Usability Lab

Purpose of Lab

  • Teaching of methodological know-how in all bachelor's and master's degree programmes in the Faculty of Business Administration and Engineering and in cooperation with other HFU faculties.
  • Project work
  • Thesis work
  • Research

Lab Equipment

Stationary Usability Lab

The stationary usability lab consists of a test room and a control room. From the control room test runs can be observed and recorded from various perspectives. The test run can be projected for larger audiences in HD quality. Usability tests of technical documents in paper form, device controls or prototypes are recorded using modern camera and sound recording equipment.

Mobile Usability Lab

A mobile usability lab is also available in order to evaluate a product with test persons in the normal environment. The mobile equipment for the recordings can be quickly and flexibly set up.

Eye Tracking and Screen Recording
In order to record screen content, we have an eye tracker which records eye movements, as well as extensive screen recording software. The Tobii mobile eye tracking glasses is a portable eye tracking system. This makes it possible to carry out usability tests in a realistic environment.

    Room

    G 1.04 + G 1.05 Furtwangen Campus

    Not just a question of usability

    A visit to the Usability Lab at Furtwangen University

    What makes a food processor your favourite kitchen product? Why is it that some vending machines can do what you want them to do quickly and easily, and others just drive you crazy? Can an online fitness programme really persuade us to get down on our exercise mat? And who was it that decided the “save” button must be placed at the top left anyway? Operators and users of products which are supposed to improve our everyday lives  can only hope that someone has actually asked such questions. This is exactly what happens at the university in Furtwangen. In the “Usability Lab” of the Faculty of Business Administration and Engineering the focus is all on user-friendliness. And one thing’s for sure – it’s never boring. The places they work and the objects they test could not be more different from each other. From a heavy duty road roller to a mobile phone app, from parking ticket machines to front door bells – here they test everything humans use.

     “In this lab we test products for companies who want to ensure during their project development phase that their idea will be accepted by the target group, ” explains HFU professor Dr Gerhard Kirchner. According to Kirchner, the most important word here is “rather”, because, “The deciding factor nowadays is not which product has the best features any more, but which the customer would rather use!” Products are considered to be user-friendly when the customer neither hesitates nor has to search, but simply intuitively knows how to use them and there are no possible hazards.

    Today a self-pay fuel pump is being tested in the Usability Lab. With a toy car, a bottle of water as a petrol pump and a customer card, volunteers can test how self-explanatory the system is. Cameras record the study, even the eye movements, which are registered with a pair of eye tracking glasses – because it is also important where on the display the customer expects to find the information. The students who are carrying out the test today have based their research on four key questions: What has already functioned well? Where can we make improvements? Why was there a problem at this point? How could it be optimised? To answer these questions the young scientists have proposed theories which are now being tested with volunteer test persons. Companies which plan these safeguarding measures into their development process, profit from the fact that small errors can be discovered and removed at an early stage. The film and sound materials from the tests using cameras is tranferred from the Usability Lab to a neighbouring room for evaluation.

    Meanwhile back at the petrol pump, the car registration number has to be entered to request a receipt. The test person is having some trouble with the keypad and it does not seem to be working straightaway – important information that the students can pass on to the project partner.  “It’s often the small things we notice which are actually very important,” explains Professor Kirchner, giving the example of a valve system for oil pipelines which was tested in the HFU lab. Built-in display units indicated red or green depending on whether a valve was open or closed. “Very clear. Supposedly. But around 10% of all men have red-green colour blindness, ” says Kirchner, “and on an oil platform they can’t afford to make any mistakes….” So the red-green display unit was removed.

    In contrast the current test is successfully concluded. The “car” is filled up and after answering dozens of questions the test persons have also learned a lot about their own expectations of vending machines. Back in the outside world, during the next routine encounter with technology, one does wonder why there aren’t more usability tests…