Usability Lab

Human-Centered Computing @ Graz University of Technology

Mission & Vision

The goal of the Usability Lab is to enable unobtrusive observation of user experience and performance with novel technologies in a controlled environment. Usability Labs consist of rooms for controlled studies. These rooms will allow an experimenter to observe how humans carry out various activities with minimal intrusion. Two usability rooms have been built, separated by a half-way mirror from the control room. In the current configuration, the Control Room is in the middle, allowing simultaneous observation of both experiment rooms for parallel study conditions or for research on remote collaboration.

The technology needed in usability rooms should make it possible to control numerous factors of the room conditions as well as the machine or computer system that is the subject of the study. In addition, usability rooms should be monitored with cameras and environmental sensors. This is currently work in progress.

Lab Outcomes

Education and Research

This lab is used since its creation for education in courses dealing with user evaluations and its diverse aspecst. Such courses using the infrastructure until 2025 are:

  1. Human-Computer Interaction,
  2. Evaluation Methodology: The aim is for students to acquire the methodology to formulate hypotheses and design their validation procedure. The lecture is divided into three major blocks, statistical methods, evaluations from a scientific point of view, and exemplary evaluations in diverse sub-fields: interactive applications, visualization, haptics, eye tracking, crowdsourced studies, recommender systems.
  3. Human Factors Lab: The goal of this seminar is for students of the Masters in Human Factors (CSS) to acquire the concepts and the methods to analyze human aspects of a system, propose and design the methods to elicit and observe human factors, and deliver recommendations for future designs based on such studies. Topics include: Human Factors and Ergonomics, Human Factors Engineering, Perceptual issues and evaluations, Information processing, Sensation and perception, basic anatomy and physiology, antropometry, decision making and decision support.

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Interested in our research or want to collaborate? Reach out to us and join our mission to redefine immersive computing.

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