Open Government Data Portals And Gamification

I found an interesting paper on open government data portals:

Tailoring open government data portals for lay citizens: A gamification theory approach
Anthony Simonofski, Anneke Zuiderwijk, Antoine Clarinvala, Wafa Hammedi
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401222000421

I learned from the paper that most open government portals work best for expert users. The researchers proposed a gamification approach to "simplify" the portals for lay citizens. Games are the inspiration for gamification, which uses elements from games to improve the user's experience with the portal in a fun and more engaging way.

The researchers collected lay citizen's requirements for open government portals in order to consider user input for their design of a prototype of the gamified portal. The requirements provide insight into what the public wants the sites to include and how they should work (the researchers interviewed only 10 lay citizens). I thought the requirements would be useful for other areas, such as websites that provide online reviews.

I found the comparison between requirements by lay citizens and expert users interesting. Their requirements do conflict. Gamification improved the ease of use (or usability) of the portal for the lay citizens.