Exploiting Motivation Subscales for Gamification of Lifelogging Application

Introduction

Among the many web services available today, there are lifelogging services in which humans take the initiative in entering their daily records. The primary purpose is to provide a data review of the user’s daily activities and use the data for self-management and life improvement. Continuous data input is essential for lifelogging services because the data population determines the utility of the service. Therefore, it is ideal to have more users continue to use the system. However, continuity depends mainly on the motivation of the users themselves. There is a problem that users stop using the service due to boredom, tediousness, and lack of visibility of the effects of the service. Therefore, various studies (Narumi et al., 2015; Tosa et al., 2012) introduce gamification (Matallaoui et al., 2016; Hungerbuehler et al., 2021; Moldon et al., 2021) into lifelogging services to promote motivation toward a specific purpose, such as improving motivation for input continuity.

However, in existing studies, gamification was introduced without a deep discussion of the rationale for its application, and only specific gamification features were introduced and evaluated in specific applications. As a result, the problem remains that it is not clear which gamification features are practical for the application’s purpose and which gamification features have led to increased motivation. For this, the authors aimed to develop a method to introduce gamification according to the purpose of lifelogging and to elucidate what kind of gamification features effectively increased motivation for lifelogging. In particular, the motivation that it set contributed to the continuous recording as the target.

The key idea is to introduce gamification features based on five different motivation subscales (Tanouri et al., 2021) into Work Support Service (WSS), a lifelogging service that can create it to record work. By observing which motivation subscales contribute to the continuity of the WSS, the authors solved the traditional technical problem of not knowing which motivation subscales were effective for lifelogging. Moreover, the authors developed a practical gamification feature to improve motivation and contribute to the further development of lifelogging. The authors addressed the following approaches to achieve the objectives of this study:

• A1: Experimental evaluation of the regular version of WSS

• A2: Implement and deploy five types of gamification features in WSS

• A3: Experimental evaluation of gamification version of WSS

• A4: Evaluating the effectiveness of gamification implementation

First, in A1, subjects were asked to use the regular version of the WSS without gamification for one week, and logs of the work recorded in the WSS were collected. In addition, at the end of the experimental period, the participants were asked to answer a questionnaire that asked them to rate the SQuaRE -based evaluation index (Nakamura, 2017) on a 5-point scale and to provide the rationale for their answers.

Second, A2 implemented and introduced a gamification feature based on the five subscales of motivation (i.e., intrinsic motivation, introjected regulation, integrated regulation, identified regulation, and external regulation) in the WSS. Specifically, the following gamification features were implemented in the WSS: look back, continuous login record, ranking, target work time setting, and grading in meetings.