Modeling user types changes in gamified systems

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Ana Cláudia Guimarães
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Gamificação; Gamification; Modelagem de usuário; Perfil de usuário; Personalização; Personalization; User modeling; User profile
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/55/55134/tde-02102023-164837/

In recent years, gamification (i.e., the design of systems, services, and activities to provide motivation benefits as those games usually create) has been applied in several domains seeking to improve user experience. The success of applying this strategy, however, relies on several aspects (e.g., user profiles) and on how the gamification design is implemented. Even though over the years different studies have proposed and validated user models (e.g., Bartle, BrainHex, and Hexad) to represent the different user profiles in games and gamified settings, little is known about whether and how these user profiles change over time and consequently influences in the results of applying these user models in practice (e.g., to personalize gamified systems). To address this problem, this research aims to analyze how the user types from the Hexad model, the most indicated model to personalize gamification, can change after six months of the first evaluation, and how it is possible to model user profiles based on these changes. To achieve these goals, this research focused on three main aspects: i) Analysis of the psychometric properties of the Hexad scale in Brazilian Portuguese; ii) Analysis of the stability of the Hexad user types after six months and how the user profile changed based on the first evaluation; and iii) analyses of the impact the Hexad user types have on the gamification design. Based on six studies, this research indicated that the profiles from the Hexad model can not be considered stable over time, that they influence the gamification design, and also influence the user profile modeling on gamified systems. Apart from the indication of improvements needed to be made in the Brazilian version of the Hexad scale and that some profiles can be more stable than others, this research contributes to the academics and practitioners with sets of recommendations on how to model user profiles in gamified systems, and with the indication of new studies that can be conducted in the personalized gamification field.