| dc.description.abstract | Next to transport, households are the largest energy-consuming sector. The sector accounts for 27.2% of the total final energy consumption in the EU. Referring to the Paris agreement (United Nations, 2015) and the new 'Green Deal' of the European Commission (becoming energy neutral by 2050), it is crucial to lower the energy consumption of the household sector as far as possible. Buildings can be modified and equipped with RES installations and extra insulation. However, for applying these measures, significant investments are required and the implementation is time-consuming. Next to these measures, human decision making and behavior are critical in lowering the energy consumption of households. Residents need to use energy more efficiently and to enable change in behavior, they first need to get insights into their energy consumption. Energy apps that are connected to a smart meter can provide these insights, and by implementing game design elements in these apps, the behavior of users can possibly be influenced.
This research is inspired by other studies that show that specially designed gamified environments are able to motivate consumers to conserve energy. Nevertheless, these environments are not available to the general public. This reveals a research gap and the focus of this research. It needs to be investigated to what extent widely available energy apps include game design elements, and what effect these elements have on the behavior of its users. Therefore, to investigate to what extent game design is implemented in energy apps, the available energy apps in the Dutch market are evaluated based on the framework of AlSkaif at al. (2018). This framework consists of five game design types and 18 game design elements. In total, 30 apps with the goal of energy efficiency within households are evaluated. These apps were found by using a similar method as a research in the U.S. in which energy apps were evaluated (Beck, Chitalia, & Rai, 2019).
For the present evaluation, the game design types and elements were clearly defined, and the apps were thoroughly examined. To enable a comparison of to what extent a particular energy app is gamified, a formula has been created and has been used to grant a game design score to all apps. The best scoring app received only 9.8 of the maximum 28.8 points. On average, the apps only received a score of 3.8 points, indicating that the energy apps in the Dutch market are not that gameful. These are interesting findings for the experiment to test the effect of the game design elements. Even the best-performing apps do not make use of the most effective game design elements used in previously done experiments. Therefore, the experiment is split into three months, all with a different focus. During the first month (December 2019), the participants got access to one of the three selected apps, and no further game design elements were added. During the second month (January 2020), game design elements that trigger the intrinsic motivation were added by the researcher (tips, data-driven reports, and a happy holiday e-card). During the third month (February 2020), elements which trigger the extrinsic motivation were added (competition, leaderboard, and prizes).These elements can have a different effect on each individual participant, and to make the experiment even more interesting, the participants were sorted into three groups, all with a different social connection to each other. One group consisted of 11 households that lived in the same apartment building, one group with nine participants consisted of friends of the researcher, and the nine participants in the last group did not have a social connection with each other. During the experiment, it was monitored whether these participants are affected by others in their group. This creates an exciting experiment with a 3x3 design, three different energy apps, three months to test different types of motivation, and three different social groups. The experiment only focused on electricity consumption since not all of the participants use natural gas for heating.
The electricity consumption of the participants is compared to their consumption in the same period last year. Over the whole three-month period and all participants combined, the data shows a decrease in consumption of 3.2%, if the most extreme participant is excluded (+74%). All three months, the neighbors group shows the best result, with an impressive average decrease in electricity consumption of 9.7%. The group without a connection shows a decrease of 5.7%, and the friends group an increase of 6.8%. Of the three different apps, the participants that used the most gamified app, Smappee (used by three participants in each social group), show an impressive average decrease in consumption of 7.9%, compared to a decrease of 3.7% for the Smart Dodos app, and an increase of 13% by the U-meter app users. All data obtained during the experiment was cross-checked with a survey before and after the experiment. These surveys reveal that participants found that the competition, leaderboard, and tips game design elements were most motivating. Also, 28 of the 29 participants think game design elements can cause people to deal more consciously with electricity. An interesting result that shows that energy apps and game design can help in reducing the energy consumption of households. Hopefully, this result inspires researchers to conduct similar larger-scale experiments, because due to the small sample size, it is impossible to draw definite conclusions. | |
