An Adventure in Usability

Abstract

Usability testing can be used as an effective tool throughout the design and development of a serious game. User responses to the usability measures can help designers meet the challenges of creating a game that is educational, playable, and entertaining. However, there are a multitude of measures to choose from, some empirically created and tested and some created by developers to test a single game. This chapter will provide a broad overview of usability, two major methods of conducting usability testing and how usability can be applied to testing, and more importantly, improving games. Two possible usability measures are discussed from a game evaluation standpoint and compared highlighting on which aspects of usability heuristics they focus.