Harrisburg University launches student-led product testing center

Harrisburg University professors are hoping to work with a variety of businesses as the school’s new User Experience Center takes shape in downtown Harrisburg.

In January, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology announced it will open a User Experience Center on South Third Street. User Experience Centers are labs where staff test a client’s product on potential customers. The results from the testing can then be used by a business to see how efficient, safe and user friendly their product is.

The center’s permanent location is set to be finished in late spring but until then, the university has prepared a temporary space in its educational center on Market Street.

The center will allow students to get real world experience in the user experience space by working with businesses to test their products with different demographics of users.

Clients submit their products, such as a phone application, and the students work with a sample of users to see how a customer would use it. With HU’s incoming center, students could gather data from 30 to 40 people a day, said Adams Greenwood-Ericksen, the center’s director and associate professor of game studies and user experience at HU.

When the new center is complete, students will be able to test groups of 13 users at a time or conduct one on one user research.

“There are a lot of places that offer user experience testing generally, but relatively few that do the type of in-person product evaluation and hands-on user research work that we do,” said Greenwood-Ericksen, who joined the university last summer from Full Sail University in Orlando.

Greenwood-Ericksen helped develop a similar user-experience lab in Orlando, focused on testing products for the video game industry. Now he is working with HU to bring a similar lab, but with a broader client base.

Student staffing

The center will primarily be staffed by students in HU’s Human Centered Interaction Design Master’s of Science program, and students in the Interactive Media program’s new User Experience Design concentration. However, Greenwood-Ericksen said that he hopes students from other HU majors will be interested in working at the center.

The user experience space is an industry that is less technology oriented than other majors at HU and is easier for students with more of a background in the humanities to find a niche in, said Tamara Peyton, an assistant professor in HU’s User Experience Design concentration.

“Tech is saturated with people who can code, but what we need now is people who can connect it to the users,” Peyton said. “Until the last ten years, there were very few people (building technology) who understood people, which made us have to adapt to the tech.”

The temporary User Experience Center is already up and running with a number of out-of-state clients such as a major educational content publisher and a Europe-based video game developer. One of the purposes of the incoming center on South Third Street is to expand that clientele to local businesses.

“We would love to work with local accelerator programs, incubators or startups as well as with established groups that have specific needs or projects,” said Greenwood-Ericksen, adding that smaller companies benefit the most from user experience services, but high costs generally make such services inaccessible. “Because our educational mission allows us to keep our services affordable without reducing the quality, we can offer that kind of support even to startups and other smaller organizations.”

Better understanding

Budding software developers can make their product do what they set out for it to do, but understanding how that software will scale with growth, or knowing if the product could confuse or disinterest a user is vital to the process, said Andy Long, director of business development at Ben Franklin Technology Partners in Lancaster.

A lot of people who set out to create pieces of tech, often have less experience when it comes to creating software, Long said. “There is not a single piece of software worth its breath without user testing.”

The university will wants to bring bigger clientele into the fold such as health care and government organizations looking for help designing the user experience end of the software. The goal is to cast as wide of a net as possible with organizations of varying size so students working in the center have a star-studded resume when they graduate.

“The center acts as a real business and the students can say that they have real world experience,” Peyton said. “You have a graduate that’s 22 with a new user experience degree that can say they have two years of experience in the industry.”

The researchers graduating from HU could also be picked up by area businesses that decide to invest in their own user research capabilities, said Greenwood-Ericksen, who said he sees the program being a possible pipeline for businesses to start as a client and end with their own user experience staff.