Speaker: Qiqi Jiang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School

Time: 10:00-11:30 July 11th, 2019

Venue: Tongji Building Block A Room 309 

Abstract:

Despite the rapid growth of the fitness mobile app market, fitness app companies face the problem of a significant number of poorly motivated, inactive users. In practice, gamification, especially story-based gamification, has been widely adopted as an effective approach to increase system use and reduce user churn. However, prior research suggests that gamification can result in positive and negative behavioral outcomes, and it remains unclear how to craft a gamified fitness app to maximize its effectiveness in promoting use. Moreover, previous studies mainly emphasized designs focusing on rewarding mechanics (e.g., points, badges, and leaderboards) and narrative mechanics (e.g., storytelling) but did not comprehensively investigate the role of social interaction mechanisms (SIMs) in gamification design. In this study, we focused on the influences of various SIMs (i.e., competition, cooperation, and coopetition) on the frequency and duration of users’ app use. Using a custom-developed mobile app for the Chinese market, Fitness Castle, we conducted a 2 × 2 longitudinal field experiment and examined the effectiveness of competition and cooperation among users in a gamified fitness app. The results indicate that competitive game mechanics have a significant positive influence on fitness app use. In addition, when a gamified system is purely cooperative, users are not more motivated to use the app more often; however, when competitive and cooperative mechanisms are jointly provided, system use significantly increases. Should these results hold, they point to the need to fundamentally rethink gamification app design for the fitness market around fostering more coopetition.

Speaker’s Bio:

Qiqi Jiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School. He obtained his PhD degree from Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, and a master’s degree from ETH Zurich. His research interests include IT-enabled innovation (e.g. open-source software community, mobile app marketplace, and crowdfunding platform), strategic impacts of information technology, and IT design and evaluation. His research has appeared, or will appear, in several reputable IS journals and conferences, such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Information & Management, among many others.