Welcome

Welcome to user:number 1!

This journal will be a series of short articles about usability relating to my consultancy, user:number 1. We specialise in offering competitively priced offshore user testing, but this journal will discuss some of the things about usability that I have discovered over the years.

As a background, I am the founder of the consultancy and took my PhD at Cardiff University where I was supervised by Professor Stephen Payne (he of the task action grammar). I spent a few happy years there researching the usability of web search engines and found some interesting results. Then, one day in September, after being examined by Andrew Howes and Alan Dix (and John Pearce asleep behind me as chair!), my thesis was accepted.

In my time, I have done commercial consulting and research into e-learning for postgraduate medical students. I decided recently to take my skills more permanently into the market because I have a lot of research methods experience that could really help businesses become competitive.

Some articles here will be quite brief and others may be lengthy. The first one I have will focus on considering computer interfaces as a language translator. This sounds strange, but it can help an analyst understand how interfaces work before being committed to time-consuming and expensive user testing.