Usability professionals have attained a specialist role in systems-development projects. This study analyzes usability professionals’ operational understanding of usability by eliciting the constructs they employ in their thinking about system use. We approach usability broadly and without a priori distinguishing it from user experience. On the basis of repertory-grid interviews with 24 Chinese...

This study arises from our concern that many of our best art and design students are failing to make the most of the opportunities provided by IT because of their fear or dislike of computers. This not only deprives them of useful skills, but, even more importantly, deprives many IT based developments of their input. In this paper we investigate the relationship between attitudes to creativity ...

Students' perceptions of technology-supported collaborative writing (CW) and peer reviewing are important because these perceptions affect adoption decisions, initial engagement, and continued reliance on collaboration/peer feedback as a learning resource. This paper describes and demonstrates the utility of the Repertory Grid Technique to probe such perceptions. Combining interviews and writte...

The computer elicitation and analysis of personal construct systems has become a technique of great interest and wide application in recent years. This paper takes the current state of the art as a starting point and explores further developments that are natural extensions of it. The overall objective of the work described is to develop man-computer symbiotic systems in which the computer is a...

Many businesses today are using the World Wide Web (WWW) to create a compelling presence and this phenomenon is projected to sustain in the near future. Organizations are increasingly using websites not only to capture but also to build relationships with their desired markets. However, research into the effectiveness of B2C websites remains highly fragmented and user-centric, ignoring the view...

The outsourcing of information technology (IT) to external vendors promises lower delivery cost while attaining higher delivery quality. Despite these positive prospects, many information technology outsourcing (ITO) projects still fail, often due to an unsuccessful client-vendor relationship. Most research to date has focused on investigating this relationship from the clients’ perspective, ev...

This study is exploratory and looks for meaningful ways of differentiating coaching approaches used by UK practitioners as a way of establishing a more solid foundation for comparative and evaluative research. The paper briefly explores how coaching is defined, arguing that current definitions provide an inadequate foundation for theoretical and evaluative research, compared with multi-dimensio...

This paper develops an experimental approach to understanding how construction workers modify their risk taking behavior when safety schemes are implemented. The study takes a qualitative approach using (1) repertory grid techniques to map attitudinal change and (2) navigable movies to reproduce the experience of surrogate travel. Hazard categories emerged from the data to produce a framework w...

This article reports the results of a study that investigated effects of four user characteristics on users’ mental models of information retrieval systems: educational and professional status, first language, academic background, and computer experience. The repertory grid technique was used in the study. Using this method, important components of information retrieval systems were represented...

This research-in-progress paper illustrates how technoidentologists can explicate relationships with IS/IT and uncover techno-identities in a single interview. The power of this approach lies in the ability to paint a more complete picture of users’ preferences for various IS/IT. This includes beginning with concrete IS/IT and ending with core constructs that represent purpose and/or meaning in...