User-centred design and usability

Description

User-centred design and usability form a research line that supports the above-mentioned research area. Within this area we focus on processes for the development of interactive systems. Such processes are typically participative, they integrate the goals of different stakeholders and they focus on the end-user during the complete development cycle.

We investigate how software can be designed and developed in a more user friendly manner using high-level models and low-level and high-level prototypes. Furthermore, formal and informal usability tests (as wel in the lab as in the field) are used in order to assess the validity of interaction techniques.

Key reference for this work is:

• "VIP-lab: A virtual lab for ICT experience prototyping"
  Karin Coninx , Mieke Haesen , Jan Bierhoff, Measuring Behavior 2005, August 30 - September 2 2005 , Wageningen, The Netherlands

Related project: Virtual ICT Experience Prototyping Laboratory




Social Software with Friend-Of-A-Friend

The Friend-Of-A-Friend project aims to create machine-processable information chunks about people and their relations with other people. Although it is primarily a web-based solution, it is suitable for use in ubiquitous applications. Telebuddies is our FOAF-based interactive digital TV application that supports micro-communities of related people that participate and collaborate through television. PhotoFOAF is our attempt to combine community-based mobile imaging with capturing of social metadata. PhotoFOAF makes social metadata-based queries such as the co-depiction experiment part of an integrated system.

More information:

• The Telebuddies website
• The PhotoFOAF website
• Related publications