Impact of Gamification on usability and engagement with regards to a financial savings application

Abstract: The implementation of game elements has quintessentially uplifted the overall experience of applications in various domains and thereby expanding the customer base. This process is called gamification which has now been introduced in many domains. The purpose of the study is to understand gamification and how its impact would be if it is deployed in a financial savings application. The gamified elements are implemented based on a gamification framework called the Octalysis framework1. This Octalysis framework is a human-centric gamification framework which serves as a template to implement the required gamified elements. Based on a pre-study of financial applications and the Octalysis framework, two distinct prototypes (Version A and Version B) of the same mobile app concept were developed where the difference is the presence of gamified elements in one prototype. The evaluation is based on analyzing the impact the gamified elements have caused on the usability and the emotional engagement of the financial savings application. The participants are provided to interact with both prototypes and interviews are conducted to evaluate the emotional engagement and the usability of both the prototypes of the financial savings application. The study shows an increase in emotional engagement corresponding to the gamified elements whereas the usability more or less remained the same, indicating a deeper investigation of the gamified elements with regards to usability is required.