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Foldit Drug Design Game Usability Study: Comparison of Citizen and Expert Scientists

Published: 22 November 2020 Publication History

Abstract

In building a new drug design mode for the popular citizen scientist game Foldit, we focus on creating an easy-to-use and intuitive interface to confer complex scientific concepts to citizen scientist players. We hypothesize that to be efficient in the hands of citizen scientists such an interface will look different from well-established drug-design software used by experts. We used the relaxed think-aloud method to compare citizen and expert scientists working with our prototype interface for Foldit Drug Design Mode (FDDM). First, we tested if the two groups are providing different feedback when it comes to the usability of the prototype interface. Second, we investigated how the difference between the two groups might inform a new game design. As expected, the results confirm that experienced scientists differ from citizen scientists in engaging their background knowledge when interacting with the game. We then provided a prioritization list of background knowledge employed by the expert scientists to derive design suggestions for FDDM.

Supplementary Material

a20-liu-supplement (a20-liu-supplement.pdf)
Supplement to "Foldit Drug Design Game Usability Study: Comparison of Citizen and Expert Scientists" by Liu et al., Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG '20).

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cover image ACM Conferences
MIG '20: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games
October 2020
190 pages
ISBN:9781450381710
DOI:10.1145/3424636
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 22 November 2020

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Author Tags

  1. citizen science
  2. drug discovery
  3. game design
  4. usability

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MIG '20
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MIG '20: Motion, Interaction and Games
October 16 - 18, 2020
SC, Virtual Event, USA

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