Gamification Impact on Duration, User Engagement and Return rate for a Mobile Application.

Abstract

Two models of the mobile application, Plants 4 Consumers, are compared in return rate, duration, and user engagement. The first model contains features such as virtual planting and recipe browsing. The second model contains all the features of the first model, but in addition, includes 3 mini-games, with inspirations from whack-a-mole, flappy bird, and minesweepers. For analysis, a comparison of dwell-time (duration), user engagement and return rate is drawn. The impact of the games’ factors was analysed with the GUESS questionnaire. The purpose of this project is to answer the questions: (i) Does gamification increase users’ duration, user engagement and return rate? (ii) Which key factors of gamification in the GUESS scale impacted the users’ duration, user engagement and return rate? And (iii) which key factors can be improved for future research? 30 participants (n=30) took part in the experiment. 15 participants took part in the non-gamified version of Plants 4 Consumers, and another 15 for the gamified version. Normality tests were conducted to find the distributions of each dataset, follow by inferential tests based on whether the datasets were normally distributed. Significant differences were found between the non-gamified and gamified in duration and return rate. No significance could be concluded in user engagement.