Evaluation of Serious Game prototype to aid education of smart contract policies

This project would build upon the research carried out in the Development of a Serious Game prototype to aid the education of smart contract policies project and the Evaluation of a Serious Game as an innovative technology to communicate and engage stakeholders for Digitally Enhanced Advance Service (DEAS) offer project.

The Development of a Serious Game prototype to aid the education of smart contract policies was a five-month research project which addressed the challenges of the industry partner EHAB and looked at, how can innovative digital technologies be used to show risk in different scenarios for the different stakeholders through gamification.

The primary challenge was to determine if serious games could be employed to enhance communication, education, and engagement of customers regarding DEAS offers. Designing, implementing, and developing a game for EHAB’s servitization offer could potentially enhance both the customers and business understanding of the value of DEAS. To this end, a serious game was designed for the EHAB group to improve the uptake of their services for weather risk management. The simplification and simulation of the offer’s benefits could be experienced through the gameplay, impacting clients and customers decision-making process to utilise EHAB’s services. This would provide enhanced planning by enabling users to keep track of weather days per month to avoid unforeseen issues, optimize plans based on accurate forecast information, as well as capture data about their site productivity to help keep better records for claims.

The research carried out in the project broadened the scope of the creative content methodologies for video games; this was done by increasing the impact in the finance sector (EHAB). The creative content methodology adopted in this project was repurposed and developed to have a focus on education and engagement rather than entertainment. One of the main outputs of the previous research was a fully functional/ playable game which was developed and tested by the team at EHAB and others. EHAB saw the value in the proposed research and was involved in up-taking and using this research.
A preliminary Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) study was designed to provide an initial appraisal of a small users’ cohort appetite towards the use of the serious game to convey the EHAB’s servitization group. In particular the use of a TAM study allows gauging the acceptance of new technology based products and applications based on user’s feedback analysis. TAMs are used to measure customers/users’ attitudes towards a new technology by measuring the ‘Perceived Usefulness’ and ‘Perceived Ease of Use’. A small cohort (10 users?) pilot evaluation was organised to provide an intial gauging of the functionality of the system through a custom TAM which yielded positive results and further feedback to make improvements to the game.


The proposed follow-up work intends to develop/upgrade the game further and address the feedback received from user testing and evaluation by EHAB’s team. This includes the addition of a leader board, so the player's score could be compared with other players and provide an overview of successful choices made by professionals that could inform future real-life possible courses of action. Additionally, this could be used by EHAB’s clients to understand the risk appetite of their employees. Overall, this work will identify and refine certain aspects of the game that can be improved and modified, such as data visualisation of the results and including further save points in the game.
Finally, conducting an extensive TAM study would provide this research work with new, valuable insight into the serious game usability and user experience beyond the EHAB domain, and will produce rich data from a larger demographic for detailed analysis. The latter would facilitate the development of a paradigm framework and guidelines for future development of other similar applications.
While the primary focus of the original project was to design, develop, and implement the EHAB game, this proposed work aims to explore and analyse the potential use of the game from a user experience point of view through a large users’ cohort.