Studying user browsing behavior through gamified search tasks

Abstract

Typical crowdsourcing tasks ask workers to label images or make relevance judgements, as a low cost alternative to lab based user studies. More recently, gamification has been employed as a way to make these tasks more appealing and so users play, rather than work. One observation is that differences in task design and incentives elicits different player behavior. In this paper we discuss a new type of task, where we aim at eliciting player behavior that resembles user behavior when performing a search task. Care should be taken in the design of a gamified version of such a task to allow players to complete tasks with a limited amount of effort and time, without changing the behavior to be studied. We discuss the motivation of the abstractions and design choices we have made in achieving this goal. We then analyze whether and how these abstractions and design choices influence our observations of player behaviors.