In broad terms, my research involves understanding how people look for and use information and feeding that understanding into the design and evaluation of electronic tools to support their information-seeking and use.

More specifically, in my PhD thesis, I examined the information behaviours displayed by and associated knowledge held by a vertical slice of academic and practicing lawyers and fed the findings into the development of two novel methods for evaluating the functionality and usability of electronic legal resources, which I have called the Information Behaviour (IB) methods. Latest research: Click here for information on the IB methods, including a tutorial.

My PhD work was funded by an EPSRC DTA studentship and has close ties with the UCIS (User Centred Interactive Search with Digtal Libraries) and MaSI (Making Sense of Information) projects at UCL Interaction Centre.

My PhD followed on from my MSc thesis, entitled ' Investigating users' mental models of traditional and digital libraries.' The usability of electronic legal resources is an exciting topic because resources such as digital libraries hold the key to knowledge, yet most are difficult to use and it is not immediately clear why. See my publications for more information.

'How do architectural students behave when looking for information on the Web?'

I am currently extending my work on lawyers by examining the information-seeking, interpretation and use behaviours of a very different group of professionals - architects. Findings will be reported in due course and promise to highlight interesting new information behaviours not found in my studies with laywyers.