CONTROLLED STUDIES OUTSIDE OF THE LAB

Abstract

Often, evaluators study a computing system inside a laboratory setting to best gain an understanding of the effect of the system when different factors are manipulated. The laboratory setting allows evaluators to create not only the environment, but also the scenario in which a user study of system is conducted. Thus, the laboratory setting allows evaluators to control possible confounding variables and to develop insight about the cause-and-effect of the system when they manipulate specific usage factors. For example, it is clear that people often use mobile devices while walking. Thus, a laboratory study can be designed to test how well users might be able to interact with a mobile device while walking on a treadmill machine. Such a study, because it is conducted in a laboratory setting, would allow the evaluators to control the speed at which study participants would walk while using a mobile device, without fearing that participants must also pay attention to traffic or could be distracted otherwise.