Dr. Viswanath is the director of the ECHO (Enhancing Communications for Health Outcomes) Lab. This cutting-edge facility allows researchers to conduct formative testing and research on messages to be used with a wide range of populations.

The ECHO Lab is often used for usability tests. Participants are prompted to explore a web site, and then discuss how easy or hard it was to navigate and to find the information they sought.

Researchers in the Viswanath Lab conducted usability tests for the American Legacy Foundation's "Become an Ex" smoking cessation campaign. The focus of this campaign is to get smokers to "relearn" how to live their life without smoking. To this end, the "Become an Ex" web site has a cigarette tracker and a list of trigger habits, which range from coffee to stress to boredom. Users can see, in a concrete way, how much they smoke and what is driving them to smoke in the first place. There is also a social networking component to the site. Users can join the "ex community" and connect with other people who have quit or are trying to quit.

Two rounds of usability testing took place in the ECHO Lab — one before the site went live, and one after the site had already attracted many users. In each round, participants were smokers who were:

• familiar with the Internet
• interested in quitting
• aged 25 to 60

The recruits varied in gender and racial background, and were recruited from flyers and advertisements in the Metro newspaper.

For the second round of testing, again most participants were Internet savvy, and they also belonged to at least one social networking site, such as Facebook or MySpace. These participants were prompted to use the Become and Ex site to identify their smoking triggers and to set up an action plan for quitting.

In both rounds of testing, most participants liked the site, and said that they would use it to help themselves or a friend quit.