Feature: The Usability Lab as Teaching Playground

Packed with buttons and gadgets, things tha.t move and zoom, interactive processes that require teamwork, and tools that facilitate collaboration, Usability Labs (UL) are IT playgrounds for kids of all ages. The interactive nature of the lab brings IT down to a level where participants can get hands-on experience with the equipment and processes without feeling intimated by the technology. At IBM, the Hursley Product Usability Design Group (PUDG) tailored some standard usability activities and invited some school students in to try them out.

Originally, the PUDG team developed a tour for the UL Open Day in celebration of the lab’s refurbishments. The event’s success, coupled with our frequent requests to run on-site activities for school kids, prompted the development of a formal set of activities. The notion was to design an ‘off the shelf’ tour that any member of the team could easily run, even with little notice. As a part of the IBM® Mentorplace® initiative, the PUDG team offered to run the tour as an event for a group of school girls aged 12 to 14.

We brainstormed requirements for the tour activities:
* Interactive and hands-on
Participants should get their hands dirty with the various pieces of equipment available in the UL – it’s the best way to learn, and much more fun than watching someone else.
* Showcase the UL and the UCD process
Few people in the lab and moreover, the ‘real world’ have heard of UCD, let alone know what it’s all about. Using the UL, the activities should give participants a basic understanding of UCD and its inherent benefit in the design process.
* Enable participants to leave with a sense of achievement
The activities should give a new spin to the “heads down” developer image of IT; technology, technical processes and related equipment can be used productively by anyone with the desire to learn.
* Flexible to accommodate a variety of audiences and timescales
The tour should be a series of packaged activities which can easily be adapted to the requirements of a particular session, without affecting the value of the tour.

To begin, students were told they had just been hired to work on the FridgePlus project by Smart Toys Inc., a fictitious company that advocated UCD principles. The FridgePlus was to use Internet connectivity to create an intelligent refrigerator and their job for the day was to design the user interface for an LCD that would be mounted on the fridge. Each of the first 3 stations represented a different phase in the design process; requirements gathering, prototyping and usability testing (Stations 1-3). Station 4 was a mini-design workshop which, although was not directly related to the FridgePlus, tied the activities of the previous 3 stations together. Students were given a brief explanation of the theory behind the task and how it fit into the UCD process at the beginning of each activity.

Station 1: Requirements Gathering
Station 1 required participants to brainstorm requirements for the FridgePlus. Students were instructed to spend 10 minutes typing features they thought would be good to have on the FridgePlus. The facilitator started with a few example ideas appropriate to their age group such as a ‘Justin Timberlake Alert’, an alarm that indicated the fridge was low on Justin’s top 3 favourite foods. The second step in this activity was to assign and prioritize each of the features to one or more (time dependent) of the profiled 5 user groups; mom, dad, grandparent, sibling, you.

Station 2: Prototyping
Students sat in a circle around a SMART Board and the PUDG rep explained the task at hand. They were told to imagine they had just bought some chocolate milk at the grocery store. Before putting it in the fridge:
* Label it with a name
* Set the expiry date alarm
Students were encouraged to collectively design the task flow and were called up individually to each have a turn using the technology.

Station 3: Usability Testing
Each student was assigned a specific role and given a task sheet which gave more detail about their specific role and instructions. There were 6 tasks (Interviewer, Test Administrator, Recorder, Observer, Equipment Controller, Test participant) so students were required to pair up. Once the activity was explained, students went off into the appropriate room (observation room or test cell) to begin the activity. The students in the Test Administrator role were given a Session Scenario sheet to be read aloud explaining the basis for the FridgePlus test and the two tasks to for Test participants to perform. A PowerPoint prototype was provided to simulate the FridgePlus interface.

Station 4: Mini-Design Challenge
At an accelerated pace, students are required to brainstorm and prioritize requirements, design, draw and pitch a superhero’s costume. We thought it would be a perfect way to tie together the principles learned through the other three stations. The group was divided into two equal teams and each given a design pack which contained markers, glue sticks, and coloured and poster paper. They were instructed to follow the printed instructions and at the end of the 20 minutes they were to present their costume to the other team. Small cakes were given as prizes.

At the end of the tour all Teams met in the auditorium room for a 5 minute debriefing session facilitated by the PUDG representatives. Students voiced their opinions on what they did and did not like and what new things they learned. In general the students had a great time learning about this new face of IT: “I learnt a lot about customer requirements and how you can test to see if the product is satisfactory!”

“I learnt new things to do with computers.”

“The usability labs r excellent…they’re really cool. There’s loads of laptops down there.”

Overall the event was a success as evidenced by comments from the students and chaperones. The students had a great time playing with the various bits of equipment and at the same time learned something new either about UCD, IT or themselves. The PUDG team was pleased with the afternoon as well; the UL got some publicity with the news items surrounding the event, the department finally had a canned UL tour the team could run with and it was a great way to spend an afternoon.

At the end of the session, the team combined the feedback from the students and the chaperones with its own observations to rundown what worked and what could be improved for next time.

The lessons learned are summarised below.

* Add in a 5 minute 'Introduction’ session
Once students were escorted down to the UL, they were immediately divided up into groups and sent off to the appropriate activity room. In hindsight, a group spiel was needed to introduce the PUDG team, explain a little about what we do and what the students will be doing.

* Laminate usability testing task sheets and fix them to the relevant pieces of equipment
It was soon apparent the 12 students was too large a group to run the usability testing activity; there seemed to be confusion over where they were to stand and perform their individual roles. Afterwards, we thought that fixing the task sheets to the appropriate positions (rather than handing them out) in both the observation room and test cell would help space the students. Additionally by having them laminated it would make the task sheets more durable and reusable.

* Include a wrap-up session
Although the PUDG facilitated an impromptu wrap-up session, it was a great way to close out the afternoon. It brought everyone together to share their afternoon’s experiences and gave the PUDG team an opportunity to get feedback on what did and did not work.

* Provide participants with information sheets about each activity
It would have been helpful to give participants something tangible to take away from the event. An informational hand out offering quick educational bites about each of the activities with space to add their own comments may help to remind them what they did while on site. It could also include links to follow-up sites, just in case some students were interested in IBM, UCD or IT in general.

* Try to incorporate current classroom lesson themes with the activities
The challenge is always to make the topic relevant to the target audience. As the activities need to be flexible to accommodate a range of user groups (students, IBM employees, customers etc.) it may prove difficult to find a universal topic that’s engaging for all. One suggestion was to get in touch with the school/group/department in advance to get a feel for their current topics. This buzz item could then be somehow incorporated into one of the activities. For example, if a class is currently studying India, one option might be design a travel website for India as the subject of the mini design challenge activity.

Edited from an internal IBM paper by Davis Marasco, Usability Engineer, IBM, with contributions from Keren Lyndon, Usability Engineer and Brian E Jones, Usability Engineer. © Copyright IBM Corp. 2003

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