Enhancing Collaborative Search Systems Engagement Through Gamification Juan M. Fernández-Luna, Juan F. Huete
Humberto Rodríguez-Avila, Julio C. Rodríguez-Cano
Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial. ETSI Informática y de Telecomunicación. CITIC–UGR Universidad de Granada Granada, España 18071
Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Facultad de Informática y Matemática. GISIDI–UHO Universidad de Holguín Holguín, Cuba 80100
[jmfluna, jhg]@decsai.ugr.es
[hrodriguez, jcrcano]@facinf.uho.edu.cu ABSTRACT
search with others. For example, family members usually plan traveling together, friends seek information about colCollaborative search systems require to make sense of the lective entertainment opportunities, and colleagues work in information to achieve shared goals and reduce additional groups to conduct a research for their projects. costs. These systems include cognitive load and the cost Despite this common behavior traditional search engines to coordinate various events and participants. By applying (like Google, Yahoo!, Bing) and their creators (researchers game mechanics and dynamics to these collaborative sysand engineers on Information Retrieval (IR)), have considtems we can intensify seeker engagement with this type of ered the search of relevant information as an individual task applications and its collaborative tasks. To the best of our and do not support an explicit collaboration among users knowledge the use of game design elements in non-gaming with shared information needs. In the last few years, there contexts has been so far discussed in a few research contexts, has been an emergence of a few of tools (SearchTogether, without ties to existing literature on Collaborative InformaCoSense, WebSearch, Coagmento) to support this explicit tion Seeking. This paper presents a set of elements to gamify collaborative behavior during the search process, called Colcollaborative search systems. laborative Information Seeking (CIS) (Section 2) [10]. This kind of system requires to make sense of the information to Categories and Subject Descriptors achieve shared goals and reduce additional costs that include cognitive load and the cost to coordinate various events and H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Group and Organization Interfaces; H.3.3 [Information participants [10]. The use of game design elements in the non-gaming conStorage and Retrieval]: Search Process. texts (gamification) has raised a lot of interest both in bussines [8] and in the academy [9]. Although this trend has been General Terms particularly embraced by business to engage and motivate Design, Human Factors their users, there has been no publication of information on the bridge between game design patterns and CIS literature, so far as the authors have been able to determine. In this Keywords paper we are interested in applying game design patterns to Gamification, User engagement, Human-Computer InteracCIS systems (Section 4): tion, Information Retrieval, Collaborative Information Seeking. • We believe that attaching game mechanics in the existing CIS literature could provide a framework on how gameplay could be viewed as a part of the overall in1. INTRODUCTION side CIS and how they could support proven models Nowadays, people with common interests usually work in from the CIS field for the development of gamified CIS groups to satisfy their information needs. The arrival of the systems. computer networking era and ubiquitous computing, have been enabled that many tasks in enterprises, academic and daily life can benefit from the ability of people to jointly
• We propose a set of gamification elements for CIS systems.
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This paper contributes to understand the gamification from the perspective of Collaborative Information Seeking by reviewing the existing body of empirical research on the topic.
2.
BACKGROUND
In this section we will discuss the theory and principles of Collaborative Information Seeking and Gamification.
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2.1
Collaborative Information Seeking
regardless of the outcomes. Deterding et. al. [5] defined five levels of abstraction of games design elements:
Collaboration is a process that involves various individuals who may see different aspect of a problem. They engage in a process that goes beyond their own individual expertise and vision to complete a task or a project. Recently, a new field of research has been emerged called Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS), defined by Shah [11] as a process of information seeking “that is defined explicitly among the participants, interactive, and mutually beneficial”. CIS represents a significant paradigmatic shift from traditional Information Retrieval systems. These new system tends to be better than one made by one individual behavior, and it would help users to learn and use it more effectively. In order to build successful CIS systems Shah [10] proposed following guidelines:
• Game interface design patterns: common, successful interaction design components and design solutions for a known problem in a context, including prototypical implementations. Examples: badge, leaderboard, level. • Game design patterns and mechanics: commonly reoccurring parts of the design of a game that concern gameplay. Examples: time constraint, limited resources, turns.
1. They should provide effective ways for the participants to communicate with each other;
• Game design principles and heuristics: evaluative guidelines to approach a design problem or analyze a given design solution. Examples: enduring play, clear goals, variety of game styles.
2. They should allow, and encourage, each participant to make an individual contribution to the collaborative information search;
• Game models: Conceptual models of the components of games or game experience. Examples: challenge, fantasy, curiosity; game design atoms.
3. They should coordinate participant actions, information requests, and responses to have an active and interactive collaboration either synchronously or asynchronously whether co-located or remote;
• Game design methods: game design-specific practices and processes. Examples: playtesting, playcentric design, value conscious game design. Gamification can be a very useful tool in engaging, reengaging, motivating, activating customers’ behavior, and creating loyalty [5], [12], [13]. One of the greatest advantages of gamification is its usefulness in several types of applications. Foursquare1 , Badgeville2 and Frequent Flyer Programs are some of the most known services that use gamification and have success [12]. All of them have gamification at their core and provide services that offers customers experiences that motivate them to use these services frequently.
