The release of the location-based game Pokemon Go saw the creators breaking world records for most revenue grossed by a mobile game within its first month. With location-based games and services such as Pokemon Go becoming mainstream, new opportunities in the market have been opened. But as location-based services become more popular there is a need for research and development of UX-design to keep up. Regarding location-based services there are multiple important questions in the field. For example, how are map interactions made intuitive and how are elements that interact with the map designed for the best user experience? Questions such as these will be explored in this thesis. This thesis is done in collaboration with the company Exenze which develops a location-based mobile game called Oknytt - Jakten på amuletten (Oknytt - The hunt for the amulet). The game is tailored to specific outdoor areas of the company's clients' choosing, such as campsites, parks or playgrounds. As of the writing of this thesis, the way of creating a level for Oknytt was very complex and took a lot of time. Exenze wanted an easier way to create levels, in which clients could make make their own levels; hence, the aim of this study was to create a user interface in which a non-professional user could create their own fun, engaging, and safe level for Oknytt. The method of this thesis consisted of development and testing of a low fidelity prototype, a mid fidelity prototype and a high fidelity prototype. The resulting high fidelity prototype divided the complex task of creating a level on a specific location into four dependable sub-tasks; finding a place, marking the game zone, marking areas that were unsafe for children, and managing collectibles. These sub-tasks were made into steps in a Wizard with one added step for filling billing information. The prototype was generally well received by users. Most of the problems in the interface had to do with the marking of game zones as well as marking areas that were unsafe for children.

Στα πλαίσια αυτής της διπλωματικής εργασίας μελετούνται οι ιστότοποι κοινωνικής δικτύωσης, καθώς και οι εφαρμογές παιχνιδιών μέσα σε αυτούς με σκοπό την ανάπτυξη μιας εκπαιδευτικής εφαρμογής μέσα σε έναν από αυτούς, το Facebook. Έχοντας εξετάσει αρκετούς χώρους κοινωνικής δικτύωσης και αφού καταλήξαμε να κάνουμε χρήση του Facebook σαν πλατφόρμα ανάπτυξης της εφαρμογής μας, προχωρήσαμε στην ανάπτυξη του παιχνιδιού, αφού πρώτα διατυπώσαμε την ιδέα του. Ποιο είναι το παιχνίδι; Το Back to School είναι ένα ατομικό, διαδραστικό παιχνίδι ερωτήσεων κυρίως γεωγραφικού, αλλά και εν μέρει ιστορικού περιεχομένου. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, ο παίκτης καλείται να εντοπίσει πάνω στο χάρτη (Google Maps) κάποια χώρα, πρωτεύουσα, ή τον τόπο γέννησης κάποιας ιστορικής προσωπικότητας, ανάλογα με την κατηγορία και αντίστοιχα το ένα από τα τρία επίπεδα δυσκολίας που θα επιλέξει, πραγματοποιώντας ένα διαδραστικό τεστ γεωγραφίας. Ο χρόνος που έχει στη διάθεσή του για κάθε παιχνίδι είναι 3 λεπτά, ενώ για κάθε σωστή απάντηση λαμβάνει 100 πόντους. Επιπλέον του δίνονται 3 ζωές (lives) προτού χάσει, ανεξαρτήτως του χρόνου που του απομένει, καθώς και ένας αριθμός βοηθειών (hints) για παράλειψη ερωτήσεων που δε γνωρίζει. Έχοντας αποσαφηνίσει το περιεχόμενο του παιχνιδιού και γνωρίζοντας το που θα αναπτυχθεί, μελετήσαμε το απαραίτητο υλικό για την ανάπτυξη της εφαρμογής στον κοινωνικό χώρο του Facebook, προκειμένου να μπορέσουμε να ενσωματώσουμε το παιχνίδι μέσα σε αυτόν, αξιοποιώντας κατάλληλα και τις δυνατότητες που προσφέρονται στους κοινωνικούς χώρους. Η εφαρμογή είναι διαθέσιμη προς χρήση στον παρακάτω ιστότοπο: apps.facebook.com/backtoschooool / Within this thesis, we study the social networking sites and game applications within these,in order to develop an educational application within one of these, Facebook. Having examined several social networking sites and ended up to use Facebook as a platform for our application development, we proceeded with the development of the game after we first formulated its idea. What's the game? Back to School is a single player, interactive quiz with mainly geographical, but also partially historical content. Specifically, the player is asked to locate on the map (Google Maps) a country whether a capital or the birthplace of a historical personality, depending on the category and on the one of the three corresponding levels of difficulty that he will choose, in order to take an interactive geography test. The time available for each game is 3 minutes, and for each correct answer receives 100 points. In addition he is given lives before losing, regardless of the time remaining as well as a number of hints in order to skip questions that he doesn’t know. Having clarified the content of the game and knowing where it would be developed, we studied the necessary material for the development of the application in the social space of Facebook, so that we can incorporate the game into it, while making appropriate use of the possibilities offered by social sites. The application is available for use on the following site: apps.facebook.com/backtoschooool

