Position Paper: Collaborative Gamification Design for Scientific Software

Gamification, a design trend that is extensively applied to education and citizen science, is regarded as a means to improve scientific software usability. However, development and use of scientific software have special needs and characteristics that might present design challenges. Our position is that gamifi-cation and usability design for scientific software should be facilitated by an open, collaborative design process supported by conversational media. We believe this approach is compatible with qualities often attributed to computational science community re-garding openness and collaboration between members of varied professional backgrounds. Through an illustrative scenario, we ex-emplify the use of conversational media for collaborative design. We expect the synergy between collaborators to result in better us-ability, greater user acceptance, and adequacy to requirements, obtaining optimal design solutions in a sustainable way.