Evaluation of the Concept of a Smart City Gamification from a User Centered Design Perspective

Galvanize the citizen to be engaged with a smart city project projects are not an easy task, normally they feel that their voice cannot make the difference and leaves the project. Gamification can change this, by engaging the citizen with challenges and rewards, they will be involved creating “critical mass” to influence the makers and change the city. In this context, this paper presents the evaluation of a gamification strategy concept for the Smart City Sense Project implemented in a mobile application. The evaluation was done by a questionnaire with 41 questions, filled by a group of 23 citizens that was already involves in city civic activities related with security. In general, this special population has a positive reaction to our different proposals, but there is no unanimity in the aspects related to the gamification strategies associated with the rewards and the give challenges for their community. The user-centered design methodology proved to be robust to evaluate the proposed gamification strategy, allowing ergonomics to play a fundamental role in the development of an information system, that can prevent the occurrence of problems of acceptance in the future.