About a year ago, 4 usability laboratories in Germany met in Paderborn to start an exchange of ideas about the efficient use of a usability lab in Usability Engineering and Usability Testing. We recognized that we differ in concept, methods and technology but we also learned a lot from each other's experiences. Within the scope of this SIG we were interested in exchanging our findings with other usability labs getting to know their experiences in performing the recording and analysis of observational data. One of our aims was to come up with common usage requirements related to the investigation of human-computer interaction in a Usability Lab.

A Usability Lab is a cost-intensive factor while testing the quality of human-computer interaction during the entire usability engineering process. In Germany, a number of test laboratories in industry and research agreed upon a common test procedure called DATech Procedures for Usability Testing based on ISO 9241-10. There is a need to clarify at what point in the process it is worthwhile to bring such a lab into action. Following the DATech Procedures many usability problems can be revealed and documented without a Usability Lab. The DATech Procedures require to gain a clear understanding of the flow of the user's work on both sides, the user and the assessor. When tracing the workflow it is often easy to identify what causes a problem situation. Documenting the problem, e.g. in form of a use scenario is mostly sufficient. However, the origin of some usage problems may remain hidden. Then it is vital to trace the emergence of a problem. Sometimes context variables cause a problematic usage situation. In this case a portable Usability Lab, installed at the user's work place, can pay to reveal the sources of such a problem. A Usability Lab can as well be used to support usability prototyping and is especially useful when exploring the potential of a new technology in still unknown application domains.

A project just started to demonstrate the pros and cons of a Usability Lab embedded in the DATech Procedures for Usability Testing. Within this SIG a video will be shown to illustrate the DATech Procedures including the use of our Usability Lab.

Aim of the meeting
With this SIG we wanted to open our group to a broader and international audience for discussing the results we achieved so far.

Program

1. Presentation and discussion of different approaches how to use a usability lab (H.-G. Dierigen, B. Majonica, R. Freitag)
2. Experiences and applications from SIG participants
3. Demonstration of the DATech Procedures for Usability Testing
4. Discussion and exchange of expert knowledge with respect to the following questions:
   • What can we (not) achieve with a Usability Laboratory in Usability Engineering and Usability Testing?
   • When to use qualitative/quantitative analysis procedures?
   • Which methods of a Usability Lab can be supported by software, such as The Observer Video-Pro, and which are not yet supported?