Gamification of research part 3: Back to basics?
posted by: Ole Andresen on 12/15/2011
In my previous blog post on gamification, I talked about how I realized there were several challenges in gamifying surveys. So does this mean have I lost all faith in it?
Well, frankly, I nearly had. But then I got to see the concrete work Jon Puleston had done on gamifying surveys. Jon is Vice-President of GMI Interactive. He has been working for a number of years on improving respondent experience on surveys, in particular through alternative ways of presenting questions in Flash. Jon runs the Question Science blog which is another great resource on gamification.
Jon received the award for Best Methodological Paper during ESOMAR Congress 2011 together with Engage Research's Deborah Sleep for a paper on how gaming techniques can be used to improve the quality of feedback from online research. I saw him presenting at the ASC International Conference the same week.
What I find most fascinating in Jon's work is when he goes right to the core of the survey experience: The actual questions we ask respondents.
His papers provide lots of practical examples so I would recommend checking them out if you get a chance. Here I will just mention a few of the techniques he has tested out.
One of the techniques he uses is to add rules to questions. Rules are central to any game, and in principle, rules can be used to transform almost any task into a game. One of his examples is the difference between “describe yourself using only 7 words” and a plain, open “describe yourself”. The 7 word requirement reads like a restriction, but actually on average results in responses twice as long as those without the restriction.
Adding such restrictions is actually a very useful technique which takes advantage of how human creativity seems to benefit from constraints.
Jon also has a range of examples of ways of reframing questions to be more game-like. Here are examples of some of the techniques Jon has used with great results to change the style of questions:
1. Personalization: Make the question seem like it is about the respondent. ("If you had to paint your room in one of these colors which one would you pick?")
2. Emotionalization: Triggering some latent feelings that would encourage respondents to really think about the question. ("What would you wear on a first date?")
3. Projection: Asking to imagine something in the mind's eye of someone else. (“Imagine you are the boss of a company. Your job is now to evaluate this new product…”)
4. Forced imaginary situations: (“Imagine you spilt coffee all over your trousers and had to quickly go out and buy a replacement pair...”)
5. Use of out and out fantasy: (“What would you wear if you had all the money in the world?”)
What's really brilliant about Jon's work is that he has done extensive "research on research" and can compare using these techniques with more traditional ways of framing questions. He has shown that with these techniques respondents spend more time thinking about questions and provide longer responses that are more considerate. He also willingly shares his
failed experiments. For more on the techniques he's been using, I encourage you to check his really nice Prezi presentation: "
Turning surveys into games".
Reg Baker, President and chief operating officer of Market Strategies International, followed up on these points in his presentation at the
2011 Festival of New MR. According to him, an underappreciated aspect of survey gamification is that it refocuses us on the key elements of question wording and overall questionnaire design.
In his presentation he shows how these techniques help improve the process a respondent has to go through when answering a question, quoting the "Model of response process components" from Tourangeau, Rips & Rasinski's book "The psychology of survey response".
Reg asks whether these questions work because they are fun or gamified, or simply because they are better written questions.
And maybe it doesn't matter what we call it. As Reg concludes, whether we call it gamification or not, the ultimate goal is the same: Encouraging respondents to cognitively engage with our survey questions.
But judging from Jon Puleston's work, it certainly seems to help creativity in survey design when you think of it as gamification.
Four of the thought leaders I have mentioned in these blog posts will be discussing gamification in the
Game on! The Great Gamification Challenge virtual debate organized by NewMR December 16th: Reg Baker, Bernie Malinoff, Jon Puleston and Betty Adamou.