A virtual lab for ICT experience prototyping

K. Coninx¹ , M. Haesen¹ and J. Bierhoff²

¹Expertise Centre for Digital Media, Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Diepenbeek, Belgium
²EC/DC, Heerlen, The Netherlands

In this contribution, we present a ‘Virtual Lab for ICT Experience Prototyping’ as a joint organisation of a number of research groups in Belgium and The Netherlands. The project, which started in January 2005, is financed by the ‘Interreg Benelux-Middengebied’ authorities. The region we are targeting is made up of five provinces in North-East Belgium and the South-East of The Netherlands. The main goal of the project is to provide a multidisciplinary, profiled, accessible service, organizing all of the prototyping steps for enterprises.

The key to the Virtual Lab is not to create a new institute with an own building, but to choose for an improvement of existing facilities and to connect them. The project will mainly be realized through the following work packages: Sensitize companies in the region, Pilot projects, Evaluation and exploitation planning. The Virtual Lab will during the next three years disseminate the ideas of experience prototyping to local companies and will realize a number of pilot projects, which will investigate how prototyping can improve current practices in industry. The approach for these pilots will be user-centered. We wish to involve the end user from the beginning of the design cycle of each pilot.

This project enables the involved research groups to soundly integrate their know-how with respect to designing and measuring the user’s experience. Also, the multdisciplinary and user-centered approach of the consortium allows to judge the value of particular measuring techniques in five prioritized application domains: media, e-government, health-care, services and industrial settings.

In the final paper, we will discuss our approach for the first pilot. The end product will be an evaluated prototype of a flexible user interface for the mobile journalist. With the help of the user interface, the reporters have not to worry about technical details of the equipment, but they can concentrate on their job, journalism.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

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