Recommender systems are without a doubt a staple of the modern internet. Services like Amazon, Netflix, YouTube and Spotify rely on them. What makes them so engaging that millions of users spent billions of hours on them every day? User engagement is widely accept as a core concept of user experience but we still don’t know what role the user interface plays into it. This thesis investigates the effect of explanations in recommender systems on the users engagement with a case study on BMW Financial Services Thailand’s recommender system. An experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turks with the User Engagement Scale and A/B testing with Google Analytics proved a significant influence of explanations on the users engagement.

This thesis has been an odyssey of sorts, into how the creative and playful use of digital tools, such as virtual reality technology, may prompt one's engagement with ‘the lost atmosphere of a Place’ and its history. My point of reference is the novel platform known as Uppsala VR, the property of the Gamla Uppsala museum in Sweden. What exactly has been its nature and purpose? How is it being embedded in the overall museum practice? How do visitors perceive and experience it? What started as a User Experience (UX) survey, yet, in time evolved into an exploration of the Uppsala VR in terms of ‘mediated spectacle’. Eventually, through continuous observations, negotiation, and reflection, an intricate understanding develops about what lies beyond for historical heritage and its representation, and about the role of the users’ imaginative creativity in this process.

This study aims to examine how greyscale affects the screen time on smartphones and in what way it influences the user experience on the social media applications Facebook and Instagram. The use of social media applications is constantly increasing which has resulted in negative effects like difficulties with concentration and attention among individuals. Color can be used to make objects salient and draw attention to it. Color can also be used to affect the user experience through aesthetic aspects and the feelings that are connected to the interface. How greyscale affects the screen time on social media was investigated through a quantitative experiment that measured the screen time of the participants. The experiment was followed by an interview with the purpose to examine the participants’ user experience of the interface in greyscale with focus on aesthetic, emotional and functional aspects. The results show that color has importance for the way users are using social media, how long they tend to use the applications and that the screen time is reduced significantly when social media are used on a smartphone in greyscale. Further, the results also indicate that the user experience is affected by the absence of color. Aesthetic and emotional factors were the most affected by the change to greyscale. Functional factors were also affected by the removal of the colors on the interface, but not to the same extent, as the participants already knew how to use the applications.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Primary users can create a user experience (UX) for others—secondary users— when interacting with a system in public. Common ground occurs when people have certain knowledge in common and each knows that they have this shared understanding. This research investigates how designing for a secondary UX improves common ground during a patient-provider first encounter. During formative work, patients and providers participated in telephonic interviews and answered online questionnaires so that their respective information requirements for clinical encounters could be understood. The outcome of the formative work was a smartphone application prototype to be used as the treatment in an experimental study. In a mixed methods study, with a patient role-player using the prototype during a simulated clinical encounter with 12 providers, the impact of the prototype upon secondary user satisfaction and common ground was assessed. The main finding was that the prototype was capable of positively impacting secondary user satisfaction and facilitating common ground in certain instances. Combining the notions of human-computer interaction design, common ground, and smartphone technology improved the efficiency and effectiveness of providers during the simulated face-to-face first encounter with a patient. The investigation substantiated the notion that properly designed interactive systems have the potential to provide a satisfactory secondary UX and facilitate common ground.

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Throughout history, the construction industry has been known to present many risks to its workers’ safety and is still the cause of many accidents. This thesis examines a potential solution to one of the main problems faced by this field.Teleoperation has gained popularity, especially over the last ten years, and its application can be useful to many domains. Amongst them, research done on teleoperation tools for construction sites has been growing considerably as it appears to be a solution for some of the safety problems that it’s facing. Through a literature study and the building and running of an experiment, it aims to investigate parameters that can influence the performance and user experience of participants while remotely controlling a platform. By selecting a few parameters that can play a role in video streaming, the goal is to correlate their influence on the quality of experience of participants as they experience a prototype for a construction site. After conducting the experiment with multiple test participants, the results are analyzed and can lead to conclusions. Finally, future improvements can be made for another iteration of the experiment.