Océ Technologies

Océ is one of the world's leading suppliers of products and services for professional printing and document management; from document creation and design through to distribution and archiving. To equip our customers with high-end technology, Océ consistently invests more than 6 per cent of turnover in innovation. The Océ R&D program now comprises over 2000 people, including some 500 software specialists working in competence centers around the world. The resulting technologies enable unique applications in Cutsheet printing, Continuous-feed printing, Wide format printing, Color printing, Document management software and Imaging supplies.

Our usability lab is situated at the Industrial Design department within the Research and Development Centre in Venlo (The Netherlands). In the design department a group of product, interaction and graphical designers, (digital) model makers and usability experts are working at the ease of use of our products. During different stages in the product development usability of the design is evaluated. One of the methods used is usability testing.

	Test subject operating a product prototype while being videotaped.
	The test environment. The test sessions are videotaped with three different cameras and two microphones.
	Members of the project team observe the test sessions in the Observation Room.
	Screen of The Observer during an observation session.
	The data collection environment. Three video cassette recorders, monitor, computer with The Observer software, video-editing software. Furthermore, to get the best possible view on the session the signals can be combined in different ways with a picture-in-picture unit (e.g. face of the user, user interface and overview).

With The Observer (Noldus Information Technology) the combined signal is digitized in real-time (MPEG). Afterwards the data is analyzed for specific problems or misunderstandings. Sometimes statistical information like task completion time, response time, behavior rate or learning curves are relevant. Some of the video fragments are put together in short highlight clips that are used for presentation and archiving the material. For this a dedicated video-editing application is used.

Océ Technologies B.V.
Industrial Design Department
P.O. Box 101
5900 MA Venlo
The Netherlands 
www.oce.com/en/default.htm