How to get a PhD with virtual balls and a crème brulee

• The context • The story • The ‘new’ bit • The observations

How to get a PhD with virtual balls and a crème brulee

• It’s personal • It’s subjective• It’s emotional • It’s old stuff

A model

Context

Goal/objectiveUser

Device

A different model

• User(s)• Task / Goal• Device• Environment

or context (social and physical)

The problem

• New emerging technologies

• HCI tools not good enough

• Guidelines to design tools

• Support design as well as evaluation

The problem

‘I have seen well-respected usability professionals blandly take pot shots (at design solutions)…when their rigorous, scientific method uncovered a problem area, they would lapse into the most amateurish babbling about solutions: “well, I guess we could move this control over to this dialog box”… it was very time consuming but not solving the problems’Cooper 1999 pp 210-211

The solution

• ‘Situated’ design tools

• Successful approach

Outputs from tools

Outputs from tools

Outputs from tools

The new knowledge

• Given ‘certain’ conditions the design tools work

• Quietly radical

The new knowledge

• Organisational factions

• Guarded use of innovation

• Institutionalised product development

Some thoughts

• New knowledge can be very small

• Human science-based research is hard

• Real applied research is a nightmare!

• Rigour vs results• Watch your

epistemology• Crisis of confidence is

normal

Some more thoughts

• Sloppy thinking is your enemy

• It’s only a PhD not nobel research

• Pick an examiner who’s been round the block

• You will get sick of it• Writing-up is the hard

part

Finally

• Nobody ever calls you ‘Dr’

• It sounds patronising when they do