Characterising HCI principles for evaluating the user experience of a serious game

Abstract

Serious games as a viable learning medium have been documented in the literature. The challenge for serious game developers is to put careful thought into the design of these types of video games so as to deliver fun and engaging learning experiences. Knowledge from the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) provides the foundation for investigating relevant principles to guide developers in evaluating the user experience (UX) of a serious game. User experience relates to how an individual perceives and responds to the use or anticipated use of an interactive system such as a serious game. These perceptions are unique to every individual and thus the UX of a serious game is regarded as highly subjective. Due to the subjective nature of UX, this research employed interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as a research approach. IPA is a qualitative research strategy grounded in phenomenology and hermeneutics with a focus on idiographic inquiry. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather rich qualitative data on the experiences of participants regarding serious games. During the interviews, participants were introduced to a serious game called StoryTimes, which is based on memory improvement techniques to help students learn the multiplication tables. StoryTimes was developed as part of this research to better understand how HCI principles are applied during the development cycle of serious games. A double hermeneutic process was used to analyse the interview data. The analysis provided understanding in how participants gave meaning to those aspects of serious games that they consider to be the most important to their gameplay experience. Interview transcripts were read multiple times and annotated after which emerging themes from the comments and annotations were documented. Connections between themes were investigated, resulting in themes being clustered together. The clusters of themes represent the aspects that participants felt were the most influential in their serious gaming experiences. From these main themes, a set of HCI principles relevant to the UX evaluation of serious games was characterised.