Usagame - A new methodology to support user centered design of touchscreen applications

Abstract

Touchscreen mobile devices growth resulted in an explosion of the mobile applications. Focusing on touch mobile game applications this study aims to fulfill a research gap, creating appropriate usability guidelines for these applications. Concerns about usability, touch technologies, mobile devices and game testing, provided the background needs for this study. Initial game application tests allowed for the creation and implementation of such proposed usability guidelines into a support checklist (UsaGame), designed to help applications developers. An evaluation test was performed with 20 users in order to assess the validity of the proposed guidelines. Results from the test of the two builds from the same game application allowed comparisons that led to the assessment of the importance of some of the guidelines implemented into the application. Results suggested a usability improvement on the game application implemented with the guidelines. Furthermore results allowed commenting on all proposed usability guidelines. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.