About UsabilityNJ

UsabilityNJ is the home to STC UUX and UPA members in Central New Jersey. The group holds monthly meetings and hosts a discussion list.

All photos credit of Steve Kertesz .

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

UsabilityNJ hosts colleagues from China

By Alice Preston

On January 16, UsabilityNJ hosted a special event in honor of a stateside visit by three representatives of China’s Huawei Technologies Co. (www.huawei.com/). Li Dongyuan, who is building a new UCD department at the company’s offices in Shenzhen, led the delegation, which also included business process manager Wei Guo and senior engineer Steven Qiaio. Mr. Li, who met New Jersey’s Whitney Quesenbery at the recent UPA conference in China, was interested in building relationships with American usability practitioners, in seeing one or more usability labs and hearing about their use, and in future cooperation and exchange of knowledge and techniques with usability colleagues around the world.

The group visited the Siemens Corporate Research user interface design center and lab in Princeton, New Jersey. Center director Claus Knapheide and global program manager April McGee presented information about Siemens, their group, and their UCD program, followed by a walk through their usability lab. The group discussed the value of a multi-use space, noting that in this case the lab is large enough to accommodate a variety of tests, including tests of products as disparate as home appliances, computer software, and interactive voice recognition (IVR) systems, while tests on some systems and products take place at the customer site. The lab’s control room serves also as a meeting room for design meetings, focus groups, and small-group presentations. Mr. Li presented an outline of Huawei’s telecom offerings and the plans for their newly formed UCD department, which will include a usability lab.

We found that both business realities and the business of setting up usability groups have many similarities across the world and across organizations. Both Siemens and Huawei, being large corporations, approach the in-company opportunities by setting up a centralized group, with opportunities for group members to work on usability for several different areas of the company. Other attendees noted that in their organizations, a more diffuse approach is in use, while yet others work as consultants on contract to specific clients for specific project-based assignments. One conclusion was that new labs need not be set up the same way as traditional labs. With the newer testing software that is available, projecting a large image of the test can provide almost the same experience for observing team members as the two-way mirrors. Control rooms can have windows; observers can be assembled down the hall or even more remotely.

Whitney Quesenbery welcomes UsabilityNJ attendees to the
meeting at Siemens Corporate Research

Siemens Corporate usability lab

The UsabilityNJ attendees pose with Siemens Center director
Claus Knapheide (second from left) and guests Li Dongyuan
and Steven Qiaio (center) and Wei Guo, (seventh from right)