Three is a crowd? Our experience of testing large-scale social software in a usability lab

'In the wild' testing has been the cornerstone of HCI in past attempts to create large scale social software, such as conference software. Conversely mobile software is frequently tested in a lab environment, thus banishing typical context of use. In this paper we present our attempt at merging the two approaches for conference social software. We tested in the lab, but attempted to replicate some of the social context of field-based testing. We report our learnings and propose future research for this type of hybrid testing.