The aim of this thesis project is to create a user interface for a web based film production project management portal. This implies creating a site map and a functionality specification based on the needs of the people working in the film production industry. The project was made on account of The Chimney Pot, a post production company in Stockholm. For the scope of this project, the research was concentrated on the part of film production that concerns The Chimney Pot, i.e. the procedures that take place after a film has been recorded. The research also focused on people working in the area of Stockholm, even if their clients and customers in other areas of Sweden and abroad were indirectly included in order for the project portal to be a usable tool in projects where these people are involved. Before any visible results can be seen in a web production project, a range of preparation steps needs to be taken. Planning is essential if the final product shall work properly. Extensive research has to be done into the industry. In order to make the product usable, the intended users, their requirements, work procedures and environment need to be examined. Only when there are substantial results and enough knowledge about the industry, the actual implementation can start. The first step is to make a functionality specification, next a site map should be produced and the technical architecture should be specified. These are the areas that are covered in this project, but there are also recommendations about how the further development should be made. Important aspects in the next phase are to create a budget, to put together a development team and to create a graphic user interface. In the whole process the issues of usability need to be considered, i.e. efficiency, flexibility, learnability and satisfaction. The key requirements for the project portal turned out to be speed and effectiveness. The user interface was designed to be intuitive and to be shallow, which means that the user should be able to perform any task with the least amount of mouse clicks possible. Another intention with the produced user interface is for it to be clearly divided into the four main areas that could be extracted from the user requirements. They are planning, project details, communication and file sharing. Directly after logging on to the project portal, the user should get an overview of all these areas. Other important considerations were security, version control and seamlessness. These issues demand a thorough planning of the technical architecture and this thesis provides some useful tips for the further development of the technical specification.

In the future network-based Swedish Defence (NBD), attaining information superiority will be of great importance. This will be achieved by a network of networks where decision-makers, information- and weapon-systems are linked together. As a part of the development of NBD, we have performed a study of user interface design for a future network-based tool package for analysis of sensor systems, referred to as the C2SR-system. This thesis was performed at Ericsson Microwave Systems AB, Sensor and Information Networks, during the autumn 2002. A pre-study concerning the requirements of usability, trustworthiness and functionality of a user interface for the C2SR-system was performed. Officers representing the future users in the NBD played an important role when gathering these requirements. Another important part of the pre-study was the evaluation of software that contains parts of the functionality necessary for the C2SR-system. On the basis of the results from the pre-study, we have designed a user interface to the future C2SR-system. To demonstrate the most important conclusions, a prototype was implemented.

This report is a part of a diploma work, conducted as a part of a Master of Science degree. The diploma work consists of a preliminary study, two case studies, a user study, a paper and this report. It was created at the Linköping University for the department of Science and Technology, in cooperation with Unilever Research in the UK, and partly with the EC founded project, Smartdoc IST-2000-28137. Hand-held, mobile devices like Personal Digital Assistances (PDAs) are becoming increasingly popular in today’s wireless world. While trying to pack all the possible information into a small window, a nightmarish scenario is created for the interface designer to deal with. The goal for this project was to investigate different Visual User Interfaces (VUIs)on PDAs, and how to apply desktop interaction techniques to PDAs. A VUI model based on Zooming User Interface (ZUI) techniques, to adapt two complete different visualisation application areas; on-line brand-based shopping and flood warning system for PDAs, is presented. The on-line brand- based shopping was evaluated in a benchmark usability study comparing it to traditional PC based on-line shopping.

Browsing the Web on a distant screen may very often become user’s unpleasant experience. Such a situation may happen in a living room environment, where the user attempts to browse the Web on TV sitting at 10-foot distance from the screen. In a vast number of web sites that the user is able to request, many may contain, for instance, tiny text characters, which would become unreadable when watched from the distance. On the other hand, also navigation through the Web offerings can become troublesome. Especially, when the user is only equipped with the commonly used remote controller, interaction with the displayed content may prove inefficient. Therefore, methods to overcome content visibility and navigation problems become challenging. In this thesis we perceive living room environment as a good scenario, in which web-enabled handheld devices could further be utilized to interact with Consumer Electronics products, such as TVs. This sort of interaction should make an advantage of publically available Web resources to have them displayed on TV and controlled from the distance by the user who is equipped with, for instance, a web-enabled mobile phone. We think that such an interaction approach would become beneficial in several ways, making the Web browsing routine an interactive, possibly a group activity. Discussed in this thesis solutions are the first step of automatic transformations of web content into a form that can be rendered on Web4CE (Web for Consumer Electronics) products. A particularly important aspect of the proposed system is the concept of request/response HTTP message processing and HTML modification. According to this approach, living room browsing activity should be achievable without the need to re-author already existing web sites.