4. They should ask participants to agree and follow a set of rules; and 5. They should provide mechanisms to let participants not only to explore their individual differences but also to negotiate roles and responsibilities. At present most of the CIS systems developed involves certain overhead and an additional cognitive load to their users [4], due to, their complex implementations for supporting control, communication, and awareness actions. The era of CIS systems demand to make sense the information to help participants be more efficient and be actively engaged in the collaboration and to reduce additional costs that includes cognitive load and the cost to coordinate various events and participants [10].
2.2
3.
CIS SYSTEMS AND GAMIFICATION
Gamification has gained recently success in finance, health and education environments creating loyalty, brand awareness and effective user/client engagement, but according to our observations it can successfully be used also in CIS environment. By using gamification in CIS we wish to trigger a more efficient and engaging collaborative search behavior. Despite gamification is not all about the elements and their correct use, there are, several advantages and opportunities that rise from designing systems like a game designer [5]. We need to think about who is using it as a player (seeker), rather than, customers and users. The idea of a gamified CIS system is combine intrinsic motivation with extrinsic one in order to raise motivation and engagement for collaborative search tasks. Intrinsic motivations come from the seeker, who decides whether to make an action or not, some examples are: collaboration, cooperation, suggestion. Whilst, extrinsic motivations occur when something or someone determines the seeker to make an action for example: classifications, levels, points, badges, awards, missions [5]. Zichermann [12] proposed that gamified systems need to have a feeling of autonomy and freedom and, to provide feelings of competence, without forgetting the social aspect.
Gamification
The phenomena of gamification has been used in different contexts such as business, finance, marketing, education and health, for a few years. The objective of gamification is taking game-elements and using them in a non-game context, with the purpose to achieve benefits that are difficult to carry out with the use of conventional tools. The definition of this term is very related to similar pre-existing concepts such as game-based technologies, playful interaction, serious games and serious gaming [5]. Huotari and Hamari [8] have defined the term as a process of enhancing services with (motivational) affordances in order to invoke gameful experiences and further behavioral outcomes. In this definition, the authors, highlight the role of gamification in invoking the same psychological experiences as games (generally) do. On the other hand, Deterding et al. [5] defined gamification as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”, emphasized that the affordances implemented in gamification had to be the same as the ones used in games,
1 2
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https://foursquare.com/ http://www.badgeville.com/
A CIS system that gives seekers opportunities for acquiring new skills or abilities, being optimally challenged, and receiving positive feedback also increases the intrinsic motivation to use it. We believe that improving these key factors, seekers can raise a better collaborative behavior and reducing challenges in making sense of information during collaborative search tasks. Some key components need to be taken into consideration to gamify a CIS system in order to build up coherent functionalities. Because, although all game elements can be used in a gamification process, they might not all be equally relevant. We consider Dynamics and Mechanics elements are the most relevant, based on the research done on motivational theory and gamification literature [12], [5], [7]. Games mechanics make up the functioning components of the game, whilst, dynamics determine how the players interact with those mechanics. They define a set of rules and feedback loops that creates the gameplay, constitutes fundamentals of any gamified context [12],[5], [9].
3.1
How to gamify a CIS system?
In the following section we try to explain how gamification can be applied in Collaborative Information Seeking environments. Our proposal is based on several key issues for designing and implementing CIS systems, user behavior, and principles for the elements of game design [10], [7]. In order to start the gamification process we need to answer the following questions: why do we gamify our application, what are the aspirations and what are the benefits expected, taking into account the users (players) we are addressing. CIS systems have the purpose to satisfy common information needs and share knowledge among users groups, and in most cases offer means of evaluation and feedback. The main goal is to motivate user to use the available collaborative functionalities (division of labor, awareness, persistence) as best as possible. By using these collaborative functionalities we wish to motivate users to search in groups, rise engagement of users with the CIS systems. As main result of our investigation we propose the following CIS gamification elements:
Figure 1: Gamified components of a CIS system ranked according to their success (searches, successful recommendations, etc.) within the game. This type of component is a very coarse-grained technique as it lends itself to repetitive actions, but it can be a powerful motivator. Although, this kind of component is typically used in competitive activities but can also be used to encourage collaborative task between users with common information needs. 5. A CIS system should be have collaborative widgets (metadata of search results,trackers of queries, comments and recommendations) that offer support for helping seekers make sense of the information generated during a collaborative Web search task. The seekers should belong to one or more collaborative search sessions (CoSS) and have access to the of group searches and recommendations track records.
1. First of all, a CIS system should be made as social and simple as possible to simulate an user familiar environment (teamwork, classroom). The seekers may feel more comfortable if the system appears very user friendly and provide a good balance of costs and benefits. 2. The seeker (user) of a CIS system needs an account where they can edit their personal profile, put their picture (in game mechanics known as avatar) and customize their profile according to their preferences (topics of search). The seekers should select their preferences and put their skills when they consider it, instead forcing a premature commitment with the system.
6. The seekers should receive special bonuses for accomplishing positive feedbacks, such as to evaluate or recommend a good document, in order to increase the knowledge of the group or community. 7. seventh, this kind of collaborative system must offer the ability to create periodical virtual appointments or curfews and deadlines in order to motivate them to return periodically to the system.
