Feature: John Knight puts User-Lab on the Map

John Knight, a usability engineer with a fine art background, and his colleague, Marie Jefsioutine, will be giving an organisational overview of Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD)'s user-lab at the HCI 2003 conference in Bath next week.

John manages the lab. I caught up with him to find out just what a usability lab is doing in an institute for art and design, and what light that can shed on possible futures for HCI.

The user-lab itself started life as an internal project to evaluate faculty and e-learning websites being developed at the BIAD. One of the initial aims of the project was to break down some of the barriers that typically exist between graphic designers and usability engineers. Given that there was a lot of fear on both sides, John recalls, we decided to set up a survey of usability beliefs (see UN story The Persistence of Usability Myths) to help bring different communities of practice together and to explode some unhelpful myths - such as usability is Jakob Nielsen and limits innovation.

From working on internal projects, the user-lab started to move to external consulting and training. The lab itself is mostly used for traditional task-oriented usability testing where users are set exercises to perform with computers and their performance is observed and evaluated. Despite this, John sees problems with current, narrow, definitions of usability in that they don't allow for different product requirements. 'Requirements can change during product lifecycles; quality criteria that are important at point of sale can become redundant or mutate. Products that become valued possessions have a meaning and history that affects owners perceptions of the product and themselves,' he says.

User-lab's external consultancy tends to focus on this broader view of the user-experience, developing user centred design processes with a more holistic and encompassing approach to interaction design.

I ask John to give his opinion on what future trends in HCI we might expect. This is always a difficult question to answer well, but John looks at past trends from usability, to accessibility, to suggest that something around engagability might be the next issue. For John, early definitions can be limiting and not as interesting as understanding what could be, how it feels, how we can design and evaluate experiences; definitions will emerge from such understandings, he believes. The user-lab's work with interactive museum exhibits has provided some insights into what engaging experiences might be.

He also considers HCI's roots in academia. He points out that the university sector has changed over the past decades to focus more on knowledge transfer and closer links with industry – maybe this will be a distinct trend in HCI work. 'We should be more campaigning,' says John. 'Usability is still a peripheral concern.' This view is reflected in User-Lab2 – an innovative project to bring usability to small companies who would otherwise not have access to costly and time consuming techniques which often have steep learning curves. User-lab2 enables SMEs to get up to 30 hours free use of a portable accessibility/usability lab. The lab provides useful evaluation of their products and also recommends how they could develop their own user-centred development processes.

Associated Link: User-Lab at BIAD

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