Last night we were presented the results of a 10 week usability test for our location-based prototype in the Global Village at RIT. The project initiative is a part of a larger digital tourism ecosystem of products and services at RIT. The MS HCI students of the Usability Testing Class were faced with challenges. How do you sensitize subjects to interaction paradigms they never seen or used? and How do you appropriately  measure serendipitous goals and interactions while having little opportunity for quantitative measure? During the presentation the Usability Testing students clearly demonstrated ingenuity and adaptiveness in both user recruitment, testing and evaluation.

The MS HCI students recruited families of perspective RIT freshman during an open house session. Each family group experienced our tourism application which focuses on serendipitous walking trajectories in the Global Village at RIT.  The reactions from the families were very positive. Several groups stated that their experience coupled with their auto generated souvenirs was a great way to showcase and recruit new students to our HCI program. Our results have been submitted to NordiCHI 2012 for publication.

Thank you to all the MS RIT students and supporters who diligently fought through the adventure of testing emerging usability paradigms and prototypes!

Between the two independent studies, courses: Mobile Experiences for Tourism, User Experience Scholarship Seminar, Intro to HCI and Usability Engineering, we are shooting to publish in NORDICHI 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark. The challenge is high but we are focusing our research and tying for a RIT HCI presence in Scandinavia this year!  NORDCHI is one of my favorite conferences, great research and design, great people and great networking and learning opportunities.

http://www.nordichi2012.org/