Challenges for the Gamification of Incident Reporting Systems

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Toulouse, France, September 4-6, 2012
Fun and Games’2012 | POSTERS
Challenges for the Gamification of Incident Reporting
Systems
Cédric Bach, Marco Winckler,
Bastien Gatellier
Regina Bernhaupt
User Experience Lab Ruwido
Salzburg, Austria
[email protected]
ICS-IRIT Univerty Paul Sabatier
118 route de Narbonne
31062Toulouse, France
[cedric.bach, winckler, gatellier]@irit.fr
ABSTRACT
reporting incidents, citizens can improve their quality of life
by influencing the quality of their environment. Figure 1
illustrates the overall scenario we are investigated in the
Ubilloop project.
This paper reports our ongoing work concerning the study
and development of mobile applications for supporting
incident reporting in cities. We provide a view at glance of
incident reporting systems and the tools that we have
developed so far in the context of the project FEDER
Ubiloop. Our main goal is to explore the potential of mobile
games for improving the overall user experience (UX)
whilst reporting incidents which is often considered a dull
and boring activity. On one hand, we want to make the task
of incident reporting a nice and positive experience to users.
On the other hand, we want to stimulate citizens to report
incidents in their neighborhood so that the city
administration would be better coverage of problems that
should be taken into account to improve the quality of life
in the city. More than a definitive solution, this paper
identifies alternatives and discusses the challenges for the
“gamification” of incident reporting systems.
Author Keywords
Incident reporting, User experience, mobile applications.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces: Collaborative
computing.
Figure 1 Overview of incident reporting with Ubiloop: users
report incidents like potholes, tagging, or broken street lamps
to the local government using a mobile phone application.
General Terms
Human Factors, Design.
In a previous work [2] we have found that information
related to incidents can be associated to the following
dimensions: what the incident is about, when it occurs,
where it is located, who identifies the incident and the
expected outcomes leading to its solution. These
dimensions include optional and mandatory elements that
characterize incidents. For example, the dimension what
can include a combination of either a textual description, a
picture of the incident, or just an indication of the incident
category. Based on these early findings we developed a
prototype using the phonegap (http://phonegap.com)
framework, which makes the application available for many
smartphone platforms. Our prototype takes full benefits of
currently embedded technology available in smartphones
such as video camera and global positioning systems
(GPS). GPS makes the user’s task of locating incidents
easier and photos attached to the description of incidents
provide contextual information and in some situation might
INTRODUCTION
Incident reporting is a very well-known technique in
application domains such as air traffic management and
health, where specialized users are trained to provide
detailed information about problems. More recently, this
kind of technique has been used for crisis management such
as the hurricane Katrina [1]. In the context of the project
Ubiloop, we are investigating the use of mobile technology
for allowing citizens to report urban incidents in their
neighborhood that might affect their quality of life. By
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Fun and Games 2012, 4 – 6 September, Toulouse, France.
Copyright 2012 IRIT Press 978-2-917490-21-1.
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Toulouse, France, September 4-6, 2012
Fun and Games’2012 | POSTERS
be used as evidence of its occurrence. Figure 2 presents
shows screenshots of the Ubiloop prototype.
administration interests on types of incidents and or
incidents in specific geographic area.
Social aspects
a)
b)
A very interesting aspect of incident reporting systems is
that even those citizens that are not fond of reporting
incidents often declare to be interested in knowing what is
going around their neighborhood. This aspect can be used
for building a social game that could include social
awareness if users are allowed to see incidents reported by
other players. These social aspects should:
c)
 Encourage competition between citizens/players for
collecting points;
Figure 2 Ubiloop protoype featuring: a) main menu page; b)
textual description of incident; c) location on an iteactive map.
 Allow the creation of groups (or guilds) of players
according their personal affinities or geographical area;
This might create a feeling of awareness among citizens
that could be notified about real-world incidents reported
a group member;
The user interface of the Ubiloop prototype fulfills the most
basics requirements for the usability and it supports the
most important main users’ tasks for this kind of
application: i) to identify incidents occurring in their
neighbored; ii) to report new incidents; iii) obtain feedback
about reported incidents. Nonetheless, it remains a classic
example of user interaction with mobile phones. Giving the
fact that most users consider incident reporting a dull and
boring activity, we are currently looking for additional
features that can use used in the gamification of the Ubiloop
prototype so that we expect to provide citizens with a better
UX whilst reporting incidents.
 Reward most seen incidents; as this might be revealing of
citizens’ concerns about specific types/location of
incidents;
 Reward users that crosscheck incidents in real-life and
inform the community whether the problem has been
solved (or not yet);
 Implement reputation mechanisms for rewarding worthy
reporting incidents; For example, users could vote for
incident providing by other citizens that could earn/lose
points accordingly; In order to encourage people to vote,
voters might also receive additional points. Additional
points could be granted by city administration for
valuable incident reports. Many variables can be used to
calculate the reputation including the quality of
description, the precision of the location of the incident
and the degree of severity/danger/importance give to the
incident.
PLAYFUL ASPECTS OF INCIDENT REPORTING
Incident reporting systems such as Ubiloop feature several
playful aspects that can be exploited for creating different
types of games. The idea is transform citizens and users in
player so that the tasks associated with reporting incidents
can become a playful UX. Hereafter we present some
alternatives that we are looking at in the Ubiloop project.
