Gamification Discussion

[CobeyH]

There is a fundamental trade-off between user control and gamification.

User Control User control doesn't punish users for forgetting to enter data into the app. They can manually edit any task data they want and have complete control over their data. Pros:

• Allow users to manually adjust the amount of time they have spent on a task.
• Allow users to change entries as far back in the past as they want.
• Users don't get frustrated for losing a streak even though they completed the task outside the app

Cons:

• The app doesn't force people to be accountable and complete their tasks in time. People can cheat the system and won't have the same feeling of satisfaction with a streak or goal completion because they know they could have manually entered the data instead of putting in the work.
• The app can't have competitive social features to compete against your friends because streaks/progress aren't impressive if they can be manually entered.
• Much harder to implement. We must support a bunch of functions for timer reset, editing task timers and changing data from any day in the past. This also complicated the UI.

Gamification Pros:

• Allows for integrity of data because you can't retro-actively edit your information
• It's much harder to cheat yourself and therefore your accomplishments feel earned.
• Social features have some integrity.

Cons:

• If you forget to start a timer, there isn't a good way to manually add it afterwards.
• You can still cheat by enabling a timer while you aren't actually doing that task. It does however take more time.

Conclusions Some possible suggestions for this problem:

• Allow users to only edit their timer data for today and yesterday. We could add a data import feature in the future to allow them to back-fill data.
• Allow the user to choose which mode they want. You could enable "Strict Mode" in the settings, and that would allow you to complete on leaderboards but it would prevent you from editing data. This would certainly be more work though because then we need to support both social features and manual data manipulation.

[kutaycinar]

Monetization should also be discussed and would differ depending on which route we decide to for this app.

Note for later: useful articles about implementing in-app purchases with capacitor: https://capacitorjs.com/docs/guides/in-app-purchases