The core members of the ide@s group have been linked with several highly successful projects within the University of Sunderland. From the early days of the Digital Media Network (DMN) to more recently, Codeworks NITRO project. Although projects come and go, our core staff remain the same, delivering the same high standard of consultancy and services to businesses large and small, local and national.

Professor Gilbert Cockton

Gilbert is Research Chair in HCI and Chair of Interactive Digital Media in the School of Computing and Technology. He is a well-established leader within the HCI community (Vice-Chair of IFIP TC13 on HCI 2004-06, Chair of British HCI Group (2001-2004), Secretary of IFIP WG2.7 (1993-99) and Chair of ACM CHI 2003 and BCS HCI 2000 Conferences, Editor Emeritus Interacting with Computers). He has served on 30 international programme committees, and presented several keynote addresses at international conferences and workshops. His pioneering research on the relationship between value and design in software has recently led to the award of a prestigious NESTA fellowship. He leads usability work in the Digital Knowledge Exchange, a HEFCE funded project directed at knowledge transfer between partner universities and external organisations. Cockton’s work on assessing evaluation methods won the best paper for the HCI 2003 conference. He is a Working Group leader in COST Action 294 MAUSE on Usability Evaluation.

Dr Sharon McDonald

Sharon is a Senior Research Lecturer in the School of Computing and Technology at the University of Sunderland. Sharon’s early research work focused on information seeking behaviour in hypertext/hypermedia systems, and later in content-based image retrieval systems. Recently Sharon has narrowed the focus of her research to the impact of individual difference factors within HCI. She has co-authored an accepted article in Communications of the ACM; She has had senior roles on international conference programme committees (Technical Chair, HCI 2000; General and Programme Chair, European Conference on Information Retrieval), as well as ACM CHI 2002 (Co-chair Student Posters), and review committee service for several ACM SIGIR and CHI conferences. In 2004 she was an invited keynote speaker at the Earli Text and Graphics conference in Valencia. Sharon has worked on usability and design issues for privately funded proof of concept and commercial projects. She is a member of COST Action 294 MAUSE on Usability Evaluation.

Alan Woolrych

Alan received an MPhil in 2001 from the University of Sunderland for his work on the scope and accuracy of usability inspection methods. Alan’s work on inspection methods has generated a number of highly cited publications including the best paper award for BCS HCI 2003 conference. Alan’s PhD extends his MPhil work by focusing on analyst behaviour during usability inspections in terms of the different resources they bring to bear in problem discovery and analysis. Alan has several years of experience in usability consultancy, providing expert assistance to companies on the design and evaluation of a number of different software products. Alan is also a member of COST Action 294 MAUSE on Usability Evaluation.