Gamification in Nutrition Apps – Users’ Gamification Element Preferences: A Best-Worst-Scaling Approach

Abstract

An unhealthy diet has become a leading risk factor for many diseases. The use of gamification elements (GEs) in nutrition apps offers a promising approach to change the eating habit. But, the design of GEs is often insufficient, leading to low user retention. Hence, the consideration of the underlying context and the target users' preferences is essential. By conducting a survey with 220 possible users following the best-worst-scaling method, we found that goals, performance graphs, progress bars, rewards, and levels were the most preferred GEs in nutrition context. Leaderboards, narratives, social interaction, and badges were less desired. On average, five elements are perceived as optimal by most survey participants. Compared to users' preferences in education and physical activity contexts, similarities, but also differences, were found. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of contextual differences of GE preferences and provide starting points for further research on gamification.

Be Mindful of User Preferences: An Explorative Study on Game Design Elements in Mindfulness Applications

“…The stream of literature that is closest to our study consists of studies that have explicitly investigated users' GDE preferences linked to an application context but independent of specific systems or user groups. To the best of our knowledge, three such studies exist: in the contexts of PA (Schmidt-Kraepelin et al, 2019a), nutrition (Berger & Jung, 2021), and learning management systems (Schöbel et al, 2016). However, given the context-sensitivity of gamification (Koivisto & Hamari, 2019;Nacke & Deterding, 2017) and the peculiarities of the mindfulness context, the results of these studies are unlikely transferable.…”

“…In line with extant research on GDE preferences (Berger & Jung, 2021;Schmidt-Kraepelin et al, 2019a;Schöbel et al, 2016), we conducted a scenario-based online survey informed by the BWS approach to elicit 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15914.29122 users' GDE preferences in MAs. In doing so, we aimed to make our findings comparable and contribute to discussions on the context-sensitivity of gamification.…”

“…(1) extant literature reviews regarding gamification in mindfulness and related contexts like stress management or cognitive behavioral therapy (Brown et al, 2016;Cheng et al, 2019;Hoffmann et al, 2017); (2) the chosen GDEs of previous BWS studies on users' GDE preferences in health-related contexts (Berger & Jung, 2021;Schmidt-Kraepelin et al, 2019a). We had to limit our study to the ten most relevant GDEs to ensure feasibility because the number of required CSs depends on the number of incorporated objects.…”

“…Several studies have provided valuable information on users' GDE preferences in different contexts, such as healthy nutrition (Berger & Jung, 2021), physical activity (PA) (Schmidt-Kraepelin et al, 2019a), and learning management systems (Schöbel et al, 2016). Nevertheless, the insights on user preferences in these contexts are not easily transferable for the effective design of gamified MAs as the context has some special requirements regarding user-system interactions.…”

User Preferences for Gamification Elements in Smartwatch Fitness Applications

“…Designers should not blindly copy gamification elements commonly used on mobile phones onto smartwatches. Moreover, users have different preferences for gamification elements in different contexts [1]. Therefore, how should designers better apply gamification to fitness applications on smartwatches and what gamification elements should be adopted to attract different kinds of users?…”