Northern User Experience

It seems the lure of summer is just too strong, so we’re postponing Prof Alistair Sutcliffe’s talk “Does Technology make any difference in our Social Life ?” until later in the year, around September or October. We’ll announce a date nearer the time!

Professor Alistair Sutcliffe from Manchester University has kindly offered to give a talk this coming Tuesday 14th July on the topic of technology and the impact on our social lives. It promises to be very interesting…

If we get enough people interested this will be going ahead in the usual place, the MDDA offices, so please add a comment if you’d be interested in joining us.

The abstract is here…

This talk will give an overview of the EPSRC/ESRC Foresight project ‘Developing Theory for Evolving Socio-Technical Systems’ (TESS). The project is based on Robin Dunbar’s Social Brain Theory that explains the evolutionary constraints on human relationships and social organisation. With the spread of Social Networking Sites such as Facebook and MySpace, will we be able avoid those constraints to keep up with more friends and be more social, or is the downside, invasion of privacy, stalking, and a less social world ? The TESS project is researching these issues by studying social networks and work-related groups. I will describe current research on social networking sites and how this fits into the wider picture of social mediating technologies such as Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.  Investigating the questions- does technology really change the way we behave in our social life, how do we adapt and use these technologies, and what impact might technology have a social capital?
For more information on the project http://www.mbs.ac.uk/research/DTESS.aspx

About the speaker

Alistair Sutcliffe has been principle investigator on 15 EPSRC and European Union projects on requirements engineering, multimedia user interfaces, safety critical systems and cognitive modelling for information retrieval. 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, virtual reality, safety critical systems and methods for usability evaluation. His research also covers 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 and chairs / serves on a number of committees.

Talking to Rachel after tonight’s meeting (more about that later) I had a thought for next month. Rather than talking about it – why don’t we do it. How about we design something as a group. We have more than enough people to make a spectacularly over-staffed design team (or two more sensibly staffed teams). It would really interesting to see what we could come up with. Either it will be fantastic or it’ll start a huge fight and we’ll all spend the rest of the evening is Casualty.

This is a half-baked idea so I’m not exactly sure what we’d design just yet. A few of us tonight expressed irritation at banking websites, so some aspect of that might be one idea, but I’m sure we can come up with something more exciting than that. Or some common widget or tool which you always find frustrating that you’ve always wanted to fix.

Ideally it should be something none of us have designed before.

So if people are generally up for this start thinking of things we can revolutionise!

All,

Good to see some new people at the last meeting.

Following our discussion here is a link to some AbilityNet videos of assistive technology users

http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3CD45E862B50C925

Some of these are also available on Easy Youtube which was developed by Chris Heilmann

http://scriptingenabed.pbwiki.com/AbilityNet-Videos

Judith

For our next meeting I’ll be talking about a pet topic of mine. I’ll be looking at the car user’s experience and seeing why it’s so difficult to get people to switch to public transport. Then I’ll be looking at how we might design a public transport system in such a way as to make the experience as good as (or better) than using the car.

I’ll also look at other modes of transport, and see where they fit in a transport policy based heavily on user needs.

Some of the solutions I’ll mention already exist in early form, some are much more futuristic, but most are achievable with current technologies. This isn’t sci-fi, but full implementation would be expensive. So I’ll talk a little bit about how we might afford these systems, and the other social benefits which might arise from moving beyond the car.

Right – now I’m going to drive over to York! See you all next time.

We are going to be able to use Manchester Digital/MDDA offices on Portland Street for our next meetings. –  Thanks for sorting venues Paul.

I’ve set up a poll on Doodle to see what dates are the best for everyone, we are still looking at meeting every month. http://www.doodle.ch/participation.html?pollId=b4ss63xhtx24m8iw

We’ve also had offers to talk on a range of interesting topics so we can set up an agenda for the next six months or so.

Thanks

Judith

When we met on thursday, we agreed it would be nice to do something a bit special for world usability day, but it’s not far away so we will need to move quickly.  The plan so far is:

- Try to get an outside speaker.

- Try to get a small sponsorship / donation to fund a speaker / food / drinks – either from a commercial organisation or possibly from a local government / quango source.

If you can help us achieve either of these, please get in touch.

If you have any other ideas for how the event could take shape (bearing in mind the short timescale and our very limited resources), please share. The theme of this year’s day is “Transportation” which is possibly a little bit outside of the box for most of us, but let’s see what we can do with it.

All suggestions gratefully received…