Designers commonly use gamification to improve the frequency of engagement with apps, but often fail to consider the impact of placement on reward value. As rewards tend to depreciate if delayed (termed temporal discounting), placing a reward further into the future can significantly affect its ability to motivate behaviour. We examine the most effective placement of gamified rewards so as to reduce discounting and to increase the frequency an application is used. In two online studies, users were asked to choose between fictional budget tracking applications that varied in the placement of either monetary (N=70) or gamified (N=70) rewards. In both experiments we found that people more frequently used the application that provided rewards before, rather than after, the task. As predicted by temporal discounting, our work suggests that placing rewards early in the interaction sequence leads to an improvement in the perceived value of that reward, motivating further selection. We discuss the findings in the context of designing effective reward structures to encourage more frequent app engagement.

设计师通常使用游戏化来提高与应用程序互动的频率，但往往没有考虑位置对奖励价值的影响。由于奖励如果延迟就会趋于贬值（称为时间折扣）），将奖励放在未来会大大影响其激励行为的能力。我们研究了游戏化奖励的最有效放置方式，以减少折扣并增加应用程序的使用频率。在两项在线研究中，要求用户在虚拟预算跟踪应用程序之间进行选择，这些应用程序的货币奖励（N = 70）或游戏化奖励（N = 70）的位置各不相同。在这两个实验中，我们发现人们更频繁地使用在任务之前而不是任务之后提供奖励的应用程序。正如时间折扣所预测的那样，我们的工作表明，在交互序列的早期放置奖励会导致该奖励的感知价值有所提高，从而促使人们进行进一步的选择。