Much of current pedagogical discussion of the use of multimodal assignments in the writing classroom argues that one benefit of such assignments is that they foster student engagement, innovation, and creativity while simultaneously teaching writing and argumentation concepts. Although such discussions rarely use the term “play,” play theorists consider engagement, innovation, creativity, and learning to be central characteristics and outcomes of play. Thus, what many scholars view as a major outcome of multimodal assignments might most accurately be described as playful learning. In order to investigate the validity of claims that playful learning is a product of multimodal assignments, this dissertation reports on the results of a comparative case study of four different classrooms that used multimodal assignments. The objective of the study was to better understand the students’ experience of these assignments because the students’ perspective is only represented anecdotally in the literature. The study’s research questions asked: Do students find these assignments to be playful, creative, or engaging experiences? Do they view these assignments as related to and supportive of the more traditional goals of the course? And what role does the visual nature of these technologies have in the student’s experience of using them or in their pedagogical effectiveness? Each case was composed of a different writing course, a different assignment, and a different multimodal computer technology. The results of the study show that students generally did find these assignments both enjoyable and useful in terms of the learning goals of the course. Many students even went so far as to describe them as fun, indicating that for some students these were playful experiences in the traditional sense. However, comparison of the results of each case illustrates that the simple injection of a multimodal assignment into the classroom will not necessarily create a playful learning experience for students. The students’ experience is a complex phenomenon that is impacted by the structure of the assignment, whether or not they are provided a space for exploration and experimentation, their attitude towards the technology, and the characteristics of the technology. / text

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Mobile devices and mobile computing have made tremendous advances and become ubiquitous in the last few years. As a result, the landscape has become seriously fragmented which brings lots of challenges for the mobile development process. Whilst native approach of mobile development still is the predominant way to develop for a particular mobile platform, recently there is shifting towards cross-platform mobile development as well. In this thesis, a survey of the literature has been performed to see the trends in cross-platform mobile development over the last few years. With the result of the survey, it is argued that the web-based approach and in particular, hybrid approach, of mobile development serves the best for cross-platform development. Using the hybrid approach, a prototype application has also been developed and built into native application for different platforms. This has helped to get a better insight about the domain of cross-platform mobile development and its main advantage of the unification of the development and testing process. The results of this work indicate that even though cross platform tools are not fully matured they show great potential and reduce the cost associated in developing native mobile applications. Cross-platform mobile development is equally suitable for rapid development of high-fidelity prototypes of the mobile application as well as fairly complex, resource intensive mobile applications on its own right. As the upcoming future trends and the evolution of HTML5 continues to redefine the web, allowing its growth as a software platform, there remains great opportunities for cross-platform mobile development and hence provides an attractive alternative for the native mobile development.

The paper explores the rise of digital cartography and subsequently location-based services, using Foursquare as case study. In fact, the rise of smartphones and wireless technologies have made Internet ubiquitous and online services accessible from anywhere. In this context, I address the changes in carthography and how it has been remediated on digital media. I then analyze some of the developments brought by the Web 2.0 in relation to location-based services, especially user-generated content, social networking websites, tagging and geotagging. Foursquare's content is created by its users, therefore enabling them to map the(ir) world. Foursquare remediates maps and travel guides, and it uses game dynamics to foster usage and sharing. The concept of online identity-building will be also addressed in relation to the sharing of one's location and how these factors enhance performative aspects. I conclude by investigating how the geotagging tendency on social networking platforms could be as well seen as a tool for enhancing user-generated surveillance.

Precis som titeln avslöjar så handlar rapporten om att ta fram en AJAX-driven webbapplikation för sökning av sålda fastigheter. Gota Media AB har idag tillgång till en stor mängd lagrad information om sålda fastigheter i form av XML som kommer från Lantmäteriet. Enligt Gota Media så finns det ett stort behov av att skapa en sökbar webbapplikation till de nättidningar som de tillhandahåller som presenterar informationen för deras läsare. Syftet är att visa hur utvecklingen kan underlättas med hjälp av ramverket CodeIgniter och att ge svar på ett antal frågeställningar om hur webbapplikationen kan utvecklas för att uppfylla ett flertal krav från kunden. Genom att använda CodeIgniter tillsammans med ett flertal tekniker som Google Maps, CURL, AJAX och jQuery så kunde samtliga baskrav från kunden uppfyllas och ett bra resultat presenteras i form av en fullt fungerande webbapplikation. / Just as the title indicates this report is about making an AJAX driven web application for searching sold real estates. Today Gota Media AB has access to a large amount of information about sold real estates in XML format that comes from Lantmäteriet. According to Gota Media there is a great need to create a searchable web application for the online magazines that they provide to present the information to their readers. The aim of this report is to show how the development can be facilitated using the framework CodeIgniter and to provide answer to a number of question formulations on how the web application can be developed to meet several requirements from the customer. By way of using CodeIgniter with a majority group of techniques such as Google Maps, CURL, AJAX and jQuery all of the base requirements where implemented and a good result were presented in the form of a fully functional web application.

