Example labs

The Human Oriented Technology Lab (HOT Lab) is a unique university-based Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research and training facility that fosters interdisciplinary research, education and training to improve interactive technologies for human endeavors. It was established in 1978 and is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the oldest HCI labs residing in a psychology department in North America.

Cordys is a global software company that develops inventive collaborative solutions to deliver superior levels of adaptability, efficiency and responsiveness to companies and their networks. By combining new, groundbreaking, internet associated technologies with existing, commonly applied technology, we energize companies with unprecedented opportunities to reach new levels of business performance and truly satisfy their stakeholders. Our scalable, adaptive solutions fully leverage existing enterprise applications and extend their life cycle by adding new functionality. We value what is, and provide a smooth transition to what will be. We make existing systems future proof.

The usability laboratory is situated in the Design Institute, Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University. The lab serves as a focus point in the university for studies of HCI, electronic learning resources, games usability, design process management, product evaluation and interactive/reactive media evaluation. By capturing the usability evaluation process we wish to give industrial designers a wider understanding of usability.

CURE's mission is to develop innovative and usage-oriented systems utilizing methodological and qualitative usability and usability engineering knowledge. Leading edge research activities as well as intensive industrial experience enable us to provide added value for users, producers and principals.

Our usability lab was opened in December 2003. Our principal interest is not only to examine the usability of hardware and software but generally to analyze the interaction of people with different kinds of technology.

The main interest of the Human Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology concerns the question how people deal and interact with technological systems, how this affects human life in positive and negative ways and how these interactions can be optimized.

The eMotion Laboratory is a unique facility, developed to capture the subtle palettes of human emotion. Typical beneficiaries of our work include leisure-based software developers, game-based education instructors, those building emotionally contingent business applications, and health technology professionals.

The usability lab of The Hague University (“Haagse Hogeschool”) is mainly used for teaching purposes in Communication & Multimedia Design and other informatics courses. The lab exists of a portable and stationary part. The portable part offers the possibility to do the tests on site, while the stationary part allows students to observe users in a controlled environment.

The Institut für Software-Ergonomie und Usability is a privately held Zürich-based usability consulting company. During usability testing, test leader and participant communicate during the test by microphone (if necessary). During the test, the user is being observed by at least two independent observers while conducting a predefined set of user scenarios on the Lab test PC. After the test, tasks and events are logged based on the videotapes created during the test session (using The Observer Video-Pro. For CIF based reporting purposes, summary statistics (task completion, error and assistance rates) are exported into Excel and SPSS while videotapes are transcribed for qualitative analysis. For presentation purposes, Camtasia movies and video highlight clips (MPEG-2 / AVI) are produced.

Human-Centered Design Lab is the first usability lab in Thailand. The lab facilitates both design and testing services.