Accessibility in Use, if you haven’t already heard the phrase you better get used to it, because I think it is such a simple yet elegant concept that its here to stay. It’s simple, and yet its also a coda into a whole heap of concepts we take for granted. Originally, Vigo and Brajnik described in their 2011 paper [1] , and elaborated on in the forthcoming W3C WAI RDWG Note of Accessibility Metrics.

Last week I proposed that we moderate or move our accessibility, assistive technology, rehabilitation engineering, and eHealth efforts away from direct solutions for people with Alzheimer’s and start to concentrate more on those who do the caring. Based on our experiences, there are seven pieces of practical advice I’d like to give to families who will soon become carers, and the elucidation of some of the unique problems we need to think about with regard to technical provision (next week).

Regular readers will have noticed a lack of posts in February. February was a crazy busy month because I was trying to get my new final year module up and running. The module is titled ‘User Experience from 30,000ft’ and the materials are presented as Open Courseware. Here’s the third lecture which is a guest lecture from the BBC R & D detailing UX in the real world. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOgV8EN6NNs&w=640&h=360] You can get access to all the lectures on YouTube; and you can also get all the material, slides, notes, videos, etc at: http://ocw.

I’m writing a final year undergraduate unit on UX – it will be the first that that they have seen being that we are a hardcore engineering School – and I’d like your thoughts! Ignore the administrative stuff associated with work her in Manchester, but what about the unit content (both at the bottom)? Any suggestions for units that have already proved effective will be greatly appreciated! User Experience (UX or UE) is often conated with usability but takes its lead from the emerging discipline of experience design (XD).

‘User Experience (abbreviated: UX) is an umbrella term used to describe all the factors that contribute to the quality of experience a person has when interacting with a specific software artefact and focuses on the practice of user centred: design, creation, and testing.’ Defining “User Experience” (UX) is akin to walking on the quicksand – there is no firm ground and you’re likely to get mired in many unproductive debates – indeed, to me it seems we are currently “stuck in the muck”.

" Methods maketh the discipline, and I’d say that UX has some nice native methods in use with some others pulled in from other more traditional product marketing domains spliced up with advertising metrics. Importantly, the most interesting for me areHEARTPULSE which together represent some very innovative thinking which - with minor mods - can be directly applied from UX back to the wider Human Factors CS domain." A few months ago Rui made a post on measuring UX and the research methods employed - citing a paper presented by some Google UX Researchers at CHI 2010 as well as presenting a list describing the kinds of methods he proposes:

As a positivist research scientist I’ve been struggling with the whole User Experience (UX) space for a long time, because to me it just seems a bit - well - ‘fluffy’. Many people seem to have got to grips with it, including Rui Lopes (see his recent blog articles) but to me, the more I read about the subject the more I think it is fine for evaluating specific interfaces but that the results cannot be generalised.