Ten Essential Questions for Project Managers 20 May 2007 | 04:51 pm

As a project manager with almost twenty years’ experience under my belt, I have, like most people in this profession, seen some spectacular stuff-ups. In fact, as project managers, our job often seems...

A Theory of Human-Computer Interaction 14 Jan 2007 | 12:01 am

The Trouble With HCI Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as a discipline is drifting. It has no long-term objectives and no strategic direction. This would be forgivable if, like other disciplines, it h...

Repositioning Usability 10 Jan 2007 | 08:21 pm

Anyone who has worked in the field of user inteaction design will know what a hard sell it is in all but the most enlightened of organisations. IT departments and IT services companies are often the m...

Jakob Nielsen 18 Nov 2006 | 12:06 am

I have mixed feelings about Jakob Nielsen. On the one hand, he’s fabulously famous (for an HCI practitioner, anyway). People who can barely spell usability are still quite likely to know the name and...

Déjà vu 14 Nov 2006 | 11:17 pm

I’ve just read an interview between Jared Spool and Hagen Rivers and I’m feeling pretty depressed by it (even though the transcript was brimful of laughter!). I know that this interview was a thinly d...

The Usability Culture - Part 2 9 Oct 2006 | 03:31 pm

The Usability Culture - Part 1 9 Oct 2006 | 03:27 pm

Introduction By putting so much of our business on computers, we have given a problem to the people who want to do business with us and for us — the users of these systems. They have to grapple with ...

Science and the HCI Practitioner 25 Sep 2006 | 06:40 pm

I used to be a scientist. After my PhD work, I held research jobs at a couple of universities before joining Logica's R&D centre in Cambridge (the original one). And then I became a craftsman when I b...

Don't Touch That Dial 22 Sep 2006 | 03:39 pm

The first post on a new blog is always a funny thing. No-one knows you're there yet and, while you're bursting with things to say, you know you really ought to save them for a time when you're not so ...