Insights from VazaZika Developers on Gamified Public Health Software

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2. Background and Related Work and 2.1. Gamification

2.2. Game Design Elements and 2.3. Gamification Effects

2.4. Related Work on Gamification Negative Effects

3. Systematic Mapping and 3.1. The Research Questions

3.2. Search Strategy and 3.3. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

3.4. Applying the Search Strategy

3.5. Data Extraction

4. Systematic Mapping Results

5. Focus Group: Developer Perception on the Negative Effects of Game Design Elements

5.1. Context and Participant Characterization

5.2. Focus Group Design

5.3. The Developers’ Perception on The Negative Effects

5.4. On the Perceived Usefulness, Ease of use and Intent of Adoption of Mapped Negative Effects

5.5. Participant Feedback

6. Limitations

7. Concluding Remarks

7.1. Future Research Directions

Acknowledgements and References

5.1. Context and Participant Characterization

We decided to conduct our focus group with experienced developers of the VazaZika development team [111, 112]. The VazaZika is a gamified software that encourages policies of education in public health concerning the prevention of mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika, Dengue, and Chikungunya. VazaZika aims to address the need for constantly reporting mosquito breeding sites. By using 12 game design elements (avatar, badge, challenge, comment, level, notification, point, ranking, social activity, social sharing, team and vote) and 16 game rules that reward citizens by reporting mosquito breeding sites the software successfully promote the collaborative work of citizens towards disease prevention, a fruitful competition among citizens, at the same time that improving the quality of reported mosquito breeding sites [111, 112].

The VazaZika software resulted from an international research project entitled Leveraging GamiFIcation and Social Networks for Improving Prevention and Control of Zika [111, 112]. This project was performed by researchers in Software Engineering and Data Analytics from Brazil and the United Kingdom (UK). A total of 25 members participated in the project: one project manager; four development team leaders; 15 software developers, including the team leaders, distributed in two Brazilian cities, each with at least one developer per team; and seven senior researchers, five from Brazil and two from the UK. The project counted on the active contribution of a dozen Brazilian public health agents, which assisted many development activities.

From 15 software developers of the VazaZika development team, we successfully recruited four developers, including two team leaders. Table 16 provides a general view on the participants background. We have collected the table data from an online Participant Characterization Form, which we sent to participants minutes before the start of the focus group session. The team leaders are marked in Table 16 with the symbol (*).

By observing Table 16, we can see that all participants have a high education level, all of them having a PhD in Computer Science. Also, all participants have at least ten years of experience with software development and have been involved with at least six software projects. Finally, two participants reported a high level of knowledge in gamification and game design elements (P1 and P2), and two others reported a very low (P3) and low (P4) level of knowledge. Thus, we assume that we have a balanced set of participants in terms of expertise on the specific topic. It is noteworthy that all of them actively participated as developers (or technical team lead - in the case of P1 and P2) in the gamification of the VazaZika software.