A discussion with Gilbert Cockton in a brown-bag lunch at 12 noon Tuesday April 24 - venue to be announced (likely to be Wallenberg)

Over ten years ago, I began research on comparing usability methods for interactive systems with my graduate student Darryn Lavery. We struggled with ‘what mattered’ in evaluation. Definitions of a ‘usability problem’ didn’t help enough, nor did severity rating scales. From 1999 onwards, we used product and project specific filters in our usability reporting, and I later came to do the same with contextual research. Through my group’s work on technology transfer and support for digital media companies, we also came to adopt the commercial language of ‘product value’ to explain our approach.

In 2005 I was awarded a fellowship from NESTA in the UK to develop “value-centred design”. I began work that Fall, and initially explored value within several disciplinary perspectives. I had already sketched out a development framework (Cockton 2005), which has evolved substantially following reading, visits, presentations and discussions. The most promising approach to value that I have found comes from consumer psychology, where laddering interviews are used to elicit hierarchical value models (HVMs) that express consumer cognitions about products and services. I also know talk more about ‘worth’ (and ‘worthy’ and ‘worthwhile’) to avoid confusion between ‘value’ and ‘values’.

In this talk, I will outline my embryonic worth-centred framework. It aims to create and maintain a focus on value throughout the development of interactive software and media. This focus starts with designers’ cognitions about intended desirable value, and moves through the creative design and development of achievable value to the evaluation of achieved worth. Methods within the framework are all anchored by a version of HVMs called Worth/Aversion Maps (W/AMs). Supplementary methods aim to: add detail to W/AMs (worth boards, worth tables); challenge, extend and refine them (worth perspectives, worth inspection, worth delivery scenarios, value and technology probes, product ecology analysis); evaluate them as design theories about worth systems (direct instrumentation, worth impact assessment). The aim of the framework is not only to bring design to software, but to move more traditional artefact- and muse-centred approaches to design towards a new focus on outcomes rather than objects.

Worth-centred methods and my framework are currently evolving through use, discussion and critiques. I will motivate my approach as part of HCI’s ‘third wave’, moving beyond quality in use and fit to context, beyond human factors and human actors, and beyond cognition and emotion to value in the world, human satisfactors and volition. My NESTA fellowship is fuelled by listening, discussion and interaction. My presentation will be designed to achieve these, rather than just reporting ‘results’.

References

Cockton, G., (2004) “From Quality in Use to Value in the World”, in CHI 2004 Extended Abstracts, 1287-90.

Cockton, G., (2005) “A Development Framework for Value-Centred Design,” in CHI 2005 Extended Abstracts, ed. C. Gale, 1292-95.

Cockton, G. (2007a), “Shaker/Retail and Role: HCI Reform Movements”, Deflections Column, Interfaces Magazine, 70, British HCI Group, ISSN 1351-119X, p.4

Cockton, G. (2007b) “Make Evaluation Poverty History”, alt.chi, CHI 2007 (open reviewing model)

Cockton, G. (2007c) “Putting Value into E-valu-ation,” to appear in Maturing Usability: Quality in Software, Interaction and Value, eds Law, E., Hvannberg, E.,and Cockton, G. Springer.

Gilbert Cockton is Research Chair in HCI at the University of Sunderland. He has secured funding for research and knowledge transfer projects and infrastructure with a value exceeding £6M since his appointment in 1997. He currently leads usability work in the Digital Knowledge Exchange, a UK HEIF-2&3 funded project directed at knowledge transfer between university partners and external organisations. A Fellow of both the Royal Society for the Arts, and the British Computer Society, Gilbert has published extensively since 1985, with 160 papers, chapters, books and edited proceedings on usability and accessibility, grounded- and value-centred design, and notations and architectures for interactive software. He has served in many roles within the international HCI community, including Vice-Chair of IFIP TC13 (2004 06), Chair of British HCI Group (2001-2004), Chair of ACM CHI 2003 and BCS HCI 2000 Conferences, and Secretary of IFIP WG2.7 on user interface engineering (1993-99). He is Editor Emeritus of the journal Interacting with Computers, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Usability Studies.