Paper Reading #7: The Coffee Lab

Comments:

Reference:

Title: The Coffee Lab: Developing a Public Usability Space

Author: Maria Karam

Venue: CHI 2010, April 10-15

Summary

The Coffee Lab is somewhat like a real coffee shop, but with several interactive systems added for usability testing. Some of these systems include the Emoti-Chair, the iGesture System, a music visualization application, and several applications relating to captions. While all of the systems undergoing testing at the Coffee Lab are projects of their own, the focus of the Coffee Lab is to explore and research the public usability lab concept. Researchers evaluated the lab in five different stages, listed here in order: exposure, experience, experiment, extension, and exploration.

Discussion

While coffee shops have a high potential for this sort of public usability testing, I personally feel that this style of usability testing is flawed in general. This idea could work with more subtle and better known technology, but I felt like some of the ideas they were trying to test would have been either sufficiently uninteresting to patrons of an ordinary coffee shop, or else sufficiently outlandish so as to discourage interaction. These factors are diminished in the article, because while the Coffee Lab aims to be set in the public domain, it is a prototype as well. The article lacks a detailed description concerning how they avoided biasing customers and patrons, which most likely means that they didn't. As a result, I feel it is likely many individuals (myself included) would approach the coffee shop as a research enviroment - this naturally piques interesting and changes behavior.

To demonstrate this, imagine we took their Emoti-Chair and set it up in a real coffee shop - one without anyone standing around giving surveys and no visible surveillance or data collection. The difference here is that the expectations of the user are different, they no longer see the chair as a prototype. As a result, the chair will not immediately stand out as special either, and users will only notice it if the chair genuinely appeals to them. In the article, the attention of users is constantly drawn the items they wish to have tested, which defeats the purpose of doing the usability test in the public domain.