======= Date Modified 12 Jan 2012 15:45:20 =======
Hello - and I am sorry I have been away so long, there have been some really good threads on here recently and I have been reading at night but my phone invariably won't let me write replies!

Happy new year all!

The reason I come to you lovely people who speak plain english and explain so well is that I have reached something of an impasse.

Quick background - 18 years in IT, now somehow doing a PhD. Love it. But I am now well into my 2nd year and I am increasingly concerned at the time I have left, I've done a lot of writing and done a lot of application development. My sup team are keen for me to utilise public engagement methods to evaluate the applications I have developed, each of these workshops seem to take 6+ months to set up judging by my efforts so far and I have to organise three - 1 to evaluate each piece of technology. Argh. I am trying to find alternative robust but quicker methods while having no academic or social science background - writing the computer code is not an issue but evaluating it in order to be a sound piece of research is driving me insane.

Can anyone help or point me in the direction of good texts/papers?

As always - with thanks

(p.s. my other question was about writing but I saw the excellent thread below and now off out to find Writing in Plain English by Bryan Garner)


***edited to ask why I can't see HazyJanes reply???***

I can't think of any specific references but one approach might be to look at applied journals in a given field (e.g. http://mdm.sagepub.com/ or http://www.jmir.org/) and look for examples of evaluations of software and how they were conducted. The evaluations might range from qualitative assessment of a user interface to randomised trials of whether a piece of software affected real world practice. I doubt you'd have time to do the latter, but the former may be a relevant approach. What is your area of application?