BSc Final Year Project: Gamified Textual Communication Research

May 18

Date Dec 2015 - May 2016

Role Individual Project

UI Tools Android Studio | PHP | LIWP analyzer

Download Code here.

I have worked on assessing the feasibility of using Gamification to increase text communication effectiveness (social bonding) by developing two individual text application (one normal and one Gamified) for my Computer Science bachelor's research project ,below is the summary of how the project went.

Key Findings

Gamification does indeed has a positive effect on stimulating social bonding and interaction engagement to a certain degree.

This study shows that by visualising the relationship between users with a level statistics, it affects the conversation's content and changes how they perceive their relationship.

Objective

Computer Mediated Communications (CMCs) were a mean for individual to connect with each other without the Face to Face (FtF) interaction. However, research have shown that the absence of environmental contextual cues and non-verbal cues such as body language, had a negative influence on the effectiveness of communicating through digital medium.

Since several recent use case of Gamification had shown to have a positive effect on engagement and social bonding, it seems that this would fill the gap in for the absence of non-verbal cues in traditional CMC applications. Therefore this project was created to test this idea.

First Iteration and feedback

Through evaluating recent text applications such as WhatsApp and Snapchat I have created several sketches of the system interface and presented them to several potential users for the first iteration user testing. Initially the system was designed to allow users to start conversation with multiple users. However, due to the realisation that multiple interactions might lead to ambiguity in the study, the system was later altered to cater towards one to one interaction.

Gamification Elements

Levelling System

For this project an Experience bar and levelling system based on social interaction between users were used to visualise relationship milestone. For example, when a user sends a message, based on the length and the content of the message, the user would be rewarded with corresponding experience points. When the exp point reached a certain threshold, it would unlock new customisable such as emoticons and message bubbles for the user to use.

Message customisation unlocks

Based on the user's level they will be able to unlock emoticons and message customisation which should allow them to customise their message in a more expressive way, and increase their engagement to socialise more.

The colour of the emoticons were designed with the emotions each colour represents in mind. Although there were many interpretation to which colour represents which emotions this colour palette was created through user survey.