Study of Multi-Platform Usability of Deck Building Process for Digital Card Games

• Main Authors: Szu-Chun Ting, 丁思均
• Other Authors: Ping-Lin Fan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12561015912193813287

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 數位科技設計學系(含玩具與遊戲設計碩士班) === 104 === Due to requirement of lager screen area, card games are rarely seen on smart phone before. As screen size advances these years, this issue becomes minor, many digital card games obtain huge success on multi-platform. This study choice deck building process of Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft as sample, Hearthstone is the top1 digital card game on both revenue and market share worldwide nowadays, and deck building process is core game mechanism of digital card games. This study try to verify the effectiveness and Satisfaction of sample at PC, tablet and smartphone. This study invite 30 smart phone game players between 25~45 years old as tester. 15 testers who had never played Hearthstone are marked as rookie team A; another 15 testers who had played Hearthstone are marked as veteran team B. This study use the following research tools: usability testing, observation, system usability scale and semi structured interview. Before actual testing , this study invite 3 experts to perform heuristic evaluation on sample to optimize research tools. As expert’s suggestion, usability tasks and questionnaires had been simplified to make sure duration of test within 1 hour, else testers might become impatient and cause errors at testing. The SUS average score is 49.8, lowest score is 41.6 from female Team A testers, highest score is 53.7 from Team B testers, these result shows that even veteran players are not satisfied with usability of sample. Testers spend more time to completed tasks at tablet and smartphone, further analysis show that there are 2 reasons: (1) Drag is the only way to add cards into deck, which reduce the efficiency; (2) Filter window at smartphone version block deck area, which means tester can not use these functions at the same time, veteran players at team B totally ignore filter functions and they spend much lesser time to completed task. According to observation and interview, this study make improve suggestions of sample. Top principle of multi-platform user interface design is consistency at both GUI layout and input method, and principles of design deck building process are: (1) Browsing: maintain balance between showing more cards and legibility. (2) Filter: multi-condition filters / rapid reset / less interference with edit deck. (3) View cards: choose an intuitional input method. (4) Edit deck: reduce cognitive load. (5) Performance: automatically adjustment depend on device.