About Contact Help us  
Interaction-Design.org
HCI, User Experience, Information Architecture, Usability, and more
 
“I can't be happy with having everyone else pay for my wonderful source of knowledge!”

Last 3 Donors

Support us

Funding progress for 2010:
 
References Navigation arrow Authors Navigation arrow Ali al-Azzawi
Bookmark and Share Printer-friendly version of this pagePrinter-friendly Instructions on how to cite/reference this pageHow to cite 

Ali al-Azzawi

Picture of Ali al-Azzawi. Copyright unknown.
Personal Homepage:
dwrc.surrey.ac.uk/People/PhDs/AlialAzzawi/tabid/119/Default.aspx

Current place of employment:
Openia


Ali al-Azzawi is a PhD student at The Digital World Research Centre and the Psychology Department at the University of Surrey. He started at Surrey in 2005 and his area of research is centred around the theory of user experience (UX), specifically regarding portable media devices. Ali is also managing director at Openia (www.openia.com), an internet services consultancy providing content management systems (Plone CMS) based on open source technology.

EDIT AUTHOR INFO
ADD PUBLICATION
SHARE YOUR RESEARCH

Publications by Ali al-Azzawi (bibliography)

 what's this?

» 2008 «

Edit | Del

al-Azzawi, Ali, Wilson, Margaret and Frohlich, David M. (2008): User Experience Constructs for Media Devices. In: Personal Construct Psychology Conference June 29-July 1, 2008, London. .

“User experience (UX) is a notion that has increasingly been featured in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), product-design and business literature over the last decade. A Personal Construct Theory (PCT) approach is described for the purpose of exploring and understanding the UX. This paper contributes to the current debate about the nature of UX as applied to interactive media devices (Hassenzahl 2004). Here we develop a new perspective of UX as a complex psychological construct, subject to competing influences from visible object properties such as shape and colour, and invisible object associations such as perceived ease of use and brand. PCT methodology is used to examine such constructs based on a card sorting procedure (Canter, Brown, and Groat 1985), overcoming some of the documented problems with Repertory Grid (Fallman 2006), such as reliance on linear constructs and verbalisation. The multiple sorting procedure (MSP) teamed with Multidimensional Scalogram Analysis (MSA) is used here to investigate the way 36 participants think and feel about the experience of technology, in the form of MP3 players. Applying this method to life size pictures of 35 MP3 players printed on separate cards, resulted in eleven basic constructs for thinking about these devices based on their appearance alone. These were: Screen, Size, Controls, Shape, Colour, Aesthetics, Brand, Design, Functions, Usability and Convenience. Also, based on the MSA, four main groups of devices were identified: Standard (portrait orientation), Horizontal oriented, Curved, and Other/Odd shaped. The results also suggest that aesthetics may not correlate directly with preference. Participants tended to evaluate the players holistically, applying similar categorisations to free-sorts, beauty-sorts and preference-sorts. This involved a common polarisation between modern and post-modern forms as they have been found to apply to architectural styles (Wilson 1996). The MSP been applied to many areas of applied psychology, including environmental, forensic (Canter and Ioannou 2004), and organisational psychology (Wilson and Canter 1993). The present application extends this repertoire to HCI and elucidates a number of factors relevant to technology and design. ”

Copyrights may apply

Edit | Del

al-Azzawi, Ali, Frohlich, David M. and Wilson, Margaret (2008): User Experience: A Multiple Sorting Method based on Personal Construct Theory. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. .

“A multiple card-sorting task is described for the purpose of exploring and understanding the User Experience. This method is part of a Personal Construct Theory approach, and is validated with experimental data that show insight into how users conceptualise their experience with MP3 players, as represented by photographs. This approach allows access to users’ constructs and categories, which enables access to their subjective meanings and experience.”

