Empowering teenagers to perform a heuristic evaluation of a game

Abstract

Unlike user studies, inspection based methods are not widely researched in the area of Child Computer Interaction. This paper reports the findings of a study to empower teenagers to facilitate a heuristic evaluation with their peers acting as the expert evaluators. In total 20 teenagers participated in the study, with four of the teenagers acting as facilitators and the remainder as evaluators. The results showed that teenagers struggled to act in the role as facilitator, struggling to explain the heuristic evaluation process and keep the evaluators on track. The evaluators found very few problems and became distracted from the evaluation opting to play on other features of the device rather than the game itself. Further research will be performed to modify the process in an attempt to eliminate these issues in order to improve the method for teenagers.