My name is Zuha Zubair, and I’m a master’s student studying Philosophy, Mental Health, and Psychology. For the past two months, I worked alongside my colleague Simcha Kerbel and our supervisor Amy Wilkins on the Birmingham Transformative Humanities Lab (BTHL) User Experience Project. As the name suggests, the purpose of the project was to examine the experience of users of the BTHL and improve the user experience by making it more accessible. I focused on developing quantitative and qualitative measures to study the user experience of the lab pilot group.
The Birmingham Transformative Humanities Lab consists of technology such as electroencephalograms, motion capture devices, virtual reality headsets, and AI. Many of the stakeholders of the BTHL have humanities backgrounds rather than scientific backgrounds, making it more challenging to use the technology offered. Even if one has a scientific background, one can still have difficulties using unfamiliar technology. Hence, it’s essential to make this technology accessible to stakeholders in the humanities as it enables meaningful interdisciplinary work. This is why we worked on developing a measure to examine the user experience of stakeholders.
My experience mainly consisted of conducting research into how case studies are formulated, developing case study and questionnaire objectives, and defining goals for the measures. Then, I designed qualitative interviews addressing the objectives, questions such as what needs to be resolved to improve access to the BTHL, or mere demographic questions about stakeholders, such as “What is your current role? How long have you held this role? What discipline do you belong to, work in, and collaborate with? Which facilities or resources do you use at the lab? ” Following the establishing of the questionnaire objectives and qualitative questionnaire, I conducted research into reliable UX scales. One of the most commonly used and reliable scales is the System Usability Scale, which we have chosen to use for the BTHL. I combined some demographic questions reformatted from the qualitative questionnaire for quantitative survey use with the System Usability Scale items, resulting in survey that can be shared with users of the BTHL to collect demographic data, such as role and discipline, as well as quantiative data such as a likert scale assessing how necessary they find the BTHL facilities, and finally, qualitative data, such as what makes the BTHL difficult to use.
Unfortunately, due to the short length of the internship, we did not get to collect data using these measures; however, they are accessible for future use by the lab, which will be a beneficial way to keep track of stakeholder user experience over the years. I am grateful to have had this fruitful experience, where I had the opportunity to learn more about user experience measures and even get to develop a survey and questionnaire myself. I look forward to continuing to engage in research development.