Copyrights may apply

» 2007 «

Edit | Del

al-Azzawi, Ali, Frohlich, David M. and Wilson, Margaret (2007): Beauty constructs for MP3 players. In CoDesign International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 3 (0) pp. 59-74

“This paper contributes to the current debate about the nature of beauty and aesthetics as they apply to interactive products. Current disagreement centres around the question of whether beauty should be viewed as a continuous property of objects or as a rare emotional response to object encounters (Hassenzahl 2004, Frohlich 2004). Here we develop a new perspective of beauty as a complex psychological construct, subject to competing influences from visible object properties such as shape and colour, and invisible object associations such as perceived ease of use and brand. We introduce a new methodology for examining such constructs based on a card sorting procedure, and use it to show how 36 participants think about the beauty of 35 MP3 players. One implication is that beauty may not correlate directly with preference. We also found that participants tended to evaluate the players holistically, applying similar categorisations to free sorts, beauty sorts and preference sorts. This involved a common polarisation between modern and post-modern forms as they have been found to apply to architectural styles (Wilson 1996).”

Copyrights may apply

» 2006 «

Edit | Del

al-Azzawi, Ali, Wilson, Margaret and Frohlich, David M. (2006): Users' First impressions of MP3 players. In: First International Symposium on Culture Creativity and Interaction Design CCID September 12, 2006, London. .

“In this study we explore the dimensions of the first impressions made by users as they sort photographs of MP3 players. We collected data using a Multiple Sorting Procedure, the data was then analysed using Multidimensional Scalogram Analysis. We have found that simple, user-defined, concepts such as colour and shape played a prominent role at this stage of interaction with the product. We also explored what users saw as “Kinds of Beauty” and found four main types; Average, Quirky, Shapely and Elegant. This study has focused on eliciting the users’ own conceptualisations and categorisations.”

Copyrights may apply

ADD PUBLICATION
SHOW THIS LIST ON YOUR HOMEPAGE

What do YOU think?

Give us your opinion! Do you have any comments/additions
that you would like other visitors to see?

 
comment You say: Mar 21st, 2010
#1
Be the first to add a thoughtful note to this page ! 

  will be spam-protected
 

 
How many?
=
e.g. "6"
 

Changes to this page (author)

17 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on Ali al-Azzawi's author page.
12 Nov 2008: Conference Article on this page was edited (approved by an editor)
12 Nov 2008: Author was edited (approved by an editor)
05 Nov 2008: Conference Article on this page was edited (approved by an editor)
05 Nov 2008: Author was edited (approved by an editor)
05 Nov 2008: Page was edited
04 Nov 2008: Conference Article was added to the page (approved by an editor)
04 Nov 2008: Author was added to the bibliography (approved by an editor)
04 Nov 2008: Page was edited
04 Nov 2008: Conference Article was added to the page (approved by an editor)
04 Nov 2008: Author was added to the bibliography (approved by an editor)
04 Nov 2008: Conference Article was added to the page (approved by an editor)
04 Nov 2008: Author was added to the bibliography (approved by an editor)
30 Oct 2008: Added a picture of Ali al-Azzawi
30 Oct 2008: Author was added to the bibliography (approved by an editor)

Publication statistics

Publication period:2006-2008
Publication count:4
Number of co-authors:2



Productive colleagues

Ali al-Azzawi's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

David M. Frohlich:25
Margaret Wilson:4


Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Margaret Wilson:4
David M. Frohlich:4

 

Other options

Learn more about Ali al-Azzawi:
- Google Scholar
- ACM
- CSB

Mar 21

“ Software design is the act of determining the user's experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user's whole experience. ”

-- David Liddle, From Bringing Design to Software, edited by Terry Winograd, 1996 ”

  • Share this quote on... Bookmark and Share
  • Get more quotes

Eva Hornecker on Tangible Interaction

Eva Hornecker explains the evolving concept of Tangible Interaction.

Read Eva's insightful entry here..

Help us help you!

  • Spread the word: Bookmark and Share
  • Donate
  • Other ways to help
 
 

Page information

Page maintainer: The Editorial Team
How to cite/reference this page
URL: http://www.interaction-design.org/references/authors/ali_al-azzawi.html
© Site Copyright/IP Policy | Privacy | Changelog

How to help | Site Map | RSS Subscribe through an RSS feed
Bookmark and Share
.
Author index:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Æ
Ø
Ö
Å
Calendar:
Internet Calendar (.iCal/.ics format) | Printerfriendly Calendar | Approaching Deadlines | World Map | Calendar RSS Feed
 
Browse bibliography by:
Authors | Conferences | Periodicals | Publishers