A new era of gamified financial applications: What does it mean?

A new era of gamified financial applications: What does it mean?

A new era of gamified financial applications: What does it mean?

By Florian Istrefi & Tim de Verdier Below

Abstract

“Background: We are seeing that both the field of gamification and the mobile financial application industry are growing at a rapid pace, without any indication of it declining. Businesses are implementing gamification in their platforms to motivate their users to use their applications and differentiate themselves from competitors. Purpose: This research aims to explore how gamification can influence the user's motivation in mobile financial applications. Previous literature has shown that gamification can have different outcomes on user motivation depending on what kind of environment it is implemented in and not have the desired outcome organisation anticipates it to have. Even though there is clear evidence that MFA is starting to gamify their applications, there is no study investigating how this influences the user's motivations. Method: The research follows a relativist ontology with a social constructionist epistemology and exploratory qualitative theory. In total, 13 interviews were collected through the empirical data with participants using an MFA. The participants consisted of consumers of young adults between 20-30 years old that were active users of an MFA that were sampled by using a purposive sampling method. A thematic analysis was used. Findings: The findings presented how several game elements could influence the user motivation in the context of MFA, each of these game elements where after analysed through the Octalysis framework and the STD to further illustrate how each game element can activate key core drivers in the Octalysis framework as well as the users Intrinsic and 3 Extrinsic motivation. It was found that game elements that were Progress and Goal, Social, Notification, Exploration, and Reward oriented had a strong impact on users' motivation by intrinsically motivating them. Competition oriented game element leaderboard was not seen to motivate the users intrinsically or extrinsically, however, other forms of competitions that fulfilled some criteria were seen to extrinsically motivate them.”

Reference

Istrefi, F., & Verdir Below, T. D. (2022, May). National Fire Regulations for the use of wood in buildings - diva portal. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1653744/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Keyword

Gamification, financial, applications, businesses, competitors, research