Evaluating a gamification proposal for learning usability heuristics: Heureka

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an educational experiment conducted to determine whether an automated, card-based gamification strategy has an impact on the learning of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristic usability rules. The participants in the experiment were 55 students enrolled on a human-computer interaction course. According to the results of the experiment and the hypothesis tests performed to compare both traditional and gamified approaches, there were no significant differences (t (53) = 0.66, p = 0.52), although the scores attained by the students who used the gamification strategy were slightly better when evaluated one week later (M = 6.29 and M = 6.57 out of 10, respectively). Moreover, the students’ perceptions reflect that the proposed tool is easy to use (MD = 4.00 out of 5) and useful as regards learning (MD = 4.00 out of 5). Further research is needed to determine whether incorporating other gamification elements, such as rankings, difficulty levels, and game modes, would have a positive impact on student motivation, engagement and performance.