Prototyping Gamification Apps Using Board Games: A Case Study of Muscle Stretching App

Abstract

This study uses a self-development gamified health-related app, “Work? Out!” as an example. To set up two experimental devices: the App prototype (Hi-Fi prototype) and the Board game prototype (Lo-Fi prototype), and to test them respectively. This research is intended to measure the differences between the two devices in game experience and the satisfaction of game elements. Also, it analyzes the demand attribute of the user to game elements, the optimal order of game elements, and the correspondence between game elements and game experience. The research results show that the “board game prototype” can help the “App prototype” usability test to verify the gamification strategy in the early stage of design. In the “game experience” measurement, the performance of the two groups was very similar, and there was no significant difference in the six measurement factors (P value > 0.05). “Game Element Satisfaction” shows that “App Prototype” is generally better than “Board Game Prototype”. According to the Analysis of variance (ANOVA), only two game elements have significant differences, which need to be paid special attention to. Although there are obvious differences in the “demand attributes of game elements for users” and the “ “optimized ranking of game elements”, there is still a similarity of nearly 60%. This study found 6 elements with the same attributes in the two groups, which can be used for the optimization of “App Prototype”.