Evaluation of a Game Used to Teach Usability to Undergraduate Students in Computer Science

There is a growing recognition of the importance of teaching usability, which has been discussed in various forms in undergraduate courses in areas related to Information Technology. Usability is an essential concept that professionals need to learn as they produce artefacts for different types of users and contexts. After a systematic mapping of the literature in this field, the authors found that the techniques currently used to teach concepts related to usability mostly involve the development of projects and case studies or the application of heuristic evaluations. Although the use of serious games has been used in different areas, our research exposed that serious games are not used to teach usability. Therefore, we propose in this paper the development of a simulator game that exposes the player to a corporate environment by simulating real situations in the projects of a fictitious company. The objective of the game, called the UsabilityGame, is to support the teaching of usability by addressing the usability engineering life cycle, requirements analysis, and prototyping and heuristic evaluation. We conducted four experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of using the UsabilityGame as a tool to teach usability concepts to students. We concluded that the game promotes the learning of usability in general, and heuristic evaluation and requirements analysis in particular.