The Goal

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact planning product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The product will be a desktop website and mobile app that will recommend a set of actions that ordinary citizens can take to avoid, mitigate, adapt, or rebuild from climate change disasters.

In order to make it attractive and fun to use, we have been advised to add a gamification feature (points, badges, levels, social feedback, etc) to the proposed mobile and desktop applications. The feature design has not been worked out at all, but it might provide points for doing actions in your house to protect against climate disaster, helping out in your local area, being given badges for being prepared for a certain type of disaster, etc.

Potential considerations for the gamifying feature man include, but are not limited to:

• An increase in completed citizen climate actions
• An increase in citizen usage of the in-app action tracking and reporting
• An increase in citizen contribution to community action projects
• An increase in the average time spent per user session
• Identifying which badges, and rewards should be competitive and which should be co-operative
• Identifying if any badges are national, provincial, or local/community
• Identifying which badge levels are available and how the process works
• Identifying which kind of social feedback is available and how the process works

Before investing time and money in developing such a feature, we would like assistance researching and preparing a business case for the gamification feature, including research for likely implementation and ongoing administration costs, ROI, user experience improvements, and other analysis. As a stretch goal, you can look at gamification business cases to identify the costs of using commercially-available off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions vs customized development, and propose a high level implementation plan to roll out gamification feature in our application.

Your Contribution

We would like you research the various gamification concepts, trends, issues, and solutions that are used in web and mobile apps such as FitBit, Facebook, video games, etc...then make a well-reasoned, thorough, and well-referenced business case, for why a customized gamification system would benefit our future climate change product (or not!).

The primary goal is producing a business case however in order to support that we would need to evaluate the implementation costs. Therefore we would also like to understand how others have gone about implementing gamification, the cost and availability of COTS vs custom solutions, and what kind of high level project plan is needed to roll out this feature (this assumes the business case would justify it).

At the start of the project we will provide a walk-through of our prototype site and content. We will also provide a wealth of background material on the application, its overall business case, goals and objectives, and even detailed psychographic surveys and other recommendations behind the proposed gamification feature.