UX and Serious Games—A Research Agenda

User experience (UX) research entails the research and design processes of all user experiences with a product, while serious games have been increasingly gaining importance to facilitate otherwise unappealing or tedious activities in education, health, or business contexts. The players, their willingness to play the game, and the games’ effects on them are crucial in the design and development of games and serious games. The established concepts and methods for research and design of user experience constitute a reasonable starting point for locating methods to employ when designing and developing serious games. To identify gaps and form a research agenda, we adopted grounded theory-based literature review as a method to research the current state of UX concept integration in serious games’ development. While integrating evaluation methods is well under-way, there is still significant unfulfilled potential around user research and design. In particular, lacking awareness of existing research concepts and methods poses a significant hurdle.