The Ozlab concept presented at SMART, Univ. of Wollongong

At the lunch seminar April 28 at SMART Infrastructure Facility, John Sören Pettersson presented a literature review by him and Malin Wik and the conclusions about why the Ozlab concept has survived for 15 years.

The Wizard-of-Oz method has been around for decades, allowing researchers and practitioners to conduct prototyping without programming. The extensive literature review in the field that we have conducted revealed, however, that the re-usable tools supporting the method do not seem to last more than a few years. Generic systems started to appear from around the turn of the millennium, but most have fallen out of use.
Our interest in doing this review was inspired by the ongoing re-development of our own Wizard-of-Oz tool, the Ozlab, into a system based on web technology. The presentation highlighted pitfalls for systems that try to circumvent the need for programming in experimentation within interaction design.
The presentation is available via slideshare.