Using Qualitative Data Analysis to Measure User Experience in a Serious Game for Premed Students

The University of Texas Transformation in Medical Education Portal (UT TIME Portal) is a game-based learning platform for select premed students, with a particular emphasis on communication and professionalism. In addition to quantitative data on system usage and user performance, the UT TIME Portal generates rich sets of qualitative data collected through discussion board posts and preand postsurveys. Using NVivo 10’s built-in tools, our team used this qualitative data to measure game experience outcomes in many ways by building and testing out hypotheses about our user experience design. The ability to tag, code and organize themes to then be analyzed in the context of quantitative data generated by the UT TIME Portal adds an important dimension to understanding the user experience and generates insights not possible to glean from quantitative