“Absolute or Relative?” – Exploring the Choice Between Leaderboard Types in an Image Tagging Task

Allowing users to customize gamification has been shown to be promising, but how much freedom and which types of options users should receive is still unclear. In this paper, focusing on low-effort customization, we considered giving users the choice between an absolute (seeing all opponents) and a relative (seeing opponents that are just below and above their own rank) leaderboard in the context of image tagging. Results of two studies showed that, although the task performance is not affected significantly, offering this choice is appreciated, and users’ preferences for the type of leaderboard are moderated by the number of opponents on it.