title: Evaluation of the usability of a serious game aiming to teach facial expressions to schizophrenic patients.
abstract: In some psychological disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, loss of facial expression recognition skill may complicate patient's daily life. Information technology may help to develop facial expression recognition skill by educational software and games. We designed and developed an interactive web-based educational program with which we performed a usability study before investigating its effectiveness on the schizophrenia patients' ability of emotion perception. The purpose of this study is to describe the usability evaluation for a web-based game set that has been designed to teach facial expressions to schizophrenic patients. The usability study was done at two steps; first, we applied heuristic evaluation and the violations were rated in a scale from most to least severe and the major problems were solved. In the second step, think-aloud method was used and the web site was assessed by five schizophrenic patients. Eight experts participated in the heuristic evaluation, in which a total of 60 violations were identified with a mean severity of 2.77 (range: 0-4). All of the major problems (severity over 2.5) were listed and the usability problems were solved by the development team. After solving the problems, five users with a diagnosis of schizophrenia used the web site with the same scenario. They reported to have experienced minor, but different problems. In conclusion, we suggest that a combination of heuristic evaluation and think-aloud method may be an effective and efficient way for usability evaluations for the serious games that have been designed for special patient groups.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Antalya, Turkey.
authors.forename: Filiz
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Isleyen
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Antalya, Turkey.
authors.forename: K Hakan
authors.initials: KH
authors.lastname: Gulkesen
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Antalya, Turkey.
authors.forename: Buket
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Cinemre
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Antalya, Turkey.
authors.forename: M Kemal
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Samur
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Antalya, Turkey.
authors.forename: Nese
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zayim
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry, Antalya, Turkey.
authors.forename: Semiha
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sen Kaya
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction / Q000379:methods*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D010353:Patient Education as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D012938:Social Perception; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018910:Video Games; D055815:Young Adult