Serious Games for Crowdsourced Design Innovation and Testing

Abstract

Equipment procured for defence and security organisations often require a human-computer interface. The current UK defence procurement process seeks design ideas from a small community of experts through synchronous meetings, attendance at human factors laboratories, and subjective assessment at the manufacturer’s location. These traditional design methods, while termed ‘user-centred’, assume that the expert users are able to travel and meet, which was difficult to achieve even pre-covid pandemic. The use of Serious Games in the defence design context and the crowdsourced objective testing of the design options is novel and untried. This research offers a route for incremental asynchronous design and test activities. Using a crowdsourcing construct, designers, expert and less-skilled users share views and prototype human-computer interface design ideas as part of a Serious Game hosted in a web browser. This research is a worked example of how a Serious Game can support remote design with this paper reporting on crowdsourced objective testing of human-computer interfaces for defence and security equipment.