Within the field of usability, heuristics are \u2018shortcuts\u2019 to overcoming major usability issues, and are often used to supplement user testing. They can quickly identify large usability issues, early in the development process, and prevent the need for major redesigns further down the software development process. If many of these issues didn\u2019t become addressed until play testing, typically one of the last steps of development, the amount of re-working needed would increase exponentially.<\/p>\n
Their use is particularly important with the \u2018home-grown\u2019 scene of iPhone game design, due to the small size of most development teams. Because a development kit costs only $99, and publishing a game requires no budget (except marketing), the iPhone development scene is a lot more small scale than other mobile platforms, and so often teams (or individuals) cannot afford to employ the most thorough methods of evaluating usability, such as expert review.<\/p>\n
It would be useful then to have a series of guidelines that developers can follow to identify good and bad iPhone usability game design issues, which is what I\u2019m attempting to achieve in this series of blog posts. Within each topic, I will aim to cover why it\u2019s important, and provide examples of a correct, and an incorrect implementation. Hopefully this will prove to be a useful resource for iPhone game developers.\u00a0<\/p>\n