We had a field trip to Serco Usability Labs today. We were hosted by Andrew Swartz, who was very friendly and helpful in talking to us about the company and giving us a brief overview of the lab and even getting us involved in some usability activities.
It was great that they brought out a whole table full of snacks – grapes, corn chips, mini pretzels, twinkies,… the works. We were sheepishly holding ourselves back while Andrew was talking us through the slides, but we had our fill during the minute break though.
We didn’t get to visit the offices, which were located upstairs. We hung around the reception area and were brought to one of the testing labs, which is quite a comfy room with a large TV screen and a computer inside. The place was set up well for observation, with a huge glass window-mirror to the observation room.
This lab was a lot more customer-facing than the BT lab I visited a few years back. I just remember walking through a series of store rooms in a building in Adastral Park, before I got to the nicely decorated BT usability labs. The Serco one was conveniently located just after the reception room past a set of doors.
Although we were there for over 2 hours, it didn’t feel all that long. I was surprised at how fast time passed, and it could’ve been the fault of the snacks but Andrew did a really good job of grabbing our interest and creating some good interactions in the room.
We got a feel of how it’s like to do a usability test when a few of us tried walking through introductions for users who come into the labs. I volunteered to facilitate one of the sessions with a ‘fake’ user, who was one of the Serco staff, and it went really well and we had good things to talk about. My classmates heard me say “this sucks” from the observation room, which is really funny. I felt like I was being observed more than playing the part of the observer (of the user).
One key thing that was repeated a lot was to avoid our tendency to help the user during the think-aloud process, which I thought was a valid point to make, because the user does seem like they need help a lot sometimes. But facilitation requires a kind of real-time observation and curiousity, and sort of being in two places at once – an observer as well as a host.
If this is a taste of what the usability industry is like, then I am sold. I absolutely love interacting with users and learning how they make use of systems, and being part of the process of providing solutions that can help both companies and users build better products.