User Experience in Educational Virtual Worlds

Panagiotis Zaharias This paper explores user experience (UX) in educational Virtual Worlds. A two-month user experience evaluation was conducted where 37 learners used an educational Virtual World for a problem-based learning task. Two user experience measurements were performed at two distinct phases so as to assess users’ perceptions of the Virtual World environment over time. Results reveal that all UX qualities were rated lower at the second measurement mainly due to the many technical problems that users faced throughout the study. However, only the decrease in pragmatic quality was found to be statistical significant. To this end, results indicate that the environment needs usability improvement in terms of efficiency and effectiveness and technical stability so as to provide a better user experience. Computer Science Department, University of Cyprus CY-1678 Nicosia, Cyprus zaharias@cs.ucy.ac.cy

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