Gamification of mobile applications on marketing strategy and users' experience

Absztrakt (kivonat)

What makes a mobile phone user download an app? As more and more mobile applications are appearing spawning on the store, the need for unique and interesting apps to deeply engage with customers is higher than ever. Every phone user is seeking a memorable experience, fun, and attractive storytelling when searching for mobile apps, similar to all of those games’ elements that every individual loves to play regardless of age, gender, or race. Gamification - the implementation of game design elements into non-game contexts, is increasingly becoming a crucial factor and one of the most powerful and innovative strategies to engage users in the marketing field, especially in the mobile application's sector. Existing researches on gamification in marketing practice have proven to enhance customer engagement, brand loyalty, and attitude, as well as motivation and brand app experiences. However, a challenging area in the field of gamification is how to utilize the fundamental elements of game design effectively to improve users’ experience in a marketing context of brandings and mobile gamification setting. This study hypothesizes that human-focused gamification design on mobile applications, which employs gamification techniques to motivate human behaviour, can positively influence users’ experience, attitudes and engagement. Also, the research paper investigated which gamification strategies do mobile applications utilize to effectively make their mobile apps more engaging to the users. By adopting the Octalysis Eight Core Drives Gamification Framework by Yukai Chou and the Google HEART Framework for user experience, this research will evaluate and measure the effectiveness of gamification in mobile applications marketing and branding as well as to analyze and build strategies around the various systems that make gamified application engaging. The methods selected in this research is quantitative online survey with the 5-point Likert scales with evaluation of successful gamified mobile applications such as Share the meal, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, Duolingo, Be and Shopee. The research discovered that find implementing gamification into mobile applications can improve users’ experience and engagement. Furthermore, applying gamification techniques that utilize positive motivators (White Hat gamification strategies) are more effective in engaging users than negative motivator (Black Hat gamification techniques). There are still some further research questions that remained unanswered such as the effects of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in gamified mobile applications. It is still unclear how or to what extent does each intrinsic and extrinsic type of motivation in mobile gamification techniques affects users’ experience, engagement and attitude. The most suitable way to examine this future research question is by using appropriate framework such as the Octalysis framework to examine the effectiveness of motivation on gamification.