Gamification is the use of game elements and mechanics in non-game contexts to motivate and engage users. It can be applied to various domains, such as education, health, marketing, and social media. But how do you test whether your gamified solution is usable, effective, and enjoyable for your target audience? Here are some tips and methods to help you conduct usability testing for gamification.
Before you start testing, you need to define what you want to achieve with gamification and how you will measure it. For example, do you want to increase user retention, engagement, learning, or behavior change? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your goals? How will you collect and analyze data from your users? Having clear and specific goals will help you design your gamification strategy and your usability testing plan.
Defining s.m.a.r.t (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) would be far more useful than KPI's as kpis can be too rigid for testing especially if your using customer feelings or single metrics (like amount of sales, or even MAU or DAU (monthly active users/ Daily) which can be affected by other factors outside of your control, depending on your demographic e.g school holidays can artificially raise your DAU and affect your MAU as your customers have more free time or conversly lower those same metrics.
Testing usability in gamification requires different methods and tools, depending on the goals, budget, and resources. Surveys and questionnaires are easy and inexpensive ways to gather feedback from a large number of users. Interviews and focus groups are more in-depth and qualitative ways to explore user opinions, attitudes, and emotions. Observations and recordings are direct and objective ways to observe user behavior and interaction with your gamified solution. A/B testing and experiments are rigorous and scientific ways to compare different versions of your gamified solution or different game elements and mechanics. All these techniques can help you measure the impact of various variables on your KPIs such as retention, engagement, learning, or behavior change.
Ive found that surveys are far less effective than people think, they can give a skewed view unless very carefully crafted. If you wish to go down this route seek expert guidance on both the wording, format and analysis of customer surveys. My preferred approach is to use data driven events to gauge customer satisfaction within an app or website, as each event is used events are triggered allowing you to see how often a function or flow is used, combined with tools like google analytics or firebase sdk quite a lot of insights can be gathered like time on the page/screen, user flow replays and conversion metrics.
To get reliable and valid results from your usability testing, you need to recruit participants who represent your target audience. You need to consider factors such as age, gender, education, culture, interests, and gaming experience. You also need to decide how many participants you need, depending on your methods, goals, and resources. Generally, you want to have enough participants to get meaningful insights, but not too many to waste time and money. A common rule of thumb is to have at least 5 participants for qualitative methods, such as interviews or observations, and at least 30 participants for quantitative methods, such as surveys or experiments.
I would start by building customer persona's to then look at participant groups instead of shallow metrics like age, gender etc. You want your participant group to reflect app not a population group, Eg, Sarah the hardcore gamer and bob the gamer while I commute.
Once you have your goals, methods, and participants ready, you can conduct your usability testing. You need to prepare your gamified solution, your testing environment, your testing materials, and your testing protocol. You also need to obtain informed consent from your participants, and ensure that you respect their privacy and confidentiality. You need to follow your testing plan, but also be flexible and adaptable to any unexpected issues or opportunities. You need to collect and record data from your participants, such as their responses, actions, or reactions.
You should also carefully consider privacy and the respective laws and regulations, if your app us global seek expert advice to ensure you abide by the correct laws, GDPR, CCPA etc can be tricky to navigate you should also consider potential value of question line gender to your outcome, if you don't actually need (I mean really need, not because one if the team thinks it would be interesting) , don't ask it. This saves you from a lot of hot water.
After you finish your testing, you need to analyze your data and draw conclusions. You need to organize, clean, and code your data, and use appropriate statistical or qualitative techniques to analyze them. You need to look for patterns, trends, outliers, and correlations in your data, and compare them to your goals and expectations. You need to interpret your results and explain what they mean for your gamified solution. You need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your gamified solution, and suggest recommendations for improvement.
Usability testing is a crucial step in the design and development of gamified solutions. It can help you evaluate whether your gamified solution is usable, effective, and enjoyable for your target audience, and how you can improve it. By following these tips and methods, you can conduct usability testing for gamification and create better user experiences.