Application of Gamification to Online Survey Forms: Development of Digital Template System “Bingo Survey” and Evaluation

Nowadays, online surveys are commonly used in business and academic contexts with the widespread use of digital devices. However, problems around online surveys, such as reliability issues and frequent withdrawals of respondents have also been reported. Previous studies suggest that gamification is one of the effective solutions to these problems, and it was reported that gamified online surveys were beneficial in increasing respondents' motivation, response rates, and quality of responses. Despite the benefits, previous studies also pointed out that making a gamified survey took a lot of effort, and in some cases, game elements lowered the quality of responses. This study aims to develop a template system for gamified online survey forms and approach these problems. We applied an interactive digital Bingo game to online survey forms, with some other gamification elements such as instant feedback, score, and ranking. The system “Bingo Survey” was a digital template system for making a gamified online survey form. It was developed with TypeScript, React, and AWS Amplify. An experiment was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the suggested system. 62 participants participated in the experiment. Each participant accessed online questionnaire form. Several conditions were set to compare forms made through our template system and traditional online survey forms. Participants, randomly divided into the conditions, answered experimental online questionnaires, and evaluated the effectiveness of the online survey form. As a result, the forms made with the suggested system were highly evaluated than the traditional online survey forms, for their enjoyability, effects for increasing motivation, and higher response rates for optional free comment sections. Furthermore, it was noticed that there were no significant differences regarding the quality of response values in the experimental questionnaires between the conditions.