Measure to engage: an undergraduate thesis proposes a strategy to improve gamified applications
Paulo Markes Rodrigues de Oliveira Calado defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis developing a strategy to identify improvement opportunities in gamified applications — tackling the problem that the initial shine does not always translate into prolonged use.
Brasília, August 2018
Every gamified product opens with a promise: to keep the user’s attention amid the barrage of notifications competing for their seconds. Delivering that promise is another story — and it is that gap between design and practice that motivates the undergraduate thesis defended by Paulo Markes Rodrigues de Oliveira Calado in August 2018 at FCTE/UnB, under the advising of Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas .
The work begins with an uncomfortable fact: adoption of a new technology happens as fast as its abandonment. Without instruments to observe what is or is not working in a gamified application, product teams navigate in the dark. The author’s proposal offers a systematic strategy to identify these improvement opportunities — combining measurable indicators, behavior analysis, and alignment with the original gamification goals.
The work speaks directly to Gamification and to requirements engineering , articulating what is rarely discussed jointly: how to turn usage feedback into concrete design decisions across the product lifecycle.
Part of the research trajectory sustaining this thesis appears in the paper Gamification in education: A methodology to identify student’s profile, published at 2017 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2017, Indianapolis). The paper introduces the motivational profiling methodology that anchors the analysis carried out in the thesis.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions with strong presence in Gamification .