[chisigmail] Special IDG seminar: Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder ?

[Leong, Tuck]

Dear all-

We are lucky to have Professor Alistair Sutcliffe (bio below) visiting
our department at the moment, and he will be giving a talk at our IDG
seminar. We know its short notice but we hope you can find the time to
attend this talk.

Date: Friday 9th of February
Time: 3PM
Location: IDEA Lab, Level 4, ICT Building
111, Barry Street, Carlton.


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TITLE: Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Investigations into
attractive User Interfaces.

ABSTRACT
In this presentation I will describe a program of research on
'attractive user interfaces' which aims to understand the deeper
cognitive mechanisms underpinning users' preferences for, and behaviour
with, aesthetic interfaces and nature of 'user experience'. A
theoretical framework, based on Payne et al's Adaptive Decision Maker
theory will be described for assessing the attractiveness of websites,
composed of criteria for content, usability, aesthetics, reputation, and
customisation. The framework has been developed into questionnaire
inventories and used to evaluate a series of websites which shared the
same brand and content but differed in usability and aesthetic design.
In three studies (Sutcliffe, Hartmann and De Angeli- Interact 2005, DIS
2006, CHI 2007), we have shown that users' perception and preference for
aesthetically design web sites is subject to strong framing, context and
halo effects, i.e. their preferences depend on their background and the
task, while positive judgement of one attribute (aesthetics) positively
influences judgement of others such as usability and content, even when
objective measures showed one design to be worse, and the content of
both sites was identical. This challenges Norman's and Tractinsky's view
that 'what is beautiful is usable'. The implications of framing and halo
effects on users' judgement of aesthetics will be discussed, followed by
some more speculative thoughts on our current research which is
expanding the framework to include presence, interaction and engagement.
http://www.informatics.manchester.ac.uk/research/groups/isd/themes/


BIO
Alistair Sutcliffe is Professor of Systems Engineering, in Manchester
Business School, University of Manchester. He has been principle
investigator on 15 EPSRC and European Union projects on requirements
engineering, multimedia user interfaces, safety critical systems and
cognitive modelling for information retrieval. Currently funded research
projects include EPSRC/ESRC Developing theory for Evolving
Socio-Technical Systems (TESS) which is investigating technology
mediated social and work relationships based on Dunbar's Social Brain
Theory; EPSRC E-Science project Adaptive Visualisation Tools for
e-Science Collaboration (ADVISES) which is producing interactive
visualisation tools for health informatics researchers and EPSRC
Artificial Cultures which is researching evolutionary computing
simulations for complex socio technical systems.  His research interests
span a wide area within Human Computer Interaction and Software
Engineering. In HCI particular interests are interaction theory, and
user interface design methods for the web, multimedia, virtual reality,
safety critical systems and methods for usability evaluation. His
research also covers application of cognitive theory to design, and
design of complex socio-technical systems. In software engineering he
specialises in requirements engineering methods and tools, scenario
based design, knowledge reuse and theories of domain knowledge. Alistair
Sutcliffe is a leading member of both the international HCI and
requirements engineering communities, is the Program Chair for
Requirements Engineering 07 and recently was Co-Chair of DIS2002. He
serves on the editorial boards of ACM-TOCHI, REJ and JASE. Alistair
Sutcliffe is founder of IFIP TC-13 Working Group 13.2 'Methodology for
User Centred Design' and member of IFIP working groups 8.1 (information
systems) and 2.9 (requirements engineering) and is the editor of the ISO
standard 14915, on Multimedia user interface design. He has over 200
publications including five books and several edited volumes of papers
and was awarded the IFIP silver core in 2000. 

http://www.informatics.manchester.ac.uk/centre_hci/ASutcliffe_site.html



Tuck Leong
http://www.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/tuck/
Office: Room 3.62, 111 Barry Street,
Carlton, 3010. Victoria, Australia.
P: +61 3 83441584