Follow-up for Feb. 27 Usability Lab Tour
Thanks to all who came out this past Tuesday to the presentation and usability lab tour hosted by Dr. Stephanie Guerlain and Dave Bauer of the Engineering School HCI program.
Cindy Walters, of the ITC Advanced Technology Group, and Brevy Cannon, of UVa Media Relations, were kind enough to send me their notes from the event. These are available for download at the end of this post. Also available below is Dr. Guerlain’s Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Course Notes document. This expands on the topics covered during her presentation and introduces some fundamental concepts applied in the study of HCI—usability and user testing included.
The large turnout on Tuesday indicates there’s a strong interest in usability testing at UVa. I hope everyone who attended was able to come away with something useful. I also hope this was just the beginning of something enduring, and that we’ll all soon find ourselves regularly conducting usability testing.
Of course, to get started we’ll need at least some basic know-how, a few pieces of equipment, and a corps of test participants. Some of Tuesday’s attendees indicated that they’re willing to help pursue these resources for the benefit of supporting a central UVa usability testing program. A few folks also volunteered to help rally the support of major stakeholders in this effort. By “major stakeholders” I mean UVa divisions that have the most to offer (especially funding) and gain from usability testing; ITC, University Relations, and the various UVa school web teams come to mind. I’ll be in touch shortly with all volunteers about where we go from here.
Lab space for testing is another resource we might seek out, but we should probably first investigate the possibilities of remote testing or using portable testing stations. In the mean time, Dr. Guerlain has generously offered to experiment with allowing use of her department’s lab by other UVa groups. Based on demand, that may or may not be feasible long-term, but the lab is well-equipped and ready to use right now. Please contact Dr. Guerlain directly if you’re interested in pursuing this possibility.
If you do begin testing soon, consider cooperating with other UVa groups to share a pool of test subjects and possibly to test the combined usability of multiple websites that collectively support a single user task. I’m in the process of setting up an email list for coordinating this kind of thing and sharing the results. The list will also be a place to carry on general discussion about user experience issues. Initial invitations for the list should be going out early next week.
Lastly, if you’re a del.ico.us bookmarks user, consider sharing found articles and other online resources about user experience design (which includes usability) by tagging them with “beTechUX”. The tag stands for “beTech User Experience”. I’ve already begun contributing a few bookmarks, which you can view at http://del.icio.us/tag/betechux. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the tag at http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/betechux.
Download
- Stephanie Guerlain’s HCI Course Notes (pdf 760Kb)
- Cindy Walters’ notes (pdf 20Kb)
- Brevy Cannon’s notes (pdf 64Kb)
