User Experience Labs
Introduction
User Experience Labs focus on understanding and improving human interactions with products, services, and systems across a wide range of industries. Through user-centered research and design, these labs create solutions that enhance functionality, usability, and satisfaction. Whether it's optimizing customer journeys, designing an inclusive interface, or exploring behavioral insights, User Experience Labs ensure innovations resonate with the people they serve.
Labs
Our long-standing labs serve as ongoing spaces for focused innovation, where we work on complex challenges within a specific domain over multiple years or create new singular projects with one organization. These labs combine deep partnerships, accumulated insights, and consistent collaboration to build lasting expertise. We’re able to build on past work, track progress over time, and develop solutions with greater depth and continuity. This long-term approach strengthens impact, fosters trust with partners, and creates richer learning experiences for everyone involved.
Labs
CAT Lab
What began as a single sponsored class with Caterpillar® in 2015 has evolved into a significant “Collaborator” relationship—engaging over 125 students across 19 majors, delivering more than 30 projects, showcasing the UIC Innovation Center’s mission to bridge academia and industry.
Early projects were exploration-focused and instrumental in building the relationship with Caterpillar. That trust has evolved into a deeply integrated working relationship with Caterpillar’s Cat® Digital team delivering high-impact, actionable insights that drive innovation and customer experience across multiple product groups at Caterpillar. This relationship provides students with an unparalleled opportunity to develop a diverse range of industry-ready skills while working in multidisciplinary teams with industry professionals at Caterpillar.
Explore our project case studies to see this collaboration in action and discover how we’re shaping the future of industry and education.
OSF Lab
OSF Lab
The Order of St. Francis (OSF) HealthCare has partnered with the Innovation Center since 2018, participating in both Interdisciplinary Solution Design IXD classes and the OSF Lab. Together, we develop solutions to improve healthcare delivery in the underserved rural and urban communities that OSF serves. Our efforts focus on addressing social determinants of health to create targeted and needs-driven strategies. Grounded in a human-centered approach, we examine the interactions, environments, and behaviors that shape care experiences.
Process
The user experience process centers on understanding how people interact with products, services, or systems. Through research, testing, and iteration, it ensures solutions are not only functional but also meaningful and user-friendly.
Discover
Emphasize, Clarify, Understand
This is where we start. Before jumping into solutions, we take time to understand the full picture with primary research. In this phase we aim to see the world through the eyes of the people we’re designing for.
We empathize by engaging directly with people in their real contexts. We listen, observe behaviors in action, and look for drivers behind decision making. We seek to understand not just what’s happening, but why it’s happening.
We clarify by making sense of what we’re seeing and hearing. We identify patterns, contradictions, and underlying needs. We map out systems, environments, and barriers that shape experiences. This helps us move from complexity toward focus.
We understand by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions like:
- What are people trying to do?
- Where are they getting stuck?
- What do they really need — even if they’re not saying it?
Discover is about curiosity and learning so we can uncover the right problems.
Define
Analysis and Synthesis, Framing, Focus
After research, we sort through what we’ve learned and create a thorough analysis. We look for patterns, pain points, and opportunities. We define the challenge in a clear, focused way and reframe it into a “How might we…” statement. This small shift encourages a user-centered and open-ended approach.
We create statements to be specific enough to guide ideas and creative explorations, while keeping users and project objectives in mind. The deep analysis conducted during the Define phase, allows us to move beyond a broad problem statement like “customers are abandoning their online shopping carts” and reframe it into more focused, actionable challenges. For example, we might turn it into questions such as, “How might we simplify the checkout process to increase completed purchases?”
Using the insights we gained in the Discover phase, we go from understanding the world as it is to framing the challenge we want to solve.
Develop
Ideate, Prototype, and Test
With a clear problem to solve, we begin to brainstorm ideas, sketch solutions, and build prototypes. These can be anything from paper models to clickable mockups to role-played service experiences. We test these early versions with users to see what works—and what doesn’t. We expect to revise and improve multiple times. This is where user experience becomes essential: we’re designing not just what something does, but how it feels to use.
Deliver
Launch, Hand-Off, Execute
In the Deliver phase, we organize and present the outcomes of our work to support decision-making. This can include pitch decks, recommendations, user insights, prototypes, and user testing results that highlight potential market impact. Deliver is about moving from development to action—ensuring solutions are ready for review, approval, or launch.
