Paper Reading #3: The Coffee Lab: Developing a Public Usability Space

Commentary

See what I have to say about Jessica's and Joshua's work.

References

Karam, M. (2010). The coffee lab: developing a public usability space. Proceeding of the Acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2671-2680). Atlanta: http://www.sigchi.org/chi2010/.

Article Summary

Karam outlines her project that explores usability in a public setting, called the Coffee Lab. The lab is set up in a local Toronto coffee shop and consists of several interactive systems with which Karam can conduct public usability tests (PUTs). The novel concept in this project is the fact that Karam conducts her studies outside of a traditional laboratory environment, affording her the opportunity to explore a wide user base in a more natural setting, in the hopes that she will get more salient results. Karam describes the project as ...[being] aimed at developing a permanent usability facility in a coffee shop, where different interactive systems are presented, evaluated, and experienced by anyone who enters the shop.

The Emoti-Chair in the Coffee Lab
Image courtesy of Sideshow Cafe

There are currently two interactive systems being tested at the Coffee Lab: the Emoti-chair and the iGesture. The infrastructure of the lab consists of several computers networked together with various webcams for data gathering and touchscreens for interaction. She evaluates the systems in five stages:

• exposure, or first contact with the user;
• experience, in which the user first learns about the system;
• experiment, in which a more structured approach is taken towards gathering user input;
• extension, which encompasses long-term study opportunities;
• and exploration, after the user has become familiar with the system and has been subjected to various questionnaires and interviews, and is allowed to interact with the system in a completely unstructured way.

Karam goes on to cover some of the results she has gathered and to offer some improvements that will be made to the system as time goes on.

Discussion

This is as ingenious a concept as the CAT article I reviewed previously. A recurring theme I've been noticing in the field of HCI is that of the observing the interaction itself, and not just trying to come up with and test what we as the designer think is a creative idea. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's interesting to me to step away from design for a moment and focus on observation. If I could fault myself on one thing it might be the atrophy of my creative process, maybe through disuse, maybe through too narrow a scope of explorations. I can complete a project to a specification, and I can surely come up with some improvements to the specification I discover through the process of creating it, but I feel like employing some of these techniques from the field of HCI might help me fix my disability of not being able to discover my own novel interactions.