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A Social Interaction Taxonomy: Classifying User Interaction Tasks in Web Applications

Authors:
Monika Steinberg
Nicole Ullmann
Jürgen Brehm

Keywords: Game Design Mechanics; Interaction Taxonomy; User Interaction; Social Media, Web Applications

Abstract:
For social web applications, motivated users are an essential part. They create the new (Open) Content that is presented to users. Without ongoing current content such web applications are unviable. Creating and editing content means user interaction upon resources and with each other. It is no surprise that web applications evermore tend to use game design principles to keep their users motivated. In this contribution, a Social Interaction Taxonomy (SIT) is presented that classifies users for any kind of interaction within any kind of web application. For this purpose, we designed a taxonomy which classifies typical activities within web applications to prepare them for global rewarding with points and special awards in the next step. The focus of this contribution lies on the classification of user interoperation tasks in social web applications and the derivation of our taxonomy. It creates the basis for a Global Interaction Rewarding Model (GIAR) via RESTful web services. Web applications, that want to reward their users’ activity with points, badges or other prizes in a global and application-independent way, can embed our taxonomy for activity logging with rewarding and the generation of activity stats known from game design (user rankings, level progression, etc.). By applying simple game principles like rewarding points and creating appealing, emotive user experience a "boring" vocabulary trainer becomes a vocabulary learning game. Students or other users of such rewarded interaction stay motivated. They easily walk through learning phases because they do not perceive it as learning, but as playing. Next to gaming mechanics, the developed Social Interaction Taxonomy can be embedded into, e.g., web activity monitoring systems to gain classified information about the users’ behavior.

Pages: 25 to 30

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: February 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4367

ISBN: 978-1-61208-120-5

Location: Gosier, Guadeloupe, France

Dates: from February 23, 2011 to February 28, 2011