The university admits internal as well as external partners to perform experiments with multimedia user interfaces. The Ozlab technique is adapted for development of interactivity on different units. Testing is vital in interaction design - it is not enough if the interaction developer has certain knowledge in the area usability. However, testing would be expensive if interactivity has to be programmed. The web-based Ozlab lets the designer test with real users in real situations before programming takes place.

Ozlab is an excellent tool for professional user interface designers and interaction designers to easily improvise and test a variety of alternative interactive ideas, and, not to be forgotten, Ozlab is also useful for discussing interaction design with stakeholders and for demonstrating behaviour for implementers (programmers).

News

2025-03-12 Vistor from Vaasa university to the lab

During his trip to Karlstad to discuss a double degree master's programme in UX, usability, accessibility, Juho-Pekka Mäkipää also took a look at our usability lab. The discussions vetted their and our courses in these areas, to make a full UX programme available to students in Karlstad and Vaasa. The future offer may include also joint courses and joint supervision of thesis students. The HCI group at Vaasa university will host the NordiCHI 2026 conference.

2025-01-27 AI in computer games

For teachers and master students, Kevin Hagemann presented a report "Exploring the role of designing constraints for GPT-driven narrative generation in game development" as examination for the course ISAE06. This project focuses on exploring how GPT-like models can be utilized to create interactive and dynamic narratives tailored to the players while also emphasizing the importance of constraints in maintaining coherence and alignment with creative goals. Kevin has undertaken a literature study as a preparation for the spring '25 Master's Thesis course.

2025-01-13 UI principle for designing virtual showrooms

Nsofwa Chanda had an assignment from IKEA for his ISAE07 work. The increasing demand for immersive digital shopping experiences has driven retailers to explore virtual showrooms as an extension of their physical showrooms, and Chanda tested some principles while developing and evaluating his prototype. He has then worked with his supervisor on a HCII paper to present in Gothenburg later this year.

2024-12-20 Co-designing an intranet

Elin Nilsson defended her Master's thesis today, a thesis in which she reflects on a project she did a couple of years ago, helping the university's communication department in its overhauling of out intranet. The study aimed to explore how co-design with users as co-designers can be facilitated through interactive prototype development in a co-located setting and how the Wizard of Oz tool called Ozlab can be used for this method. Also card sorting on screen in the Ozlab prototype was part of the co-design and the evaluation.

2024-09-10 Plans for user studies in the future: Computer games QA with players

Presently, Karlstad University runs a pre-study within the regional focus area of computer games and gamification. The pre-study participated in a study visit in September to Norway and the game developer education at Innlandet University in Hamar, together with regional administration and the Game Changer project at The Great Journey. There started a discussion on a possible InterReg project where a marketing firm can offer game testing based on recruited gamers; such a service could also be used by indie developers as these cannot afford having their own QA unit. This resonates well with plans in our usability lab on game testing and neither has the game education in Hamar any specific course on QA with experienced game players. These plans will be further developed next year after the pre-study is finalised. 

2024-06-14 PhD defence: Malin Wik about Ozlab prototyping

Malin Wik once attended the web developer program, then became a lab engineer in the usability lab, took a master's degree, and became a doctoral student. For many years, she has helped shape the teaching about prototyping and also the Ozlab system, which she has used both in her master's and doctoral thesis to experiment with the malleability of interactive prototypes during interaction. More info in Swedish. The PhD thesis: Prototyping with purpose: Increasing participatory design with malleable interactive prototypes. Karlstad University Studies 2024:17.Opponent: Suhas Joshi, Oslo University.

2024-06-14 Virtual concretisation of abstract concepts

Master's student Linus Geewe defended today his thesis Vector Algebra in Augmented Reality: Insights from Learning Activity with Engineering Students. The essay is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Information Systems and Mathematics at Karlstad University where we develop technical aids for teaching mathematics among undergraduate students. There are two key factors here: the involvement of master's students in interdisciplinary projects and the use of virtualisation techniques - virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, extended reality - for interactive visualisations where even abstract concepts become tangible by being manipulable. The usability lab as well as an AR head set borrowed from colleagues at Computer Science have been used for the two trials Geewe conducted autumn 2023 and spring 2024 with two different math classes. Student interns in the lab has helped in pilot testing for the second round. After obtaining his Master's degree at Karlstad University, Linus has been accepted to a PhD program in Vienna.

