Innovation and user experience

The sociotechnical research group for innovation and user experience was founded by the late Professor Andy Smith, who led a team of researchers working in Europe, Africa and Asia. Andy’s work left an important legacy in this field, which currently underpins much of the work we do.

The group currently engages in different types of activities spanning research, consultancy and training.

Through our lab and network of members and associates, we offer world-class expertise in several areas including but not limited to:

• user experience and usability consultancy
• cross-cultural and sociotechnical design of interactive systems
• work analysis and interaction design
• cultural and sociotechnical aspects of user experience
• cultural and sociotechnical aspects of software engineering
• technology-mediated intercultural collaboration
• human-computer interaction in developing countries (HCI4D)
• cultural and sociotechnical aspects of HCI education.

We have been successful in exploiting UK and EU funding streams in delivering its research strategy. We have accessed the EU Asia IT&C programme to support usability research in both India and China. We have been the lead partner in the Sino European Systems Usability Network (SESUN) and the Indo European Systems Usability Partnership. SESUN has developed active and sustainable links between China and Europe, helping to redefine and promote HCI / usability within China. This has included collaborating with the Ministry for Information Industry, co-chairing a major conference in Beijing.

We were also involved in the EPSRC funded VeSeL project - Village e-science for Life – which addressed the problems associated with the digital divide in Africa. VeSeL aims to fuse educational and environmental objectives to empower African village communities. Our contribution there focused on socio-technical participatory design and the localization of usability methods.

More recently, SCIUX has begun to explore the use of emerging copyleft hardware technologies and how they might contribute to the fields of mobile learning and information communication technology for development (ICT4D). We believe that this open approach provides the opportunity for the community to directly influence the hardware roadmap of a device and thus generate sustainable solutions within markets of developing countries.

Also in the e-learning domain, we are looking at university libraries’ usability design from a socio-technical perspective.

Our work with commercial usability agencies and clients such as Microsoft, HSBC, Siemens and Intercontinental has allowed us to develop a process model for developing usable cross-cultural websites. A current commercial focus of our research is on how different perceptions of internationalisation lead to issues in its integration with software development methods such as Agile.

The impact of context and culture poses many challenges that cannot be exposed as a one-off evaluation in technology design. Decisions and actions in product design often result in the emergence of cultural and sociotechnical implications and issues. Our research is aimed at the early identification of these to promote enhanced stakeholder participation and better product usability and user experience.