Context: Smartphone is gaining popularity due to its feasible mobility, computing capacity and efficient energy. Emails, text messaging, navigation and visualizing geo-spatial data through browsers are common features of smartphone. Display of geo-spatial data is collected in computing format and made publically available. Therefore the need of usability evaluation becomes important due to its increasing demand. Identifying usability requirements are important as conventional functional requirements in software engineering. Non-functional usability requirements are objectives and testable using measurable metrics. Objectives: Usability evaluation plays an important role in the interaction design process as well as identifying user needs and requirements. Comparative usability requirements are identified for the evaluation of a geographical information system (Google Maps) on personal computer (Laptop) and smartphone (iPhone). Methods: ISO 9241-11 guide on usability is used as an input model for identifying and specifying usability level of Google Maps on both personal computer and smartphone for intended output. Authors set target value for usability requirements of tasks and questionnaire on each device, such as acceptability level of tasks completion, rate of efficiency and participant’s agreement of each measure through ISO 9241-11 respectively. The usability test is conducted using Co-discovery technique on six pairs of graduate students. Interviews are conducted for validation of test results and questionnaires are distributed to get feedback from participants. Results: The non-functional usability requirements were tested and used five metrics measured on user performance and satisfaction. Through usability test, the acceptability level of tasks completion and rate of efficiency was matched on personal computer but did not match on iPhone. Through questionnaire, both the devices did not match participant’s agreement of each measure but only effectiveness matched on personal computer. Usability test, interview and questionnaire feedback are included in the results. Conclusions: The authors provided suggestions based on test results and identified usability issues for the improvement of Google Maps on personal computer and iPhone. / +46 (0) 76 55 44 637

This thesis deals with design and implementation of collecting data from GPS device. The proposed solution provides storage of the current GPS information in NMEA standard, where each sentence of this standard are stored in XML le. Record performs GPS device based on Windows Mobile 6.1 system, which communicates with built-in module and the data are stored in XML format. Thus, stored data is interpreted using Interpret GPS data, which uses Google Maps to display information about the track.

Denna rapport aterger arbetsprocessen kring att utvärdera geograskatjänster, och att utveckla karttillämpningar för nätverk av rikstäckande omfattning. Arbetet utfördes pa plats hos DGC, en datakommunikations-, tele- och nätoperatör som distribuerar kundförbindelser i hela Sverige där konsumenter ansluts till stamnätet. Uppgiften bestod av att utvärdera möjligheter till att slå upp koordinater för etablerade kundplatser, rita ut accessnätet i ett kartgränssnitt och ta fram ett eller flera stödverktyg för bland annat orderprocesser. Användningsfall utifrån önskemål, arkitekturmönster samt analys av yttre leverantörers tjänster för geocoding avgjorde hur det slutgiltiga systemet var utformat. Mjukvaran som utvecklades integrerades både i bentliga system och som ensamstående tillämpningar. En publicering/release genomfördes som avslutande moment i arbetet. I rapporten beskrivs hur kartläggning gjordes med hjälp av KML, hur geografisk data hanterades, utformningen av övervakningsverktyget som framtogs samt hur koordinater för adresser hämtades. / This thesis describes the process of analyzing and evaluating geographic services, and the development of map applications for nationwide networks. The project was performed at DGC, a datacommunications-, telephony- and networks operator which distributes customer access across Sweden where consumers are connected to the backbone network. In whole, the task consisted of an analysis regarding the possibilities of address-to-coordinate lookup for established customer sites, displaying the access network in a map interface and developing one or more tools, aimed at supporting order processes. Architecture patterns, use-cases construed from user requests and analysis of external provider services for geocoding determined the design of the solution. Software was partially integrated in existing systems, and partially distributed as stand-alone applications. The product was finalized with a release. Read further to get a description of the monitoring tool, network mapping with KML, dealing with geographic data, and also the process of fetching coordinates for addresses.