Gamification in the context of user Productivity and engagement

This article presents an approach on dealing with the engagement of mobile devices users, with the purpose of increasing productivity. As it seems that more and more smartphone users acknowledge the benefit of tracking down things they do, from physical to social activities and doing so in a competitive way, a lack of solutions that address a wider range of coverage was noticed. The proposed solution provides motivation and a competitive environment for users, while tracking their objectives and challenging others, by using an approach that covers the best practices of the concept in use and by being developed in a usercentered manner. Unlike existing applications, our proposed model covers a wider range of objectives and encourages the engagement in a game-like manner. The application’s fundamental background consists of the concept of gamification, applied in a day-to-day environment. This concept, together with a series of other useroriented concepts implemented in the proposed application, have as main goal maintaining users’ interest while ensuring increased productivity. This application is meant to cover a wide range of necessities, for smartphone users, by allowing users to track objectives proposed by themselves or others, as well as ensuring motivation through a gamification system. General Terms Gamification, motivation, engagement, SMART, usability, user-centered design INTRODUCTION Our everyday life is becoming more and more loaded, and we end up with a full agenda. The application proposed in this paper promotes an easier way to track one's objectives, with the use of a device that is almost never left out of sight, the mobile phone. By doing so, we attempt to create a solution that maintains the users’ interest, increases their productivity and always challenges them to exceed others or their past achievements. In this paper, we propose an application that motivates users to accept challenges and complete objectives in a competitive way by providing a user-friendly interface. While there are many applications that serve as agendas, their lifetime is significantly short. It does not take much for the user to slowly forget about them or lose interest and ending up deleting them soon afterwards [1]. Therefore, we propose a user-centered design and as a main tool, the gamification technique. In large terms, gamification refers to the application of game-design elements and game principles in nongame contexts. Such elements and principles are adopted in order to increase motivation, improve user engagement, ease of use and even usefulness of systems. The idea came from the fact that people like having clear goals and even more being awarded once achieved. In this way, the users’ behavior is easily influenced to do the expected actions when treated as “players” with game elements such as challenges and rewards [2]. The roots of gamification lie in the User-Centered Design, considering the user in every decision made. User-Centered Design (UCD) means, more than anything, understanding exactly what users need, how they behave in given circumstances and what is their approach and considering all these in the process of development [3]. As mentioned before, a fundamental step of the gamification process is considering the users. In most of the cases, the users do not have the same complex overview of the project as the developers, thus they will focus more on the fun than on the complexity. In this way, the features should be filtered based on how intuitive and understandable they are for the users. Figure 1.User Centered Design Diagram [3] When leading on a UCD, one focuses more on