Min Tian,1,2 Longsheng Xie,3 Wei Wei,2 Yanhua Chen,1,2 Jian Tang4 

1Department of Nursing, The Affiliated Hospital, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Nursing, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Nephrology, The Affiliated Hospital, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Infectious Diseases, The Affiliated Hospital, Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, People’s Republic of China

Correspondence: Jian Tang, Email tangjian034@swmu.edu.cn

Background: The self-management of people living with HIV plays a pivotal role in enhancing their health quality of life. However, the self-management practices within this population are suboptimal. Therefore, it is imperative to reinforce HIV self-management education interventions to improve self-management ability among people living with HIV. The advent of digital educational games presents an unparalleled opportunity for innovative educational methods.
Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the user experience and acceptability of a digital educational game as a novel health education intervention to support self-management for people living with HIV.
Methods: A mixed-method study with explanatory sequential design was conducted to evaluate the user experience and acceptability of a digital educational game for self-management health education among people living with HIV. Fifty people living with HIV participated in this study and completed a questionnaire to investigate their user experience after playing the game. Nine participants were interviewed face-to-face to evaluate the acceptability of the game. Categorical data are presented as percentages. Qualitative data were analyzed via thematic analysis.
Results: The overall user evaluation of the “Cute Pet Butler” by the 50 participants (28 males and 22females with an average age of 33.64 years) was excellent or good at 90.91%, medium at 8.64%, and poor at 0.45%. The interviewees included 5 males and 4 females, with ages ranging from 23--51 years. After analyzing the interview data, the acceptability evaluation of the “Cute Pet Butler” with five themes were extracted, that are: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, positive user attitudes, the intention of game playing, and modification suggestions.
Conclusion: Cute Pet Butler had a good user experience and acceptance among people living with HIV. These results support further evaluation of its effectiveness as a new method to improve self-management health education interventions for people living with HIV.

Keywords: people living with HIV, self-management, health education, digital educational games, user experience, acceptability