Do current user testing practices meet the needs of the new interactive paradigms?
Marc González Capdevila, Toni Granollers, Juan Enrique Garrido, Octávio Henrique Müller, Leonardo Coelho Ruas · 2021
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners count with more than 30-40 years of work already done evaluating the usability of interactive systems. For along time, the evaluation of user interfaces by user testing techniques, has been one of the most successful ways to get feedback from the users. HCI experts usually perform their experimental evaluations sessions in usability labs, indoor facilities with equipment like eye-tracking devices or multi-rooms with specialised software. Although expensive and not available for everybody, this model has worked for a long time. On the other hand, during the last decade the interactive context has completely changed. The rise of new user interactions like voice, virtual reality and augmented reality has conceived new interactive paradigms. The well-known Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT) are not just something that might happen in the future, but an unstoppable reality that favours these changes and, because of that, we need new HCI knowledge, methods, and techniques to deal with the challenges brought by them. In this paper we show and discuss about this new reality in order to defend the need for a complete change in the way that we evaluate the Quality in Use of current and future interactive scenarios. We will finish our arguments by proposing a line of research to find new methodologies to improve the Quality in Use laboratories for the present/future.