3. The seekers must be receive constant feedback and be informed about the progress of their tasks (progress bars and humanise popups). The use of these strategies may be a useful tool for assessing progress toward satisfying the shared information need that motivated the collaborative search in the first place.
8. A CIS should compensate seekers for their searches achievements and for proper behavior and social engagement like helping others seekers, and adding value to the system etc. by offering badges. 9. A CIS should offer the possibility to convert points or badges into virtual goods. Seekers will engage more
4. A CIS system should be have some class of leaderboard widget [12], [5] that lists of players (seekers)
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7.
with the system and will be motivated to earn more points in order to benefit from these advantages.
4.
[1] J. Antin and E. F. Churchill. Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. In CHI 2011 Gamification Workshop Proceedings, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2011. [2] S. Castellani, B. Hanrahan, T. Colombino, and A. Grasso. Game mechanics in support of production environments. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings, 2013. [3] L.-T. Cheng, J. Patterson, S. Shami, S. Rohall, C. Dugan, A. Sempere, M. Muller, W. Geyer, and J. DiMicco. Finding moments of play at work abstract. In CHI 2011 Gamification Workshop Proceedings, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2011. ´ [4] S. Cleger, J. M. Fern´ andez-Luna, H. Rodr´ıguez-Avila, and J. C. Rodr´ıguez-Cano. Estudio de la Carga Cognitiva en Interfaces Web de Sistemas de B´ usqueda Colaborativa. In Proceedings de la XV edici´ on de Conferencia de la Asociaci´ on Espa˜ nola para la Inteligencia Artificial (CAEPIA), pages 79–88, 2013. [5] S. Deterding, D. Dixon, R. Khaled, and L. Nacke. From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification. In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, pages 9–15. ACM, 2011. [6] L. S. Ferro and S. P. Walz. Like this: How game elements in social media and collaboration are changing the flow of information. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings, 2013. [7] F. Groh. Gamification: State of the art definition and utilization. Institute of Media Informatics Ulm University, pages 39–47, 2012. [8] K. Huotari and J. Hamari. Gamification from the perspective of service marketing. In Proceedings CHI 2011 Workshop Gamification, 2011. [9] C. I. Muntean. Raising engagement in e-learning through gamification. In Proceedings 6th International Conference on Virtual Learning ICVL, pages 323–329, 2011. [10] C. Shah. Collaborative information seeking: A literature review. Advances in librarianship, 32:3–33, 2010. [11] C. Shah. Working in collaboration - what, why, and how? In Second workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS), Savannah, Georgia, USA., 2010. [12] G. Zichermann and C. Cunningham. Gamification by Design: Implementing game mechanics in web and mobile apps. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2011. [13] G. Zichermann and J. Linder. Game-based marketing: inspire customer loyalty through rewards, challenges, and contests. John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2010.
RELATED WORK
This paper presented a set of elements to gamify collaborative search systems. Many researchers have been working in how to apply game-elements in a non-game context, with the purpose to achieve benefits as engaging, re-engaging, motivating, and creating loyalty, all of those benefits are difficult to obtain with the use of conventional tools. For example, Muntean [9] describe how to increase user engagement in an e-learning environments through game-elements. Antin et al. [1] present five social psychological functions for badges in social media contexts. On other hand, Cheng et al. [3] propose that an important consideration for applying gamification within the enterprise is to identify the appropriate time for manifesting game elements into the work context “the moment of play”. They reflect on their experiences with gamification projects within an enterprise. Huotari and Hamari [8] propose a definition for gamification from the perspective of service marketing and lays ground for future studies on gamification and marketing. Castellani et al. [2] illustrate how we use gamification in production environments, such as call centres, in order to help agents and supervisors manage their performance. Ferro and Walz [6] exposed the relation of different types of game elements and online social networking services influence (OSNS) the flow of information, and potentially means for the future development of OSNS.
5.
CONCLUSIONS & FUTURE WORK
In this paper presented a set of elements to gamify CIS systems. The elements proposed does not suggest to create a search game. The means to make CIS systems more fun and engaging. The use game elements could help seekers gain motivation towards to use CIS applications, and because of the positive feedback they get pushed forwards and become more interested and stimulated to collaborate. Seekers engagement is the important metric for success in gamification. Today there are several metrics to analyze engagement which due to technological advancement in analytic can be included into such a web application. These metrics are: page views per visitor, time spent on site, total time per user, frequency of visit, participation and conversions. In our future work we wish to implement the gamification elements proposed on a prototype of CIS system and follow applying the above mentioned metrics in this particular context. It is however intuitive that gamification can improve motivation and engagement of seekers with these systems. By gamifying this kind of search system we do not wish to replace the intrinsic motivation of user, which is stronger and more long term, with the extrinsic one, but offer a combination of the two for a better performance. We can use these elements to create more effective and engaging CIS systems.
6.
REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Ciencia e Innovaci´ on, and the Regional Government of Andalusia through the TIN2011-28538-C02-02 and TIC-04526 projects, respectively.
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