Manchester Event 4th July: How people make judgements about design quality


This is a free, public event

Date & Time:  Monday 4 July 7.00pm to 9.00pm

Venue:  Code Computerlove
Ducie House, Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JW (The entrance is on Peak Street, look for the cartoon robot sign above the door)

User Experience: How people make judgements about design quality

User experience (UX) is a topical interest in Human Computer Interaction research and commercial design of web applications; however, there is little agreement about just what good UX is and few design guidelines for improving user experience. The talk reviews user experience and aesthetics research in the University of Manchester over several years.

UX is influenced by several criteria ranging from functionality and content to usability and aesthetics. We know from several experiments that users’ overall judgement of experience is context dependent, so it is influenced by the task, domain and their prior knowledge.

Judgement criteria (usability, content/services, aesthetics, customisation, engagement and brand) are prioritised according to the decision domain and users’ background and then influence the decision making process, e.g. for entertainment applications, aesthetics and engagement will dominate, whereas for business oriented domains, content, services and brand will be more important. The findings from recent studies on the role of different media, avatars, and interactive metaphors will be discussed with plans for current studies investigating how UX may change over time.

Alistair Sutcliffe

Alistair Sutcliffe is Professor of Systems Engineering, in Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. His research interests span a wide area within Human Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. In HCI particular interests are interaction theory, and user interface design methods for the web, multimedia, and safety critical systems; application of cognitive theory to design, and design of complex socio-technical systems.

In software engineering he specialises in requirements engineering methods and tools, scenario based design, knowledge reuse and theories of domain knowledge. Alistair Sutcliffe is a leading member of both the international HCI and requirements engineering communities. He serves on the editorial boards of  ACM-TOCHI, REJ and JASE. Alistair Sutcliffe is founder of IFIP TC-13 Working Group 13.2 ‘Methodology for User Centred Design’ and member of IFIP working groups 8.1 (information systems) and 2.9 (requirements engineering) and is the editor of the ISO standard 14915, on Multimedia user interface design. He has over 200 publications  including five books and several edited volumes of papers and was awarded the IFIP silver core in 2000.