Testing in the field

It is widely acknowledged in the HCI community that much can be gained from bringing aspects from the field into the lab, and this principle is dominating within usability groups in Danish Industry. The paper describes three such Danish usability groups and their experiments with turning the tables by using aspects from the lab in the methods applied in the field during field work projects. The context of use plays an important role for a richer understanding of the usability of particular products. As such, implications of this is not surprising, neither theoretically nor empirically. What is interesting, however, is how findings of this type are instantiated in the particular cases; how the three usability groups have used the lab approaches to aid them in working in the field and how the new methods may enhance their existing methodological toolkit. The message of the paper is that there are a variety of ways in which the theoretically driven, pre-planned, and predirected may meet the situated and open minded, both when usability work is conducted in the field and in the lab