About Us - News
WUP goes to Athens
WUP believes it’s important to keep up with academic developments in the usability world, and identify good ideas and techniques for crossover to the practitioner environment. Consequently, WUP user experience consultant Rebecca Whitfield attended the 3rd COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop, entitled Review, Report and Refine Usability Evaluation Methods (R3 UEMs), held in Athens on 5 March 2007.
The aim of this workshop was to discuss the current state of usability evaluation methods (UEMs). It was organised by a working group of the COST294-MAUSE project, whose aim it is to work ‘Towards the MAturation of Information Technology USability Evaluation’.
The ultimate goal of MAUSE is to bring more science to bear on Usability Evaluation Methods (UEM) development, evaluation, and comparison, aiming for results that can be transferred to industry and educators, thus leading to increased competitiveness of European industry and benefit to the public.
(www.cost294.org)
The workshop was attended by over 25 participants from across Europe, primarily from the academic world. Only two usability practitioners, including Rebecca Whitfield, were present.
The workshop opened with two keynote presentations - the issue of usability standards (Susan Harker, The University of Loughborough) and the issue of usability in practice (Nigel Bevan, Professional Usability Services). These were followed by the presentation of new, quality contributions on emerging UEMs (10 ’short’ sixty second talks, followed by 6 ‘long’ 10 minute talks), followed by parallel group discussions discussing various aspects of UEMs.
WUP’s contribution was selected for one of the ‘long’ talks. It was very well received by the workshop participants. Erik Frokjaer (Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen) presented an interesting commentary of the WUP method focussing on the many advantages, and few disadvantages, of the method from an academic perspective.