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.
While interacting with others on the internet, users share a lot of personal data with a potentially large but "invisible" audience. An important issue is maintaining control over personal data and therefore, in the first place, users need to be aware to whom they are disclosing which data. Based on the cues-filtered-out theory we introduce a new feature to support the privacy-awareness of forum users and tested it with 313 users. The results of our empirical study show that the presentation of privacy-related context cues indeed increases forum users' privacy-awareness. This is an important precondition for users' willingness to modify privacy settings or to use privacy-enhancing technologies.
Personas are a design tool to ensure a strong userfocus within projects. In this case study we compare and discuss seven different persona marketing materials used to increase the acceptance of the personas by the project team. The marketing materials are a mixture of consumables (e.g., wine or cake) and long-living marketing materials (e.g., posters or savings box). The insights gained are encouraging and confirm that marketing materials can be useful for increasing the acceptance and usage of personas.
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