

See Haptimap context cards

4. Heat maps

Heat maps are useful in revealing patterns either repetitive or those that break from the norm. They can serve the purpose of revealing preferred or frequently used paths as well as rarely used ones. They are also useful in identifying patterns deviating from the norm.

5. Timelines

As used in Facebook, timeline visualizations enable the presentation of events as they occur over time. Such are perhaps popular in investigations in helping reveal the sequence of events that led to a mishap or intended scenarios. Information depicted on timelines can also be mapped onto artifact maps or process flow maps – putting it more in context – where events happened, when, etc.

6. Video and sound stills

Video clips can be used to capture and present complex work practices. They can be used to represent complex relationships, capture gesture and other subtle affordances that may otherwise be hard to capture through sketches, photos or text descriptions. For instance, they can capture user’s attention shifts or multitasking during a specific context.

Sound stills are audio recordings of a specific work context. They can be used to present underlying ambient sounds in the respective contexts. Essentially, they can enable a design team to determine what modalities of interaction would be suitable in specific contexts. For instance, in a mine, it may difficult for a worker to interact with a device through voice/speech.

7. Artifact maps

Artifact maps are models used to represent the overall layout of a workplace artifacts and thus enable a quick comprehension of a complex context as well guide research as well as design. The detail of the modelling can vary depending on the intent of the research or design work.

8. Artistic visualization of data

In a loose manner, artistic visualization of data may be taken as a presentation of information without strictly observing its scientific context but rather just visualizing it in a way that makes it approachable or simply to capture the attention of observers. There are of course no limits to what can be visualized artistically.

The capturing of attention (I would say) then creates the context for identifying patterns or figuring ways how they can be identified in a piece of art.

9. H-Form

The H-Form uses a ‘H’ figure to chart good and bad aspects for a subject of interest and the collection of ideas for improving issues surrounding the subject.

Ref & further reading:

Collect and Map it all: The Artifact Map, a Tool for Complex Context Analysis. Steffi Beckhaus, Senana Lucia Brugger, Katharina Wolter

What is participatory learning and action (PLA): an introduction. Sarah Thomas

Dynamic user experiences context cards. Haptimap – haptimap.org

Art/design work as a tool for primary data collection in the field of health research. Freddie Yauner, Andy Tennant.

An exploration of human emotion, in six movements. Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar.

H-Form, Issue identification. Jisc infoNet

Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a building

Robots playing music instruments

Just when it seemed like only we humans could master art