Usability Heuristics for Evaluating Arabic Mobile Games

Table 1

The proposed/compiled list of Arabic Mobile Game Heuristics (AGH).

Number	Heuristic title	Description
1	Visibility of game progress and language mode [12] [13]	Players make decisions based on their knowledge of the current progress of the game. Players should be provided with enough information to allow them to make proper decisions while playing the game. Players should easily know which language mode they are in.
2	Strive for Arabic cultural identity	The game should clearly adapt to the Arabic culture in its use-of-language, visual designs, concepts, measures, conservativeness, and logical order. Follow Arab-world conventions.
3	Player control and customized settings [12]	Provide players with a marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state or unplayable content without having to go through an extended dialogue. Also, give players the ability to modify cultural settings based on their country of preference, as well as volume, difficulty, and speed.
4	Provide consistent responses to actions and unambiguous translation of words [12]	Games should respond to players’ actions in a predictable manner and provide consistent input mappings. Follow platform conventions and strive for a consistent translation of words, phrases, and symbols.
5	Provide visual representations that are easy to interpret, strive for recognition rather than recall [12] [13]	Minimize the player’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. Visual representations should be designed so that they are easy to interpret.
6	Aesthetic and minimalist design [13]	Dialogues should not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
7	Help users avoid errors and minimize the use of dark patterns [13]	The system should constrain actions that make errors. In addition, the use of dark UI patterns should be minimized as much as possible.
8	Provide instructions, training, and help [12] [13]	Provide players with searchable documentation and interactive training and instructions of the game in both English and Arabic.
9	Aspire to right-to-left layout and navigation	An Arabic mobile game should be right-to-left justified in terms of its layout, images, scrolling, hierarchal menus, and navigation.