Week THIRTEEN

Part VIII of Hornbæk et al. (2025)

Intro

Last week we lived inside the lab: think-aloud studies and controlled experiments, where we bought precision by stripping the world away. But a keyboard that wins in a tapping task can still lose on a real phone, in a real pocket, or on a real commute.

Three stops on one spectrum of system completeness: field evaluation of a prototype, then a pilot study of a partial-but-real system, then a deployment study of the fully shipped thing.

This week’s question: what do we learn when we drag evaluation back into the messy real world, and what does it cost us?

Case Study: Google Glass