Being in a large corporate research organization, our way of working is traditionally very technology driven. Lately, we are moving towards user-centered innovation and are integrating a more consumer-oriented approach in our research. Not only are we involving the end-user, we are focusing on lifestyle and user experience. Effectively listening to users is critical for research and development of successful products in this area. To fully adhere to this market pull paradigm, end-users should be involved already in the conceptual stage of development instead of only in the prototype phase, as is currently mostly done. Validation of insights and preliminary ideas is important for the success of a final product. The focus on lifestyle research also brings new kinds of questions to answer on the end-user experience of products and technologies. Performing such user studies in different phases of a project in a traditional way by inviting participants on site is an expensive and time consuming practice, while it is hard to reach a representative group of the target audience. Performing the user testing in a Web 2.0 community-like environment solves these issues. In such an environment, many of the needed tests can be facilitated, ranging from user insight generation and validation, via user interface confrontation to prototype testing. In this presentation we introduce SimplicityLabs, our embodiment of such an online user testing infrastructure. We briefly show how the various kinds of tests and experiments are designed and implemented using our web-based toolbox. These experiments range from simple questionnaires to fully functioning prototypes with extensive logging. We are comparing our different methods with respect to development effort, testing effort (both from the user as well as the researcher), usefulness, and ability to draw conclusions. Furthermore, we show how the collected data is analyzed. We compare both online conceptual research as well as online prototype testing with their traditional offline counterparts. Our test subjects in these experiments have been mainly invited on a one-off basis. We plan to use SimplicityLabs as a platform for building longer relationships with enthusiastic netizens by stimulating involvement in early product concepts and offering a glance of the technologies ahead. We will elaborate on the future of this project as well and discuss how a corporate-backed community will function. As a next step, we plan to harness the wisdom of the crowds by trying to grow a pool of participants in online experiments and employ contextual inquiry and mapping techniques within this community to form the basis of new product and technology concepts. We hope to develop new ideas this way by provoking interactivity both between members of this community as well as researchers and thus complete the conversion to the market pull paradigm in a Web 2.0 way. This presentation does not require any specific prior knowledge.

Presentation files: First Steps Towards an Online User Experience Testing Community Presentation.ppt