The Usability Laboratory at Manchester Metropolitan University - Launch Party

Date: 24th November 2010 - MMU Usability Laboratory, John Dalton Building E148, Chester Street, M1 5GD

The Usability Laboratory at Manchester Metropolitan University is a unique facility, designed to capture and analyse human behaviour as we interact with a host of technological devices including computers, mobile devices and video game consoles

 

The benefits of this type of analysis include an enhanced user experience, streamlined design and development process, and improvements in efficiency and profitability.

The Laboratory is perfectly placed to support the design, development and assessment of wide range software and hardware and can support:

 

• Focus group based design
• Full User Experience and Usability analysis
• Eye tracking (for Web site assessment etc)
• User Centred Design (including formative and summative assessment).

Those who might benefit from using the Laboratory include digital media marketing companies, web site and video game developers, those building business applications, and developing and designing technology based systems.

The Laboratory comprises an Observation Lounge and an Observation Suite. In order to make test users feel relaxed and comfortable, the Observation Lounge is designed to mimic the look and feel of a living room.

There are the usual furnishings but with remote control cameras and microphones to capture user behaviour and facial expressions during evaluation sessions.

The video data is digitized in real-time, and observed behaviours, including user engagement measured using heart rate monitors, can be fed into the world leading Noldus Observer XT 10 behaviour analysis software.

There is a PC in the Laboratory which can be used to capture keyboard input and the space can also be used to capture interactions with games consoles such as Wii, Playstation and Xbox 360.

Eye Tracking
The remote eye tracking hardware (SMI RED 250) records a wide range of data from fixation point of the user's gaze and pupil dilation to scan paths. BeGaze is used to analyse the output, for example definition of custom areas of interest and a wide range of statistics and the production of heat maps and other visual representations of the data.

Academics at the University actively pursue research and consultancy collaborations in the area of user experience and usability engineering and would be pleased to discuss potential projects with you.

The Usability Laboratory is available for commercial hire with technical support and assistance from academics with usability analysis if required, for example to enhance objectivity.

At the Launch Party you will be able to see the Lab in action, hear about usability projects we are working on, meet and network with others interested in user experience and usability engineering and discuss future collaborations.