Introduction to Gamification Part 4

In the last article, we finished off some examples of how to turn your survey into a game. In this article, we'll look at some of the weaknesses of this method. Before we begin, however, the most important thing to note is that there are countless ways to "gamify" your survey.

Some people have suggested actual video games, where answering a question helps you move on. Others have suggested telling a story, where each new page brings you to the next page in the story. There are certainly more ways to gamify your survey than what was suggested in the previous articles, and each may be more or less beneficial than the next.

That said, here are some potential issues with survey gamification:

Time Depending on the "Game," it is almost guaranteed that there will be a lot of extra time added to the survey, and time is always bad. It's not just the longer the survey is the more people drop out from boredom – that's what these games are trying to prevent. The bigger issue is that the longer the survey is the less people have time to do them.

These are not employees doing this on company time, so if the game makes it impossible to fit the survey into their busy schedule they're likely to drop out. Realistic Game-Ness Video game developers don't simply throw a game together and expect it to succeed. The same goes with gamification.

It's possible that the changes you make to your survey are not going to fool anyone, and you'll end up just wasting your time without seeing the results you had hoped for. Distractions Any game-like qualities are going to add distractions to the survey. Those distractions could alter your survey results.

Surveys are supposed to be as clean and to the point as possible so that your data collection is as accurate as possible. Any attempt to add to the survey could take away from the accuracy of the results.

Over the last four posts we've gone over Gamification and what it means to surveys. It's not an option that many people use, and it's something that has some clear questions about it in terms of how effective it is as an addition to your data collection, but at the very least it's an interesting idea that could, theoretically, improve or change the way you collect data.