ShopAutiPlan: Design and Evaluation of a Shopping Game to Assess Executive Planning Skills in Children with Autism (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Serious games offer high ecological validity for cognitive assessment but are often deployed without formative usability validation, potentially limiting their effectiveness for neurodiverse users such as children with autism. OBJECTIVE To design a supermarket-based serious game, ShopAutiPlan, for assessing executive planning skills in children with autism and to conduct a rigorous formative usability evaluation prior to clinical deployment. METHODS A multidisciplinary team (HCI researchers, psychologists, game designers) co-developed ShopAutiPlan. Before any child testing, six domain experts completed independent usability sessions using think-aloud protocols and the System Usability Scale (SUS). Identified usability issues were mapped to Nielsen’s ten heuristics, and SUS scores were analyzed across five components (efficiency, memorability, error minimization, satisfaction, learnability). RESULTS Experts unanimously identified both well-implemented features (e.g., clear feedback, intuitive controls) and critical usability barriers—most notably under Aesthetic & Minimalist Design (visual clutter, poor contrast) and Match Between System & Real World (lack of realistic ambient cues). SUS yielded an overall average score of 70.4, with psychologists assigning higher severity to cognitive-load issues and developers highlighting technical performance and consistency problems. CONCLUSIONS The formative evaluation pinpointed key areas for refinement, particularly in visual design and realism, and demonstrated the value of early expert feedback in creating accessible, clinically relevant serious games for autism assessment.