- Title
- Assessing Game Interface Workload and Usability: A Cognitive Science Perspective
- Creator
- Thorpe, Alexander; Nesbitt, Keith; Eidels, Ami
- Relation
- ACSW 2019 Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference. ACSW 2019: Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference (Sydney, N.S.W. 29-31 January, 2019)
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3290688.3290749
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- User interfaces for games are designed not only to convey information effectively, but to do so in a usable way while engaging players in the gameworld. The interface must help users without hindering them by overloading the players' cognitive capacity. Designers currently assess usability and workload demands with both subjective and neurophysiological measures. However, these measures may be imprecise, require laboratory setups or just be too expensive to be utilised. Cognitive science offers validated methodologies to assess the workload demands of user interfaces objectively and directly. One such measure, the detection response task (DRT), has previously been used to assess real-world computer interactions, and provides a pragmatic, cost-effective method of assessing players' experienced workload in an objective way. To test this approach, thirty-eight participants completed a computer-based tracking task with varying levels of task load, while simultaneously responding to a software-based DRT. Participants also completed the task without being required to respond to the DRT. It was found that the DRT was sensitive to task load in the tracking task, but also interfered with tracking task performance. Future studies into the use of software-based DRT measures may assess different methods of delivering the DRT stimulus in minimally invasive ways. Nevertheless, the DRT offers game interface designers the ability to assess the usability of their designs using validated, objective workload measures without investing in expensive apparatus. Furthermore, this real-time approach can be integrated directly into gameplay to support dynamic difficulty balancing based on the player's experienced cognitive workload.
- Subject
- cognitive workload; multitasking; working memory; dynamic difficulty; usability
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1448625
- Identifier
- uon:43450
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781450366038
- Language
- eng
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