On October 2004, the joint effort of the Swiss Virtual Campus and Università della Svizzera Italiana lead to USABLE, a research project aiming to build an online course about usability.
Virtual Usability Lab, a functional and needful support software to perform an effective and efficient usability analysis using MiLE, originated from this context.

MiLE, acronym of Milano Lugano Evaluation, is a Scenario-based usability method created by a collaboration of Politecnico of Milano and USI and adopted in the EU-funded Minerva project as part of the European standard for usability evaluation of cultural heritage applications.
Not only VUL is the sole program implementing MiLE, it is also the only one to permit the collaboration of many people within the same analysis process, preserving systematic and order. Therefore it proves to be a necessary tool in teaching and in the professional field.