I was a lecturer in the Department of Informatics and researcher of issues within the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
I have recently developed a course for industry (SMEs) that focuses on usability issues and customer experience within the (web) design process. I am currently delivering this course both in-house and on the University campus. (www.casa.susx.ac.uk/courses.html)
I work in the field of usability, striving to make products easier to learn and remember, more efficient to use, more reliable to use and of course be a satisfying experience. I'm interested in how User-Centred Design techniques are adopted by design teams and how research findings can be communicated into the design process. Interaction and experience design needs careful requirements gathering and testing from the start of any project, and when documented and presented appropriately, offer designers a valuable resource. It is far more efficient to be INFORMING the design throughout the project than to merely adopt usability to TEST just before launch.
My last academic project was the EPSRC funded EMMANATE
(Exploring Mental Models for Application in Networking Applications,
Telephony and Environments) and was partnered with University College
London's Computer Science Department as well as BT Research
Laboratories. It is a project that helped to inform the design of
future networked applications (especially Web). I was the
psychologist/usability designer on the team which involved
investigative research, studies, prototype testing and paper
publications.