Productivity aspects
Reporting an incident is a real-world task that can be
encouraged by rewarding citizens/players with points in the
game. The calculation of rewarding might include variable
such as:
 Take into account the users’ profile for defining trust and
reputation; for example, players can report incidents
anonymously, provide contact information without
identify, or have a full identity. The protection of players’
identity might be seen as two sides: other users/players
and the city administration.
 Number of incident reported;
 Frequency of reports; this is particular important to
motivate users to provide feedback on a long run;
Edutainment aspects
 Level of details provided (ex. providing a photo
illustrating the incident or providing the full address
might be subject of a bonus);
Incident reporting is associated with civic and legal values
in terms what citizens are allowed to do or not in their
environment. So that these elements can be used in the
games to:
 Different types of incidents can have different weights.
Easy to report and common incidents (e.g. graffiti) could
reward less than incidents that are rare or difficult to
report accurately (e.g. potholes).
 Show the consequences of incidents in real-life;
 Teach/learn laws and regulations associate to incidents;
These productive elements can be emphasized by
crowdsourcing specific incident reports. So that the number
of points granted might depend on specific city
 Inform about the penalties of causing incidents in real-life
(e.g. graffiti, parking in prohibited areas).
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Fun and Games’2012 | POSTERS
AN EXPERIMENTAL GAME: GEOLOCALIZEDPROBLEM
are recalled with user personal experience with realworld problems.
 Trust and privacy have a huge impact on the stimulation
of users to use the game. Anonymous incident report
protects user’s identity which might encourage incident
reporting from citizens that associate the act of reporting
as a public denunciation. However, anonymous reports
also favor spams and might decrease the overall trust on
reports provided.
 One of the most trick aspects of the game is that the game
should prevent to put users in risky situations. For
example, even if providing accurate location could be a
good principle for rewarding users, the game should not
encourage users to go next to a pothole in a road to
improve the accuracy of the geolocalization.
In order to explore some of these ideas we have proposed to
a group of master students in Informatics of University Paul
Sabatier to plan a game using the basic infrastructure
provided by the project Ubiloop. The resulting application
is “GeolocalizedProblem” that is shown by Figure 3. This
application was built on the top of an interactive map (build
using the google maps API) where users can see where
incidents have been located. The game is based on a
crowdsourcing and reputation. Users can see all incidents
include those reported by other users. Points are given
according to the number of incidents reported and the
quality of the description provided, which is judged by
other players. Figure 3 shows what happens when a user
selects a particular incident report. The arrows at Figure 3
indicates where are displayed the overall user score (1), the
different types of incidents users can report (2), attribution
of points by voting to an incident report (3), and bonus
granted for the photo attached to the description of the
incident (4).
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper provides a view at glance of the research and the
activities we are doing in the Ubiloop project. Despite the
gamification was not our primary goal, we are actually
exploring the alternatives for making of Ubiloop a game as
it could improve UX whilst reporting incidents. Moreover,
we believe that presenting Ubiloop as a game could
stimulate some citizens to report incidents to the city
administration. Nonetheless, our preliminary results show
that there are many social technical implications that
challenge the deployment of such kind of games in real-life
situations. Our next steps will be to explore these
challenges. We are planning some users studies in a
controlled usability lab to check some of our hypothesis
about the playability of games for reporting incident.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is part of the Ubiloop project partly funded by
the European Union. We thank our students X. Valrz, T.
Herito, Y. Chalabi and P. Galtier for their participating on
the implementation of “GeolocalizedProblem”.
Figure 3 Screenshot of the map view provided by the
experimental game. "GeolocalizedProblem".
CHALLENGES
FOR
REPORTING SYSTEMS
GAMIFICATION
INCIDENT
REFERENCES
Games based on crowdsourcing perpective [3] and games
exploring geolocalization [4] in cities have been proved
useful in several contexts. Nonetheless, we could identify
several aspects that challenge the use of incident reporting
systems as real-world games:
1. D. P. Moynihan. (2007). From Forest Fires to Hurricane
Katrina: Case Studies of Incident Command Systems.
IBM Center for the Business of Government.
2. Bach, C., Bernhaupt, R., Winckler, M. Mobile Incident
Reporting in Urban Contexts: Towards the Identification
of Emerging User Interface Patterns. In P 5 th IFIP's WG
13.2 Workshop on Software and Usability Engineering
Cross-Pollination. Lisbon, Portugal, September 5th 2011.
3. Matyas, S., Kiefer, P., Schlieder, C., Kleyer, S. (2011).
Wisdom about the Crowd: Assuring Geospatial Data
Quality Collected in Location-Based Games.
Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2011 Lecture Notes
in Computer Science, 2011, Vol. 6972/2011, 331-336.
4. Goodchild, M. F. (2007). Citizens as sensors: the world
of volunteered geography. GeoJournal, 69(4), 211–221.
doi:10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y.
 Incident reports are deeply connected with the real user
environment and might many important social
implications. For example, whilst reporting incidents can
be seen as a civic act that worth to be rewarded, an
increasing number of incident reports might be negatively
perceived as it show a city with “problems”.
 The act of reporting an incident is deeply charged of
emotions. The gamification of incident reporting systems
will touch with two types of the emotions: emotions that
are raised by the act of playing a game and emotions that
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