Pimp My Lab? The Impact of Context-Specific Usability Laboratory Environments in Public Transport

In mobile contexts, the consideration of the usage situation is important for the usability and user experience of interactive systems. When developing passenger communication systems for public transportation, it is therefore particularly relevant to take context-specific situations into account. This paper shows the challenge of designing context-specific test environments for mobile areas and analyzes their influence on user engagement and user-centered test results. Therefore, a user study with 24 participants in two independent test groups is conducted in a standard usability test environment and a context-specific test environment. In addition to single items related to the test environment, the quantitative analysis primarily reveals correlations between user engagement and the user-centered results. In contrast, the qualitative analysis, identifies differences in the content of user interactions for different situations and the resulting usability problems. In this way, the study confirms the assumption that context-specific environmental elements influence test quality, in particular for emergency situations and highly situational user needs.