Personalizing Persuasive Strategies in Gameful Systems to Gamification User Types

© Owners/Authors, 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI '18 Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174009Persuasive gameful systems are effective tools for motivating behaviour change. Research has shown that tailoring these systems to individuals can increase their efficacy; however, there is little knowledge on how to personalize them. We conducted a large-scale study of 543 participants to investigate how different gamification user types responded to ten persuasive strategies depicted in storyboards representing persuasive gameful health systems. Our results reveal that people’s gamification user types play significant roles in the perceived persuasiveness of different strategies. People scoring high in the ‘player’ user type tend to be motivated by competition, comparison, cooperation, and reward while ‘disruptors’ are likely to be demotivated by punishment, goal-setting, simulation, and self-monitoring. ‘Socialisers’ could be motivated using any of the strategies; they are the most responsive to persuasion overall. Finally, we contribute to CHI research and practice by offering design guidelines for tailoring persuasive gameful systems to each gamification user type.NSERC Banting CNPq, Brazil SSHRC || 895-2011-1014, IMMERSe NSERC || RGPIN-418622-2012 CFI || 35819 Mitacs || IT0725