Heuristic Based Approach for Usability Evaluation of Mobile Games

Abstract

The increasing popularity of mobile games has grasped the attention in both academia and industry. The game market has evolved to the extent that it has great impact in the economy of the worlds. As there are multiple areas of issues that affect the game quality, but game usability is one of the major problems that game designers are facing. Heuristic evaluation has been very popular method. But the lack of validation has weakened the effectiveness and confidence in the heuristics. This paper focuses on the issues related to usability of the mobile games. A survey was conducted to identify the issues of usability in a game directly from the game players. This survey covered one major genre of games. After identification and analysis, we proposed a new set of heuristics to enhance the usability of mobile games. We have also used these heuristics as guidelines to redesign a game. And the redesigned game has been evaluated by the players to validate our newly proposed heuristics. By validation of heuristics we can certainly increase the usability.