Our usability lab is one of the research facilities within the UPE Centre of Excellence. The laboratory is used to formally evaluate the usability of a wide variety of interactive systems.

The lab is outfitted with state of the art equipment supplied by Noldus Information Technology in December 2000. During a test, a recording is made of the user completing the required tasks and after the test, tasks and events are logged with The Observer Video-Pro. For presentations purposes, video highlights are produced as MPEG-1 clips. In quantitative studies, summary statistics (task completion times, error rates) are exported to Excel and next to Statistica for hypothesis testing.

 

 

Overview of the observation room including the Noldus equipment which is also linked to an eye tracking system. The observation room caters for groups of up to 15 observers to be present during a test.

 

 

 

 

Overview of the test room with no set furniture configuration to allow for more than one user to be tested simultaneously. The test room can also accommodate focus groups. Note the dome cameras mounted in the ceiling. 

University of Port Elizabeth
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
CoE Usability Laboratory
P.O. Box 1600
Port Elizabeth 6000
South Africa
URL: http://www.nmmu.ac.za/default.asp?id=1448&bhfv=8&bhsh=864&bhsw=1152&bhiw=1061&bhih=628&bhqs=1