Tailoring Engagement: Personalized Gamification for Financial Apps

Personalized gamification explores knowledge about the users to tailor gamification designs to improve one-size-fits-all gamification. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity to be done and geographic location), which leads to several occasions to tailor. Consequently, tools for automating gamification personalization are needed.

The problems that emerge are that which of those characteristics are relevant and how to do such tailoring are open questions, and that the required automating tools are lacking. We tackled these problems in two steps. First, we conducted an exploratory study, collecting participants’ opinions on the game elements they consider the most useful for different learning activity types (LAT) via survey. Then, we modeled opinions through conditional decision trees to address the aforementioned tailoring process. Second, as a product from the first step, we implemented a recommender system that suggests personalized gamification designs (which game elements to use), addressing the problem of automating gamification personalization. Our findings i) present empirical evidence that LAT, geographic locations, and other user characteristics affect users’ preferences, ii) enable defining gamification designs tailored to user and contextual features simultaneously, and iii) provide technological aid for those interested in designing personalized gamification." (Rodrigues et al., 2021).

One of the biggest trends in design right now is the gamification of industries that have historically lacked this aspect. This article is particularly interesting when thinking about the future of online banking, as it discusses how personalized gamification can influence the experience and behavior of a user. One of the main takeaways from the article is how a one-size-fits-all approach to the gamification of a system can become inefficient in providing useful and productive results and engagement. However, if there is a shift to the gamification process so it becomes custom-tailored to the individual users and their specific needs and preferences, it can increase motivation and engagement with the system.

In the context of online banking apps, this can be implemented through the use of savings challenges, rewards, and notifications that have been tailored to the user. This article provides helpful insights into how the personalization of an experience can shape engagement and behavior towards a product.

References:

Rodrigues, L., Toda, A. M., Oliveira, W., Palomino, P. T., Vassileva, J., & Isotani, S. (2021). Automating gamification personalization: To the user and beyond. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05718

Ai was used to create the title of the article