User Experience Lab

With locations in Turin, Rome and Naples, the User Experience Lab has been TIM's competence centre on Usability and User Experience issues since 1993. It works for both private and business customers on fixed telephony products and services (modems and routers, decoders) and mobile products and services (smartphones, tablets) on apps, websites and portals on multimedia and entertainment services on innovative solutions. Evaluations are carried out on both prototype solutions and on other already commercially viable solutions. The laboratory also conducts qualitative investigations on various organisational topics: work-related stress, communication, welfare, agile working, HR processes and issues.

The User Experience Lab has always worked to promote a quality of User Centred service, where the user (both the colleague who is 'Agile Working', and the customer) is placed at the centre, in order to realise technological solutions that are easy to use, capable of responding to a need, of being able to excite, of making one feel part of an ecosystem.

The laboratory employs a multidisciplinary team of experts in usability, ergonomics, psychology and communication, as well as telecommunications engineers, chemists and physicists, who, starting from the user experience, contribute to the creation of immediate and pleasant interfaces and services.

As of 2018, the User Experience Lab is accredited by ACCREDIA, The Italian Accreditation Body for the evaluation of the Usability and User Experience of Web Services and Portals, with reference to the UNI CEI EN ISO/IEC 17025 standard. The scientific nature of its methodology and the work of the evaluations carried out at various moments in the life cycle of a service were thus recognised.

For information: uelab@telecomitalia.it

How the User Experience Lab works

The lab engages users of services, sites, apps and products to learn their behaviour and mental models and to explore their needs and expectations. Involvement sometimes takes place starting from the concept definition and phase, or, in other cases when the services/products are already on the market in order to highlight any criticalities or problems in use or to identify areas of optimisation for a possible subsequent redesign phase. As well as being carried out in the laboratory, tests are also conducted in real-life scenarios, e.g. directly at the users' homes or while they are on the move. All customer data, both socio-demographic and opinion and behavioural data, are handled in full compliance with current privacy regulations.

The most commonly used methodologies and analysis tools include:

Usability testing in the lab and on the move, in the laboratory and via webcam
Field testing
Focus Groups in the laboratory and via webcam
Web discussions
Face-to-face and webcam interviews
Online Surveys and Questionnaires

In addition, increasing attention is being paid to correlation activities of the Quality of Experience with technical parameters and measures (QoS) with a controlled laboratory that allows the reproduction of fixed and mobile network configurations and the introduction of specific issues, verifying the impact on user perception and satisfaction.