2024-05-27 Deadline for proposal abstracts to EuroUSEC 2024

The European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC) which is a forum for research and discussion on human factors in security and privacy will be held at Karlstad University on September 30 and October 1, 2024, chaired by Farzaneh Karegar from the Information Systems department. EuroUSEC solicits previously unpublished work offering novel research contributions in any aspect of human-centered security and privacy. The symposium aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and students from diverse backgrounds including computer science, information systems, engineering, psychology, the social sciences, and economics to discuss issues related to human-computer interaction, security, and privacy. The deadline for paper registration is May 27, and for paper submission is May 31. For more information visit the EuroUSEC website.

2024-04-30 HCI workshop at DESRIST 2024, June 3

The methodologies we employ to bridge the gap between theoretical insights and practical solutions are paramount in technology and system development. The workshop "Mapping HCI Methodologies to the DSR Design Phase" aims to decode the Design Science Research (DSR) process, focusing on its design phase through the lens of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) methodologies such as iterative design and co-design. The workshop runs for 6 hours during the DESRIST 2024 conference. You can participate with or without a position paper; for more information, contact Bilal Maqbool.

2024-03-05 Simone and Farzaneh publish book on usable privacy

For more than two decades, Karlstad University has been pursuing research about privacy-enhancing technologies, often with a focus on usability aspects. Heading the PriSec group at our Computer Science department is Professor Simone Fischer-Hübner and she has the last few years together with her previous doctoral student, now assistant professor in Information Systems, authored a book about The Curious Case of Usable Privacy, which Springer publishes this March.

2024-02-19 Last day of the new experiment with vector manipulation in AR

Linus Geewe has continued his work from last autumn, now with more developed forms around how his prototype is used by students learning vector algebra. The math dept has once again allocated space within an existing course for these experiments which ended today. Linus now commence analysing the results for his master's thesis, where Ala Sarah Alaqra is the supervisor. From the mathematics department participates, among others, Mirela Vinerean-Bernhoff.

2022-02-02 Double presentations by Amir Haj-Bolouri

Assoc.prof. Amir Haj-Bolouri from the Information Systems group at University West visited Karlstad University for two days. At Karlstad Innovation Park’s Friday Breakfast he discussed "The meaning and the sense of meaningfulness in Virtual Reality (VR)". Half an hour later it was time for a presentation in KAU’s RiskLab med åhörare från både Centrum för Samhällsrisker och från MSB, Övningsnätverket med intresserade. Amir presenterad och diskuterade på temat "Training in Virtual Reality". After this Amir and others paid a visit to our Usability Lab where students were demonstrating different facilities (Amir is charing the DESRIST 2024 conference in June.)

2024-01-22 Karlstad municipality's web pages among assignments for HCI students

Maria Wahl, business developer at the Contact Center of the municipal management office in Karlstad municipality, has discussed interesting tasks with interns and her own colleagues, as well as with John Sören Pettersson and Elin Nilsson about how different courses can be used in the development of the web site karlstad.se. The accessibility course's small module on adaptation for mobile phones will have a practical component this year, where karlstad.se will be examined. The three interns in the lab tackle usability issues of some of the e-services linked from the municipality's website. The interns also help master's students doing iterative design within a course on user-centred systems development, bachelor's thesis students, as well as a student from a vocational programme in Experience Design who now has an internship in the communication department of our university. B2B CMS startup Nexta had a presentation in the lab today and will define usability testing tasks suitable for thesis students.

2024-01-15 New interns in the lab!

Today start three students as interns in the usability lab: one is exchange student from Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart, Leonard "Leo" Eckert, who takes this as a full-time 10-week course, and the other two are web developer students at KAU, Ebba Johansson and Moritz Uhlig, who include their internship in their curriculum as a half-pace course for 10 weeks while they are starting with their Bachlor thesis projects.

