Introduction to Gamification Part 3

This article is a continuation of the previous article about how to turn your survey into a game, which makes it more enjoyable and more interactive to the participant. Here are a few other ideas that you can consider.

An easy example would be having the user answer additional research questions at their leisure – questions that may not be part of your initial study but could help you continue to learn more about the consumer – while earning points for each optional question they're willing to answer. You can then add a prize that says "the top 10% of respondents that answer the most survey questions will receive an additional $15 gift card to X." Then you load the survey with hundreds of questions, and allow the participant to finish at any time with a running count of the number of questions they answered. This will make the respondents that want to "play" try to rack up as many points as possible so that they can be in the top 10%.

Those that don’t want to play don't have to. While these questions shouldn't be part of your main research campaign, they can still be useful for some type of market research. You can come up with a near unlimited amount of questions to have them answer, letting them know that they can stop whenever they want.

Another example would be turn the progress bar into something more competitive, such as "95% of survey respondents made it to this point" and continue asking questions until the number goes down. Respondents that want to feel they're more special will continue to ask questions until they're at the very least in the top 10%, and that makes it possible to get more answers out of a longer survey. You may not even need to change the length of the survey or use real numbers.

You can simply claim that X amount of participants reached a point until the individual reaches the end of the survey, in which case you can tell them that only 10% or 5% managed to reach the end and they should consider themselves in a special group, even if no such number exists. You can also use real numbers for larger surveys, if you choose to go that route. These are all examples of how to make a small change to your survey in a way that acts as a game for the participants.

In the next article, we'll look at the weaknesses of turning it into a game.