LIVING USABILITY LAB
Living Usability Lab (LUL) for Next Generation Networks was a Portuguese industry-academia collaborative R&D project, coordinated by Microsoft, active in the field of live usability testing, focusing on the development of technologies and services to support healthy, productive and active citizens.
The project adopted the principles of universal design and natural user interfaces (speech, gesture) making use of the benefits of next generation networks and distributed computing. Therefore, impacting the general population, including the elderly and citizens with permanent or situational special needs, such as the mobility impaired.
In this project I focused on the development and testing of a multimodal system, Living Home Center, that allows users with reduced mobility and the elderly access to communication services (email, calendar, social networks, audio/video calls, IM) in a natural and intuitive way.
Main Responsabilities
- State of the art analysis on usability evaluation methodologies, with and without users
- State of the art analysis on human-computer interaction focusing on the specifics of multimodality
- Requirements gathering with users
- Functional specification of the system
- Development of applications for mobile and desktop environments
- Specialized testing using heuristics and cognitive analysis
- Usability testing with selected group of users
- Dissertation writing about the whole process (Dissertation PDF - 3.6MB)
- Presentation of results at an international conference (2nd International Living Usability Lab Workshop on AAL Latest Solutions, Trends and Applications)
The result
Take a look of the project’s promotional video below for an overview of all the developed solutions, or head over to LUL’s official website for more information about the project.