De nos jours, l’industrie aérospatiale est composée d’acteurs internationaux.Due à la complexité de leur production (taille, nombre de composants,variété des systèmes, ...), la conception d’un avion ou d’un lanceurnécessite un grand nombre d’ingénieurs avec des domaines d’expertises variés.De plus, les industries aérospatiales sont distribuées de par le monde. Dans cecontexte complexe, il est nécessaire d’utiliser la réalité virtuelle afin de proposerdes environnements virtuels accessibles depuis des sites distants afin departager une expérience collaborative. Des problèmes particuliers, alors, surviennent,particulièrement par rapport à la perception des autres utilisateursimmergés.Cette thèse, en partenariat avec Airbus Group, se concentre sur la conceptionde techniques d’interaction collaboratives efficaces. Ces sessions collaborativespermettent de connecter plusieurs sites distants via le même environnementvirtuel. Ainsi, des experts de domaines variés peuvent travailler ensembleen étant immergés simultanément. Par exemple, si un problème survient durantles dernières étapes d’assemblage d’un lanceur, il peut être nécessairede rassembler des experts qui étaient impliqués en amont du projet (bureaud’étude pour la conception, usine pour la fabrication des systèmes), afin deconcevoir des solutions pour résoudre le problème.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons différentes techniques d’interactions afinde faciliter la collaboration à différents niveaux d’un projet industriel. Nousnous sommes intéressés à la communication et la perception entre collaborateursimmergés, à la prise d’annotation et la circulation de ces annotations età la collaboration asymétrique entre une salle de réunion et un environnementvirtuel à l’aide d’outil de réalité mixte. / The aerospace industry is no longer composed of local and individualbusinesses. Due to the complexity of the products (their size, the numberof components, the variety of systems, etc.), the design of an aircraft or alauncher involves a considerable number of engineers with various fields of expertise.Furthermore, aerospace companies often have industrial facilities allover the world. In such a complex setting, it is necessary to build virtual experimentsthat can be shared between different remote sites. Specific problemsthen arise, particularly in terms of the perception of other immersed users.We are working with Airbus Group in order to design efficient collaborativeinteraction methods. These collaborative sessions allow multiple sites to beconnected within the same virtual experiment and enable experts from differentfields to be immersed simultaneously. For instance, if a problem occurs duringthe final stages of a launcher assembly, it may be necessary to bring togetherexperts on different sites who were involved in previous steps ( initial design,manufacturing processes). In this thesis, we propose various interaction technique in order to ease thecollaboration at different moments of an industrial process. We contributedin the context of communication between immersed users, taking notes inthe virtual environment and sharing it outside virtual reality and asymmetriccollaboration between a physical meeting room and a virtual environment.

Ericsson is one of the world leaders in radio network technology and are spending a lot of resources on research in this area. This produces big amounts of data and there is a desire for tools that allows the researchers to investigate and present the data in a user friendly way. This is the motivation behind Elsa GVP, Ericsson’s visualization platform, which facilitates the production of interactive visualizations. The platform handles database connections and provides a number of visual components that can be used in an interactive visualization, such as bar charts, scatter plots and maps. Although Elsa GVP certainly makes the production of an interactive visualization speedier it is still a time consuming task and requires expert knowledge. Therefore, there is a desire to make the entire process easier and more user-friendly so that any employee can construct an interactive visualization. This is the motivation behind this master thesis work whose main objective is to investigate how to reduce the amount of work required to produce an interactive visualization by providing an intuitive graphical user interface.

The purpose of this study was to develop a list of usability guidelines, i.e. a usability checklist, which can assist in evaluating the usability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) user interfaces. Interviews were conducted to help understand their context of use and to find design focus points for the evaluation of MOOCs interface. These design focus points were then inspected for usability issues with Jakob Nielsen’s usability inspection method - heuristic evaluation - using author’s own set of 10 usability heuristics. The study reveals two main findings. Firstly, the context of use of MOOCs differs from a regular university course in the manner of how users perceive and approach them. And secondly, the usability checklist has to be adaptable and up-to-date in order to support the constant change of context of use of MOOCs. The combination of both findings is what makes this study not just another checklist, but a valid contribution to the understanding of MOOCs and the research field in HCI.

The aim of this project is to enable automatic cataloguing and measuring archeological discoveries. The first step is image processing, which is performed via thresholding, segmentation and adjusting found objects. After these procedures, examined objects are represented by a komplex vector. The second part is focused on measuring the point and identification of its shape. The access to retrieved data is permitted by user interface created in the last part of this project.

