Introduction to Gamification Part 2

In the last article, we introduced the theory of "gamification" – turning a survey (or any mundane task, for that matter) into a game. In this article, we'll look at some of the ways that surveys do that naturally, and then start to explore additional methods of gamifying surveys.

While gamification is a useful idea for surveys, many surveys already include various tools or features that make it like a game as is. Incentives, for example, are a natural way of gamifying surveys. With incentives, you have a completion goal – a prize that the user gets at the end of the survey for their willingness to complete it.

Some companies also use points as their incentive, and the user is expected to rack up enough points to purchase something fun/valuable, while others "enter for a chance to win," which has a gaming feel in its own right. Progress bars are also a type of gamification method, albeit to a much smaller degree. When the progress bar moves forward, the user knows they're nearing completion, and they keep "playing" to reach the 100%.

Both progress bars and incentives have been part of survey research best practices for years, and both have an aspect of that resembles what one would see in gaming.

It's possible to turn a survey into a video game, but the cost of doing so would be pretty substantial without much benefit. Yet there are ways you can make surveys more of a game – finding a way to make surveys more interactive so that users have reason to keep completing them. We'll start with one example and then continue with more thoughts in the next article, but a brief example would be that for each question they answer they get a new code, or a new letter of a code, and if they enter that code into your website they can potentially win some sum of money.

It could be like a raffle, where in addition to the incentive (because you always want the incentive), each question answered creates a raffle ticket they can use to win something great. It's a small change that suddenly transforms the survey into a game, because they now want to earn as many raffle tickets as possible to increase their odds. We'll look at some other examples in the next article.