Evaluating the Usability of Authoring Environments for Serious Games

Area of Science:

• Educational Technology
• Game Design
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• The EMERGO platform facilitates the creation of scenario-based serious games for professional competence development.
• A key feature is its authoring environment for designing virtual tasks.
• This study evaluates the usability of this authoring environment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To conduct an in-depth qualitative case study of the EMERGO authoring environment.
• To assess its usability, focusing on understandability and learnability.
• To compare findings with similar authoring environments in existing literature.

Main Methods:

• Qualitative case study methodology.
• Semi-structured interviews with two experienced game developers.
• Literature review of comparable authoring environments.

Main Results:

• Usability of the authoring environment presents challenges, particularly in understandability and learnability.
• These usability issues align with those reported for comparable systems.
• The authoring environment's functionality and reliability are positively perceived.
• Integration with the EMERGO method is considered strong.

Conclusions:

• The study identifies specific areas for improvement in the authoring environment's understandability and learnability.
• Lessons learned are formulated into general guidelines for enhancing authoring environments for serious games.
• These guidelines aim to improve the user experience for serious game development.