Towards the evaluation of the usability and portability of serious games

Abstract

erious Games (SG) are designed to teach, train, or promote behavior change while entertaining players. They are increasingly popular because they provide significant health benefits, while improving the cognitive functions. Similarly, to other software tools, these solutions need to assess their quality, to be later improved. However, there are not contributions that allow the quality evaluation specifically related to the usability and portability characteristics. Therefore, this paper presents, first, an evaluation method aligned to the ISO/IEC 25040 standard, its activities, and artifacts which will be used for the serious game's quality evaluation. This method's name is Serious Game Quality Assessment Method (SG-QUAM). Second, it provides a usability and portability model aligned to the ISO/IEC 25010 standard and oriented to this specific domain (i.e., serious digital games), and lastly, the quality in use while players are using the application. Moreover, 16 software engineers evaluated the solution through an experiment; the results showed good insights oriented to improve the contributions and concluded that SG-QUAM is perceived as easy to use, useful and that could be used in the future.