Our November 2024 essay is “Teaching UX: Amid the Hype of Generative AI,” by Jason Tham. From the perspective of a university faculty member in a technical communication program, the essay tackles institutional concerns, professional expectations, and ethical considerations related to the use of AI in UX education.
This issue also includes two research papers: one on the extent to which participants’ responses to multipoint rating scales varies over administrations of questionnaires, and another on the consideration of usability in the procurement of complex IT systems.
The first article is “Response Instability in User Experience Questionnaires,” by Martin Schrepp and Jörg Thomaschewski. The authors investigated the extent to which participants’ responses to rating scales are nondeterministic (not perfectly reliable) and the extent to which this has an impact on the interpretation of UX survey results.
The second article is “Addressing Usability and Complexity in Procurement of IT Systems,” by Topias Saari, Kaisa Savolainen, Mari Tyllinen, Johanna Viitanen, and Marko Nieminen. Procuring complex IT systems is a challenging task with potentially multifaceted effects on usability. The research in this article includes a case study and a literature review to better understand the gap between assessments of complexity and usability as influencing factors in procurement.
