Gamification in theory and action: A survey

Gamification has drawn the attention of academics, practitioners and business professionals in domains as diverse as education, information studies, human–computer interaction, and health. As yet, the term remains mired in diverse meanings and contradictory uses, while the concept faces division on its academic worth, underdeveloped theoretical foundations, and a dearth of standardized guidelines for application. Despite widespread commentary on its merits and shortcomings, little empirical work has sought to validate gamification as a meaningful concept and provide evidence of its effectiveness as a tool for motivating and engaging users in non-entertainment contexts. Moreover, no work to date has surveyed gamification as a field of study from a human–computer studies perspective. In this paper, we present a systematic survey on the use of gamification in published theoretical reviews and research papers involving interactive systems and human participants. We outline current theoretical understandings of gamification and draw comparisons to related approaches, including alternate reality games (ARGs), games with a purpose (GWAPs), and gameful design. We present a multidisciplinary review of gamification in action, focusing on empirical findings related to purpose and context, design of systems, approaches and techniques, and user impact. Findings from the survey show that a standard conceptualization of gamification is emerging against a growing backdrop of empirical participants-based research. However, definitional subjectivity, diverse or unstated theoretical foundations, incongruities among empirical findings, and inadequate experimental design remain matters of concern. We discuss how gamification may to be more usefully presented as a subset of a larger effort to improve the user experience of interactive systems through gameful design. We end by suggesting points of departure for continued empirical investigations of gamified practice and its effects.     

An Exploratory Study of Data Sketching for Visual Representation

Hand‐drawn sketching on napkins or whiteboards is a common, accessible method for generating visual representations. This practice is shared by experts and non‐experts and is probably one of the faster and more expressive ways to draft a visual representation of data. In order to better understand the types of and variations in what people produce when sketching data, we conducted a qualitative study. We asked people with varying degrees of visualization expertise, from novices to experts, to manually sketch representations of a small, easily understandable dataset using pencils and paper and to report on what they learned or found interesting about the data. From this study, we extract a data sketching representation continuum from numeracy to abstraction; a data report spectrum from individual data items to speculative data hypothesis; and show the correspondence between the representation types and the data reports from our results set. From these observations we discuss the participants’ representations in relation to their data reports, indicating implications for design and potentially fruitful directions for research.     

Towards a smooth design process for static communicative node‐link diagrams

Node‐link infographics are visually very rich and can communicate messages effectively, but can be very difficult to create, often involving a painstaking and artisanal process. In this paper we present an investigation of node‐link visualizations for communication and how to better support their creation. We begin by breaking down these images into their basic elements and analyzing how they are created. We then present a set of techniques aimed at improving the creation workflow by bringing more flexibility and power to users, letting them manipulate all aspects of a node‐link diagram (layout, visual attributes, etc.) while taking into account the context in which it will appear. These techniques were implemented in a proof‐of‐concept prototype called GraphCoiffure, which was designed as an intermediary step between graph drawing/editing software and image authoring applications. We describe how GraphCoiffure improves the workflow and illustrate its benefits through practical examples.     

Use and non‐use of VDTs—organization of terminal work: Research findings from Swedish cross‐site studies in the field of office automation

A group of users in Copenhagen were asked to evaluate how important a number of user interface characteristics were for them. The results show high importance of efficient daily use and of possibilities for exploratory learning while tutorial materials were of less importance. Users also were asked to evaluate four usability aspects of a number of popular programs. Results show that the quality pleasant to work with has the largest impact on evaluations of overall user‐friendliness while users seem able to view usability independently from the number of features in an application.     

MTi: A method for user identification for multitouch displays

This paper describes MTi, a biometric method for user identification on multitouch displays. The method is based on features obtained only from the coordinates of the 5 touchpoints of one of the user's hands. This makes MTi applicable to all multitouch displays large enough to accommodate a human hand and detect 5 or more touchpoints without requiring additional hardware and regardless of the display's underlying sensing technology. MTi only requests that the user places his hand on the display with the fingers comfortably stretched apart. A dataset of 34 users was created on which our method reported 94.69% identification accuracy. The method's scalability was tested on a subset of the Bosphorus hand database (100 users, 94.33% identification accuracy) and a usability study was performed.     

Ethnography of Novices' First Use of Web Search Engines

Abstract

Without prior searching instruction, undergraduate novices wrote structured self-reports during their first session on a Web search engine. Users chose their own topics and followed written instructions that prompted them to describe thoughts and feelings during specified stages of the search: pre-search formulation; search statement formulation; search strategy; and evaluation of results. The sentences in the self-reports were numbered and then coded according to their affective or cognitive function. The affective sentences reveal how users set goals and limit the scope of the cognitive operations. Search acts appear to be governed by an affective filter that organizes incoming information and provides criteria for ranking cognitive relevance to search goal. The cognitive sentences reveal a variety of operations in executing searches. Following the search, students made self-ratings on self-confidence as searchers and satisfaction with the search experience, with explanations of their ratings. Content analysis identified reasons users have for rating self-confidence, stress level, satisfaction, usefulness, and success with future searches.     

Researching Recent U.S. Legislation Using Free Sites on the Internet

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of gender, college status, and prior Internet experience on the use of Internet resources. The subjects were 96 patrons randomly selected from those using the Internet terminals at the University Library of the University at Albany, SUNY, during the first two months of 1995. We found that the majority of users shared the following characteristics: they are male undergraduates affiliated with the social sciences and are novice users who have less than six months experience. Respondents felt strongly that the Internet is useful, and has been an important resource for their research and assignments. Users have high expectations of searching capabilities, while they feel neutral or disappointed with browsing. Our findings indicate that libraries should provide access to the Internet. They also suggest that libraries should take the lead in developing searchable indexes and making info-bases better organized for the ease and effectiveness of browsing.     

一种基于人工免疫技术的存储异常检测系统

绝大部分认证子系统无法保证账户的真实性,它会将冒用盗窃账户的入侵者视为‘合法’用户。为了过滤这类非法用户,存储安全子系统必须进行访问行为诊断。为了增强存储预警能力,提出一种基于人工免疫的异常检测方案来监控用户的访问行为。若一个访问请求违反了访问控制规则,它就被视为‘异己’,从而给存储安全子系统提供一些警告提示。本方案(Storage Anomaly Detection System,SADS)针对存储层的入侵检测,并关注读/写数据请求,同时与网络入侵检测系统协同构筑了两层检测体系。仿真结果显示,SADS能达到相当高的检测率和较低的误警率,验证了方案可行性。而开销测试表明,SADS子模块的时间开销是可接受的(如对3MB的数据,其开销控制在11.6%以内)。