Foldit Drug Design Game Usability Study: Comparison of Citizen and Expert Scientists

Abstract

In building a new drug design mode for the popular citizen scientist game Foldit, we focus on creating an easy-to-use and intuitive interface to confer complex scientific concepts to citizen scientist players. We hypothesize that to be efficient in the hands of citizen scientists such an interface will look different from well-established drug-design software used by experts. We used the relaxed think-aloud method to compare citizen and expert scientists working with our prototype interface for Foldit Drug Design Mode (FDDM). First, we tested if the two groups are providing different feedback when it comes to the usability of the prototype interface. Second, we investigated how the difference between the two groups might inform a new game design. As expected, the results confirm that experienced scientists differ from citizen scientists in engaging their background knowledge when interacting with the game. We then provided a prioritization list of background knowledge employed by the expert scientists to derive design suggestions for FDDM.