Abstract Application composition refers to the creation of applications by using Web Services and resources such as mobile devices, displays, and various augmented everyday objects as building blocks. This approach is especially useful for ubiquitous applications which focus on supporting users' needs and everyday activities. This thesis proposes to compose these applications by choosing the appropriate set of resources and services and their configuration as dictated by the users themselves, together with their needs and other contexts. This thesis studies automated and interactive application composition. The first approach enables the system to act upon users' needs and intentions, while the second enables users themselves to specify their needs and achieve their goals. The research was carried out by designing, implementing and evaluating eight prototypes for automated and interactive application composition. The evaluation methods used included performance analysis and user experiments. The main results include (1) the design and implementation of automated composition mechanisms which rely on evolutionary computing and genetic algorithms, (2) a detailed performance analysis of these mechanisms using synthesized datasets and in a real networking environment; (3) the design and implementation of interactive application composition prototypes which rely on graphical and physical (i.e. touch-based) user interfaces for mobile devices and utilize various contexts; (4) an evaluation of these prototypes in a series of user experiments. The evaluation studied the following issues: users' attitudes towards an automated composition system which makes decisions on their behalf; users' attitudes towards a context-aware composition interface; and the issue of balancing user control and system autonomy. / Tiivistelmä Sovellusten kokoamisella tarkoitetaan sovellusten luomista käyttäen rakennuselementteinä Web Services -ohjelmistojärjestelmää, sekä muita resursseja, kuten mobiililaitteita, näyttölaitteita ja monenlaisia lisävarusteltuja tavanomaisia esineitä. Tämä menetelmä on erityisen käyttökelpoinen sellaisten jokapaikan tietoteknisten sovellusten luomisessa, joiden tarkoitus on tukea käyttäjän tarpeita ja päivittäisiä toimia. Tutkimuksessa esitetään, että tällaisia sovelluksia voidaan koota valitsemalla sopivia palvelu- ja resurssipaketin sekä niiden konfiguraation käyttäjien vaatimusten mukaan, ottaen huomioon heidän tarpeensa sekä muut kontekstit. Tässä väitöskirjassa tutkitaan automatisoitua ja vuorovaikutteista sovellusten kokoamista. Automatisointi mahdollistaa sen, että järjestelmä toimii käyttäjän tarpeiden ja päämäärien mukaisesti, kun taas vuorovaikutteisuuden ansiosta käyttäjä voi määritellä tarpeensa ja pääsee näin haluamaansa lopputulokseen. Tutkimus toteutettiin suunnittelemalla, toteuttamalla ja arvioimalla kahdeksan automatisoidun ja vuorovaikutteisen sovelluksen kokoonpanon prototyyppiä. Arviointimetodeina käytettiin suorituskykyanalyysiä ja käyttäjäkokeita. Tutkimuksen tärkeimpiä tuloksia ovat (1) evoluutiolaskentaan ja geneettisiin algoritmeihin perustuvien automatisoitujen kokoamismekanismien suunnittelu ja toteutus; (2) näiden mekanismien yksityiskohtainen suorituskykyanalyysi syntetisoitujen tietoaineistojen ja todellisten verkkoympäristöjen avulla; (3) graafisille ja fyysisille (l. kosketus) mobiililaitteiden käyttöliittymille perustuvien ja monenlaisia konteksteja hyödyntävien vuorovaikutteisten kokoamissovellusten prototyyppien suunnittelu ja toteutus; (4) prototyyppien arviointi erilaisin käyttäjäkokein. Arvioinnissa tutkittiin käyttäjien asenteita käyttäjän puolesta päätöksiä tekevää automatisoitua kokoamisjärjestelmää kohtaan, käyttäjien asenteita kontekstitietoista kokoamiskäyttöliittymää kohtaan, sekä käyttäjälle jäävän kontrollin ja järjestelmän autonomian välistä tasapainoa.

Abstract Traditional design of user interfaces for mobile phones is limited to a small interaction that provides only the necessary means to place phone calls or to write short messages. Such narrow activities supported via current terminals suppress users from moving towards mobile and ubiquitous computing environments of the future. Unfortunately, the next generation of user interfaces for mobile terminals seems to apply the same design patterns as commonly used for desktop computers. Whereas the desktop environment has enough resources to implement such design, capabilities of the mobile terminals fall under constraints dictated by mobility, like the size and weight. Additionally, to make mobile terminals available for everyone, users should be able to operate them with minimal or no preparation, while users of desktop computers will require certain degree of training. This research looks into how to improve the user interface of future mobile devices by using a more human-centred design. One possible solution is to combine the Augmented Reality technique with image recognition in such a way that it will allow the user to access a "virtualized interface". Such an interface is feasible since the user of an Augmented Reality system is able to see synthetic objects overlaying the real world. Overlaying the user's sight and using the image recognition process, the user interacts with the system using a combination of virtual buttons and hand gestures. The major contribution of this work is the definition of the user's gestures that makes it possible for human-computer interaction with such Augmented Reality based User Interfaces. Another important contribution is the evaluation on how mobile applications and services work with this kind of user interface and whether the technology is available to support it.