About Us
Over a decade ago, people
took it for granted that technology, PCs in particular, were hard to use. To get
a new system, peripheral, or application up and running, users had to sit down
and struggle with the manual until they figured it out or were sent to expensive
training in order to make use of the product. They had to memorize software menu
structures and arcane keyboard shortcuts that were completely different for each
application. It took weeks, months, and sometimes years to become productive.
Usability was an afterthought.
Nowadays, people use
computers at work, at home, at school, and the Internet has changed the
accessibility of technology for users around the world. Now more than ever, it
is important to make products intuitive and easy to use for the user. Or the
user will give up or worse yet turn to the competition for a better product.
If a product is not easy to
use, you lose time and money.
Welcome to LULABS,
the premier usability testing service. A place where industry experts place
products in the hands of real users in order to find usability glitches and to
help designers and developers make products more usable.
LULABS
is a Bay Area-based firm founded in May of 2001. It provides a consultancy that
is based on a methodology that was developed over the past eight years. Our goal
is to enhance the user interface of products including hardware, software and
web-based applications.
LULABS
was founded by Lulit Bezuayehu, who, as the Lab Director, managed the
multi-million dollar lab of Ziff Davis Smart Business magazine. In May of 2001, Ms. Bezuayehu was able to negotiate with Ziff
Davis Media to sublease and operate this facility as an independently-run,
private testing and consulting business.
For
the past seven and a half years, Ms. Bezuayehu helped in developing and
perfecting an industry-recognized and well respected testing methodology for
testing and evaluating thousands of products for review in Ziff Davis Smart
Business (formerly PC Computing) magazine. This same methodology and
state-of-the-art facility will be leveraged for testing new and existing
technology. Thousands of hardware, software, and web applications were tested
for a magazine poised to help the million-plus, technology-buying readers of the
magazine pick the best technology to move their company ahead of the
competition. Usability evaluation of several revisions of Microsoft, Lotus,
Corel, FileMaker, Adobe, and Caere software applications; hardware products of
Hewlett-Packerd, Acer, Viewsonic, IBM, Dell, Sony, Gateway, and Compaq, 3Com;
electronic gadgets by Handspring, Nokia, Palm, Motorola, Sony, and Mitsubishi; as
well as web interfaces of Fordvehicles.com, Amazon.com, Dell.com, Toysrus.com,
1800flowers.com, CDW.com, Buy.com, and many more have been successfully
evaluated by real users and readers of the magazine.
We use state-of-the-art usability facilities in the Bay Area for conducting our testing. Please call 415-547-8151 or email us info@lulabs.com to arrange a lab-tour or a free demo of our services.