From Usability Lab to "Design Collaboratorium": Reframing Usability Practice

This paper presents an exploratory process in which three industrial usability groups, in cooperation with HCI researchers, worked to reframe their own work practice. The usability groups moved beyond a “classical” usability setting towards a new way of working which we have coined the "Design Collaboratorium”. This design collaboratorium is a design approach that creates an open physical and organizational space where designers, engineers, users and usability professionals meet and work alongside each other. At the same time the design collaboratorium makes use of event-driven ways of working known from participatory design. Some of these working methods are well-documented from literature but adapted to the needs of the particular project, others are new. This paper illustrates how it is possible to reframe usability work and it discusses the new usability competence required. Keywords Usability work, design collaboratorium, collaboration, user participation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ACMDIS
• Authors: Jacob Buur, Susanne Bødker
• Keywords: ACMDIS 2000, Design Collaboratorium, Human Computer Interaction, Usability, Usability Groups