Heuristic usability evaluation on games: a modular approach

Heuristic evaluation is the preferred method to assess usability in games when experts conduct this evaluation. Many heuristics guidelines have been proposed attending to specificities of games but they only focus on specific subsets of games or platforms. In fact, to date the most used guideline to evaluate games usability is still Nielsen’s proposal, which is focused on generic software. As a result, most evaluations do not cover important aspects in games such as mobility, multiplayer interactions, enjoyability and playability, etc. To promote the usage of new heuristics adapted to different game and platform aspects we propose a modular approach based on the classification of existing game heuristics using metadata and a tool, MUSE (Meta-heUristics uSability Evaluation tool) for games, which allows a rebuild of heuristic guidelines based on metadata selection in order to obtain a customized list for every real evaluation case. The usage of these new rebuilt heuristic guidelines allows an explicit attendance to a wide range of usability aspects in games and a better detection of usability issues. We preliminarily evaluate MUSE with an analysis of two different games, using both the Nielsen’s heuristics and the customized heuristic lists generated by our tool.Unión Europea PI055-15/E0

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Thin Games with Symmetry and Concurrent Hyland-Ong Games

We build a cartesian closed category, called Cho, based on event structures. It allows an interpretation of higher-order stateful concurrent programs that is refined and precise: on the one hand it is conservative with respect to standard Hyland-Ong games when interpreting purely functional programs as innocent strategies, while on the other hand it is much more expressive. The interpretation of programs constructs compositionally a representation of their execution that exhibits causal dependencies and remembers the points of non-deterministic branching.The construction is in two stages. First, we build a compact closed category Tcg. It is a variant of Rideau and Winskel's category CG, with the difference that games and strategies in Tcg are equipped with symmetry to express that certain events are essentially the same. This is analogous to the underlying category of AJM games enriching simple games with an equivalence relations on plays. Building on this category, we construct the cartesian closed category Cho as having as objects the standard arenas of Hyland-Ong games, with strategies, represented by certain events structures, playing on games with symmetry obtained as expanded forms of these arenas.To illustrate and give an operational light on these constructions, we interpret (a close variant of) Idealized Parallel Algol in Cho

Derivative of functions over lattices as a basis for the notion of interaction between attributes

The paper proposes a general notion of interaction between attributes, which can be applied to many fields in decision making and data analysis. It generalizes the notion of interaction defined for criteria modelled by capacities, by considering functions defined on lattices. For a given problem, the lattice contains for each attribute the partially ordered set of remarkable points or levels. The interaction is based on the notion of derivative of a function defined on a lattice, and appears as a generalization of the Shapley value or other probabilistic values

Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns

The empirical evidence that human color categorization exhibits some universal patterns beyond superficial discrepancies across different cultures is a major breakthrough in cognitive science. As observed in the World Color Survey (WCS), indeed, any two groups of individuals develop quite different categorization patterns, but some universal properties can be identified by a statistical analysis over a large number of populations. Here, we reproduce the WCS in a numerical model in which different populations develop independently their own categorization systems by playing elementary language games. We find that a simple perceptual constraint shared by all humans, namely the human Just Noticeable Difference (JND), is sufficient to trigger the emergence of universal patterns that unconstrained cultural interaction fails to produce. We test the results of our experiment against real data by performing the same statistical analysis proposed to quantify the universal tendencies shown in the WCS [Kay P and Regier T. (2003) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 100: 9085-9089], and obtain an excellent quantitative agreement. This work confirms that synthetic modeling has nowadays reached the maturity to contribute significantly to the ongoing debate in cognitive science.Comment: Supplementery Information available here http://www.pnas.org/content/107/6/2403/suppl/DCSupplementa

Non uniform (hyper/multi)coherence spaces

In (hyper)coherence semantics, proofs/terms are cliques in (hyper)graphs. Intuitively, vertices represent results of computations and the edge relation witnesses the ability of being assembled into a same piece of data or a same (strongly) stable function, at arrow types. In (hyper)coherence semantics, the argument of a (strongly) stable functional is always a (strongly) stable function. As a consequence, comparatively to the relational semantics, where there is no edge relation, some vertices are missing. Recovering these vertices is essential for the purpose of reconstructing proofs/terms from their interpretations. It shall also be useful for the comparison with other semantics, like game semantics. In [BE01], Bucciarelli and Ehrhard introduced a so called non uniform coherence space semantics where no vertex is missing. By constructing the co-free exponential we set a new version of this last semantics, together with non uniform versions of hypercoherences and multicoherences, a new semantics where an edge is a finite multiset. Thanks to the co-free construction, these non uniform semantics are deterministic in the sense that the intersection of a clique and of an anti-clique contains at most one vertex, a result of interaction, and extensionally collapse onto the corresponding uniform semantics.Comment: 32 page

Potential relationship of epistemic games to group dynamics and learning orientations towards physics problem solving

Current investigations into pedagogical goals of introductory algebra-based physics students at the University of Central Arkansas, by learning orientation towards an in-class metacognitive group problem solving task, seek to determine possible relationships with attitudinal shifts and course performance. Students thus far have been untreated with known group-based learning pedagogies, so as to establish trends of common group habits, and ultimately to properly inform implementation of group-based pedagogies in reaction to these trends. However, students' group dynamics and learning orientations prove difficult to map to group-based measurements; an estimate of group learning orientation and preferred working group dynamic is here explored as a potential means of interpreting students' use of problem solving strategies. A means of "sampling" audiovisual data in a live classroom of several simultaneous groups is also presented as a way to estimate the frequency of chosen strategies to this end.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, conference proceeding

On the interplay between fluctuations and efficiency in a model economy with heterogeneous adaptive consumers

We discuss the stationary states of a model economy in which $N$ heterogeneous adaptive consumers purchase commodity bundles repeatedly from $P$ sellers. The system undergoes a transition from an inefficient to an efficient state as the number of consumers increases. In the latter phase, however, price fluctuations may be much larger than in the inefficient regime. Results from dynamical mean-field theory obtained for $N\to\infty$ compare fairly well with computer simulations.Comment: prepared for the proceedings of Fluctuations and Noise 200