Application of Anti-Stigma Design Heuristics for Usability Inspection

User interface evaluation has become important in developing usable health care technologies. Although usability engineering methods have been applied in the design and evaluation of health care software, available heuristics focus on task-work aspects and do not address stigma associated with many health conditions. We used a previous set of heuristics and propose a new set of anti-stigma heuristics to evaluate stigmatization in health care websites. The extended set of heuristics were concurrently applied in a heuristic evaluation and a cognitive walkthrough to evaluate an endometriosis and sexual pain website. The walkthrough involved 5 tasks that required 21 actions to execute. Twenty-six usability problems were identified and recommendations for re-design were made to the design team before end-user testing. The anti-stigma heuristics received worse ratings than the traditional heuristics, resulting in several design changes that might otherwise have been missed. Thus, the new anti-stigma heuristics were a valuable contribution.

Codebook Co-Development to Understand Fidelity and Initiate Artificial Intelligence in Serious Games

This study aimed to identify and rank the serious game fidelity themes that should be considered for retaining both the learning potential and predicted market growth of serious games. The authors also investigated existing links between fidelity and AI. The methodology unraveled serious game fidelity through the co-development of a theory- and data-driven codebook, applying the constant comparison method for data analysis. The theory-driven codes stemmed from literature while the data-driven codes emerged from a heuristic user interface evaluation of a comic book style game, named ExMan. This article identifies five fidelity themes, with functional fidelity as most important, and postulates that functional fidelity is most suited to AI integration. This study delivers a fidelity-for-serious-games codebook and concludes that observing the suggested fidelity hierarchy could safeguard that neither digital game-based learning is watered down, nor the lustre of digital gameplay dulled. Furthermore, the authors hold that AI for serious games should be given a high design priority.