Building Hyflex UX "Lab Spaces" for Developing Student Research Toolkits

Abstract

In this paper, we present an extension of best practices for proposing and equipping a usability lab for research and education in a technical and professional communication university department. We implemented future-proofing approaches while building our labs during a global pandemic to prepare research and learning opportunities for students to gain user experience research methods and literacies in a highly flexible and virtual environment. Students who can point to well-articulated research can successfully advocate for more user-centered design practices in their future workplaces. But, the COVID-19 pandemic shed light on instances where practitioners and educators were forced to adjust their research methodologies in the middle of planning a project. Through university grants and internal funding, we each proposed separate styles of usability labs based on these experiences at separate universities. By expanding on established usability lab building practices, we offer this case study of how we created labs in two separate institutions that were built to adapt for future UX research needs. While the two labs are built with different university-based objectives in mind, the authors find common ground on developing research toolkits and competencies for their students for communicating, collaborating, and connecting their research both in-person and virtually.