Presence, the participants' feeling of "being there" in an environment, is important for usability studies, as this can affect their outcomes. We aim at extending the concept of presence from virtual to real environments in the context of usability studies. We compare two environments -a virtual field environment (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment [CAVE]) and a real laboratory environment -in a betweensubjects study by means of presence. In both environments, we evaluate the usability and learnability of a mobile application. Data (n = 65) shows higher ecological validity for the real environment, but higher engagement as well as higher negative effects for the virtual environment. There is no significant difference between usability and learnability between the two environments. Presence factors are significantly related to usability in the two environments. The results suggest that -although there are differences in presence -virtual and real environments perform equally in usability studies.
This book chapter describes an approach of evaluating user experience in video games by using heuristics. We provide a short overview of video games and explain the concept of user-centred design for games. Furthermore we describe the history of heuristics for video games and the role of user experience of games in general. Based on our previous work and experience we propose a revised framework consisting of two sets of heuristics (game play/game story, virtual interface) to detect the most critical issues in games. To assess its applicability to measure user experience factors we compare the results of expert evaluations of six current games with the user experience-based ratings of various game reviews. Our findings indicate a correlation between the extent to which our framework is satisfied and the game's average rating.
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