HEC Montreal’s Tech3Lab specializes in the evaluation of user experience in the context of business technologies. The research conducted at the Tech3Lab is characterized by the use of tools derived from neuroscience to develop a rich understanding of the experience actually lived by users, whether they are consumers, employees or citizens interacting with technology.
Two research chairs coexist within the Tech3Lab: the Chair in User Experience (UX Chair) and the RBC Financial Group E-Commerce Chair (RBC Chair). In addition, these two Chairs work hand-in-hand with industry on UX innovation. Industrial partners of the two research chairs include such major names as Deloitte, Vidéotron, National Bank, CAE, Sobeys, CN, Blue Yonder, D-Box, Radio-Canada, Desjardins, LRDG, and more recently, Alloprof and ServiceNow. These collaborations create unparalleled training opportunities for students in the new HEC Montréal Master’s degree in User Experience who are doing their thesis within these partnerships.
Thanks to new funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Tech3Lab will inaugurate several new data collection rooms this year, making a total of 13 rooms, allowing researchers to research in the laboratory, a use a vast range of user contexts.
Tech3Lab in figures
Since its foundation in 2012, Tech3Lab has carried out more than 300 research projects and collected data from more than 6000 users. In total, 12 research professionals work full-time at Tech3lab and more than 175 graduate students of all levels have conducted research projects in collaboration with our researchers. Funded by the FRQSC, the Tech3Lab research group brings together more than 20 researchers who mobilize HEC Montréal’s unique infrastructure in their programs and multidisciplinary projects. Finally, in 2020, the Tech3Lab inaugurated the world’s largest bilingual user experience Micromasters in MOOC format, on the edX platform, which in its first year was undertaken by more than 40,000 students from around the world.
Tech3Lab and Chair’s Innovation Highlights
• Thanks to a donation from Québecor, the UX Chair offers a free UX acceleration program to 10 start-ups per year in collaboration with AsterX.
• Since necessity is the mother of invention, during the pandemic the UX Chair developed a new technique for collecting physiological data remotely to allow its projects to continue. This innovation is now used in a dozen laboratories around the world, including the University of Oxford.
• Funded by NSERC and Prompt, the UX Chair and RBC Chair researchers actively collaborate with the innovation groups of industrial partners in the development of new digital products and services. For example, the UX Chair collaborated with Videotron in the launch of the Helix service and with D-Box in the development of its new video game and e-Sport products.
• Innovation must be shared in order to disseminate knowledge. Thus, the researchers of the UX Chair and the RBC Chair have published more than 60 refereed scientific articles in the last five years, many of which are co-authored with researchers from the industrial sector.
