Attracting is easy, retaining is gamification: an undergraduate thesis fights churn in an academic social network
Tiago Ribeiro de Assunção defended at UnB Gama an undergraduate thesis applying gamification to the About Social Network to fight its weak spot: the network attracts new users easily but fails to retain them.
Brasília, December 21, 2017
Every social network lives with the same dilemma: what triggers the first click is rarely what sustains the tenth. The undergraduate thesis defended in December 2017 by Tiago Ribeiro de Assunção targets exactly this churn curve in the About Social Network — a project created by a UnB student — by applying gamification as a retention strategy. The work was advised by Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas .
The work departs from an honest diagnosis: the About Social Network motivates users to start using it, but does not keep them. It is a classic product-design problem disguised as a technical one. Rather than rewrite the network, the author proposes adding a gamification layer — mechanics carefully chosen to engage users in actions that create value for the network as a whole.
The research touches two important points. First, it tests the hypothesis that gamification can help extend the lifecycle of interactive applications — a bet that stretches far beyond social networks. Second, it explores the pairing of Gamification and social dynamics , a field where motivating from within is always harder than scoring from the outside.
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.