2023-09-21--28 Maths students try vector manipulation in augmented reality

Masters student Linus Geewe designed last spring a virtual reality prototype for vector manipulation in the see-through head-mounted Meta Quest Pro display and its hand controllers. This autumn, several groups of students from course MAGA44 were invited to try out this before the lectures on vectors started. At course end, some students answered how the felt this (almost) hands-on experience with vectors influenced their perception of the concept of vectors. The study will be deepened in spring 2024, when Linus Geewe works on his Master’s thesis. This is a collaboration with mathematician Mirela Vinerea-Bernhoff, who seeks experience-rich forms for teaching vector algebra, and his teachers Ala Sarah Alaqra and John Sören Pettersson at the Information Systems department. The equipment has been lent by the Computer Science dept.

2023-09-14 Usability testing course excites both students and colleagues

When the semester open for the autumn, third-year undergraduate student have performed their first experiments in usability testing. This year we started by an assignment to evaluate the Climate Adaptation Game - a web based game that will help high schoolers and older to realise the interdependecies between town planning, risks, and budget constraints. It is developed and hosted by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, who now collaborates with Karlstad University's Risklab for the development of this and other learning resources. Risklab is happy to see the results from the many student teams analysing the game from a usability perspective.

The ISGC16 Usability Testing, Prototyping an Evaluation course runs with a record number of students as we trial to also include some students from the distance programme which induces some extra efforts by the lab staff for one of the assignments, the eyetracking-based evaluation because this will include remote testing but the test participants will have to show up at Karlstad University's usability lab. Otherwise, remote supervised testing works fine, and is practiced not only by the teams drawing students from the distance programme but also practiced by some of the campus student teams as well, which we have experienced before; see the article "Usability Testing of Interactive Systems Conducted by University Students During a Pandemic".

2023-06-12 ECIS workshop "Experiences of remote user participation"

We wish to express our thanks to the participants for an interesting day in Norway! Some unregistered vistors who chose to attend out of sheer curiosity shared their valuable experiences and insights; and papers were shared among the participants. (Previous call: Call for working papers to the ECIS 2023 workshop "Experiences of remote user participation" June 12. Deadline: March 14th 2023 or write us a letter if this cannot be met, and outline your idea).

2023-02-24 Updates to the Ozlab system

The web is a fluid medium, and web-based systems need ever so often to be updated to keep all their functions functioning properly. During the pandemic we have lagged somewhat behind but this week we have had, aided by Motillo, a bug-fixing round where the forgetful session memory has been mended. Shell designers no more have to use hidden fields to keep user inputs in place when the test leaders moves back and forth between scenes. We also had Motillo to add a function whereby our sysadmins easily can change the list of alternatives for pre-defined scene sizes.

2023-01-16 New interns in the lab

This years' exchange students from Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart are Lukas Richter and Felix Widmann. During the first 10 weeks of our 20-week spring semester, they help us with testing, checking the Ozlab manual, demos, editing.

2022-12-11 Prof. Pettersson presented KAU's usability testing course at SIGED 2022

AIS's Special Interest Group in Education runs a pre-conference to the global ICIS conference every year. At Sunday the 11th of December, the SIGED gathered in one of the seminar rooms of Bella Center in Copenhagen for a long day with many interesting topics. Among the presenters was John Sören Pettersson presenting his, Gunnar Olsson's and Henrik Andersson's "Usability Testing of Interactive Systems Conducted by University Students During a Pandemic" (paper 10 in the proceedings).

2022-12-08 Ozlab used in work to design a new intranet for KAU

Work is underway for designing a new intranet for employees as Karlstad University. Elin Nilsson has performed Ozlab-based tests in which employees at Karlstad University have participated as co-designers. The work was conducted in the usability lab.

2022-08-17 Malin Wik presented mobile co-design at the IRIS conference

The Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS) is an annual seminar for Information Systems researchers established in 1978. The 45th IRIS was held in conjunction with the 13th Scandinavian Conference of Information Systems (SCIS). The theme of the seminar and conference was Workforce Leadership in the Age of Digital Transformation. The event was hosted in Helsinge, Denmark, from August 14th to 17th 2022. Research student Malin Wik discussed a paper on co-design in schools:

"Digital competence and programming have been part of the Swedish school curricula since 2018. This paper demonstrates how co-design design activities can be conducted as a way to provide digital competence education from a socio-technical perspective. Such activities were conducted with novice designers in three sessions, each with two school classes, from a Swedish engineering upper secondary school program in 2019. The students gained hands-on experience with interaction design and co-design as they designed a mobile application using a Wizard-of-Oz prototyping system and evaluated the prototype with users. This trial is used to argue that time allocation for socio-technical perspectives on digital competence in the Swedish school curricula can be expanded to be able to provide students with a more holistic view of digitization beyond technical issues."

