Jurek Kirakowski, PhD

    Research into usability, software metrics, and quality of use.

    • Director of the Human Factors Research Group, University College Cork
    • Statutory Lecturer in Applied Psychology

    My main research interest is how to evaluate computing systems for usability, especially for user satisfaction. The quantitative measurement of psychological phenomena has always been my prime fascination and so I have participated in the development of a number of end-user based satisfaction questionnaires such as:

    • the Computer User Satisfaction Inventory CUSI
    • the Software Usability Measurement Inventory SUMI
    • Measuring the Usability of Multi-Media Systems MUMMS
    • Web-site Analysis and MeasureMent Inventory WAMMI

    ...all of which have been extensively used in research and industry. The SUMI questionnaire has been hailed as the de-facto industry standard for satisfaction measurement, and if on searching the web for questionnaires in this area you don't find mention of WAMMI, use a proper search engine! See the HFRG homepage for more information.

    I've been involved in pre-competitive R&D projects part-sponsored by the European Commission since 1984, mainly in the area of usability measurement and associated software metrication. See the list of partners with whom the HFRG have worked.

    The map on this page shows some of the partners of the European Usability Service Centre network, which I have been helping to set up. At present, this work is assisted by the EC-funded UsabilityNet project.

    The aim of the EUSC is to disseminate information about and to encourage best practice in user-centred design, using the ISO 13 407 standard as the basic statement of principle.

    		Map courtesy of Dr Martin Maguire, HUSAT

    My favourite web page at the moment is the FAQ on questionnaires page, which I've developed with the help of feedback from many of my colleagues in HCI over the world.

    At UCC I lecture in experimental design and statistics as well as human factors. My special area of responsability within the Applied Psychology department is administering the first year undergraduate course: we have altogether over 600 students involved in all the modules of this course.


    I still keep a practical hand in software development: as well as being the project leader for the data analysis and report generating programs for the WAMMI questionnaire, I've also led the development and maintenance of two medium-sized software projects which have found use at the university for over ten years: the Exams Management System package and the in-house simple statistics package STATPAK which includes a versatile analysis of variance analysis routine to handle experimental designs with nested and heavily unbalanced factors: the kinds of designs psychologists love to create! More artistic sides to my character are expressed in my web site development activities, (see for instance the Sunday's Well website) dabbling in poetry (take a look at my selection of poems and translations) and playing the viola, Irish harp, piano, treble recorder, tenor horn.

    Once the principal viola of the Cork Symphony Orchestra, I firmly believe that if an instrument is worth playing, it's worth playing badly.
    Snail-Mail:
    Human Factors Research Group, 

    North Mall Enterprise Centre, 
    University College, 
    Cork, 
    Ireland. 
    Phone and Fax Numbers: 
    Phone: +353 21 490 4594 

    Fax: +353 21 427 0439  
    eMail: 
    jzk@ucc.ie 

    One of the shortest addresses I've come accross!

    Being Polish, I speak half-a-dozen languages fluently if idiosyncratically,
    and still think that LISP 1.5 was a pretty neat idea.