User Acceptance Evaluation of a Gamified Knowledge Sharing Platform for Use in Industrial Environments

Abstract

This study evaluates user acceptance of a gamification-enabled collaboration and knowledge sharing platform that has been developed for use by personnel in industrial work environments, aiming at increasing motivation for knowledge exchange. The platform has been evaluated at two manufacturing industries by two groups of users, workers and supervisors, with regard to five criteria: usability, knowledge integration, working experience, user acceptance and overall impact. Results showed that even though the ratings from both industries were positive on all criteria, there is room for improvement on user acceptance and knowledge integration. Driven by this fact, a rule-based adaptive gamification approach which exploits information about workers is proposed in order to further increase motivation and engagement. Based on feedback received from the evaluation, guidelines related to functionalities and design of a gamified collaboration platform are provided. These guidelines can be followed when implementing collaboration tools with gamification support for industrial environments.