Usability Report of Minecraft

IAD 3230 was a class on Usability Testing, and focused on teaching us how to test and evaluate digital products. Quin Smith, Alaina Chapple, and I had to find some way to evaluate a product of our choice and create a final report with a 12-page minimum final report.

     Our chosen research methods were a Heuristic Evaluation, which is a list of ten items all digital products should have to be "usable." This is a massive help is making sure there are no glaring flaws in a product. We found examples of all 10 of these Heuristics in our program which was decided to be the various versions of Minecraft. Then we each split up and performed live testing sessions of Minecraft with participants of various experience levels, to understand better how Minecraft appears differently to experienced and inexperienced players. This way, we would know how the experience can be imporved to make new players want to keep playing.

     Lastly, we had our participants perform a System Usability Scale survey which asks them to rate various aspects of the experience on a scale of 1 to 10.  This helps us to be able to find problems in the sytem easier as we can pinpoint exactly where users are having issues. Combining all these methods together, we discovered that Minecraft is very easy for experienced players to understand, but is just about impossible for inexperienced users to get started in, at least not without help. Once we finished our research, we put all our findings together in a final report which summarizes every step of our research and why we took every step, almost 50 pages in length.