Her paper were included in the "Selected Papers of the IRIS" published in December.

2022-02-15 Internship Ozlab work and accessibility work in the usability lab

Exchange students Mats Thiele and Linus Andrzejczak from Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg Stuttgart working as internships in the lab have made suggestion for revision for the Ozlab manual and also for the Ozlab system. Karlstad student Seemaa Alabdali also takes an internship course where she helps accessibility course teachers Elin Nilsson and Gunnar Olsson with various things.

2022-01-17 New course on Accessibility of Digital Services and Documents

Today starts a new course on undergraduate level on accessibility of digital services. After a trial last year we are now ready to launch a specially designed course on this topic, ISGB34 (may be given in English in coming years). https://www.kau.se/en/education/programmes-and-courses/courses/ISGB34

2021-11-18 Useful user-centered tips on LMS design for crisis management training

When the final conference for the CriseIT 2 project was held in Arvika today a 120-page report was released which targets practitioners who want to further the use of digital exercises in their organisations (written in Norwegian and Swedish: Digitalisering av krisövning - Erfarenheter från CriseIT-projekten).

2021-09-27 Study provides answers on how users can contribute to digital hospital guide 

How can users contribute to developing an app from the ground up - in a real environment? A new study provides guidance on whether a digital tool can help visitors to the Central Hospital in Karlstad to find the right one. Read the whole article (Swedish only)

2021-09-11 Teaching conference with usability course presentations

When Karlstad University’s unit for university pedagogy held its annual autumn conference, this year under the theme REDEFINING LEARNING SPACES as a reflection of the social distancing requirements, the lab people presented Corona effects on two usability/accessibility courses and how we and our students solved usability testing on distance (ISGC16 autumn 2020, and ISGC17 test run with a focus on accessibility issues spring 2021 for a forthcoming course on digital accessibility).

2021-06-30 Student work

Several student projects have been completed during the spring semester 2021, including master's theses by Egide and Mikaela (eyetracking), bachelor's thesis by Alex on evaluation of chat function for CriseIT exercises at a distance, and Henrik with a master's thesis on the GUI-ii method for participatory design.

2021-05-19 Course in accessibility

The material for an upcoming course in accessibility was tested in the c-course Future Web Standards. Gunnar Olsson and prof. John Sören Pettersson led the course and had very good help from the bachelor thesis students Alexandra and Elinor who each designed their own workshop. We now have materials and experience for a permanent course in digital accessibility (ISGB34) that will take place in the spring semesters at B-level.

2021-04-01 PAPAYA ends

PAPAY - the project on integrity-preserving cloud calculations - is now entering the final turn. Several focus groups have been conducted remotely during the spring of 2021 by Ala Sarah Alaqra in the form of walkthroughs + workshops. Expert evaluations have been carried out by colleagues in computer science and informatics. A couple of deliverables are underway during the summer of 2021.

2020-12-09 Another doctoral thesis about Usable Privacy

Farzaneh Karegar defended her PhD thesis "The Lord of Their Data Under the GDPR? Empowering Users Through Usable Transparency, Intervenability, and Consent". The opponent was the previous Ozlab internship holder Sameer Patil, today associate professor at Indiana University. Farzaneh has been supervised by Simone Fischer-Hübner and John Sören Pettersson.Her work has been carried out mainly within the EU project CREDENTIAL.

2020-01-30 PhD thesis about  Usable Privacy

Ala Sarah Alaqra defended her PhD thesis "Tinkering the Wicked Problem of Privacy – Design Challenges and Opportunities for Crypto-based Solutions", with Steven Furnell as opponent. Supervisors have been Simone Fischer-Hübner and Erik Wästlund. The research have been financed by PrismaCloud and PAPAYA.

2019-12-06 Breakthrough for research in real environments within Digitalwell

Is an app the right way to guide visitors to the Central Hospital in Karlstad? A new research study will hopefully provide answers to this. The study represents a breakthrough for research into real-world environments within DigitalWell. Read more

2019-04-08 Full speed ahead in user lab

During the spring, Ozlab has been used extensively, including for various eyetrecking examinations, updating of the manual and the introductory films. Read more