IDEA Lab

The IDEA Lab is a repository of expertise in Interaction Design, Evaluation and Analysis. It consist of academic staff, postgraduate students and research consultants, and a specialist laboratory with sophisticated audio-visual equipment to conduct user experience tests and interaction research.

The IDEA lab supports a variety of activities concerning the design and evaluation of interactive technologies. Activities include:

• User Based Testing
  A typical usability test may involve several users, each going through a series of representative and critical tasks. (example of test-in-progress, QuickTime 6.4MB).
• Heuristic Evaluations and Cognitive Walkthroughs
  Two or more of our usability experts evaluate the product against established design guidelines and/or core tasks.
• Brainstorming sessions
  The lab can be used as a convenient way of capturing group interactions and dynamics in collaborative design activities, such as in requirements brainstorming sessions, or focus-group sessions
• Participatory Design
  The IDEA lab is well suited to Participatory Design activities. Every room can be uniquely configured to suit different needs. (example of a Participatory Design session, designing an interface for a PDA, Quicktime, 28MB)

While the lab is used for basic research by postgraduates and staff, we welcome others making use of the facility. The IDEA lab can be hired by companies and individuals on a day or half-day basis. For enquiries see contact details below

The Lab

The IDEA lab is not a typical usability lab. It consists of two control rooms (for usability engineers) and four observation rooms (for study participants). The lab can be used to conduct a traditional usability session (i.e. a single evaluation), but it also supports upto four concurrent usability sessions.

Each control room can be used to monitor one, two or three simultaneous usability sessions. This configuration is ideal when many groups of students must simultaneously access the lab; but is also useful when needing to investigate distributed technologies, such as is used by people interacting over a distance (e.g. pervasive communication technologies). The IDEA lab allows the investigator to simultaneously observe both interactions.

The three smaller observation rooms are 4m by 4m and the larger room is 8m by 8m. The larger room can also be used as a training facility for large groups. It can seat about 30 people. With appropriate lighting differential, the large group can look into a usability session being held in the smaller room and being monitored by an engineer in one of the control rooms.

The observation rooms are highly configurable. A patch system allows video cameras to be located anywhere in the rooms. Video cameras can be positioned on the ceiling or on tripods around the room. Typically three cameras are used for each session. Various microphones (lapel, desk, and table) are used to capture high quality audio of participants' communications and utterances.

In the control room, four video signals - three from the participant and a fouth from the screen - can be viewed at the one time on the quad display. The quad display unit can show a view from any of three video camera, or the scan converter card from the PC in the observation room.The Usability Engineer can select from four live channels, and manipulate both the size and shape of the overlapping video images.

The session is usually recorded on standard VHS, miniDV, videotape, CD or DVD for later inspection and analysis. Digital Video Mixers are used to combine video sources in real-time.

Useful Links

• Tips for Designing Fixed Usability Lab (OVO studios)
• Designing a Usability Lab (STC)
• How Do I Get Started with Usability? (UPA)

Contact

Dr Frank Vetere
The IDEA Lab
Department of Information Systems
University of Melbourne
Level 4, 111 Barry St Carlton, VIC, 3053
Australia
T: 03 8344 1496
F: 03 9349 4596
E: fv @ unimelb.edu.au