Graduation date: 2006 / Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females’ willingness to adopt software features in end users’ programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users’ productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable to females. This thesis draws from our ongoing work with users to help inform our design of theory-based methods for encouraging effective feature usage by both genders. This design effort is the first to begin addressing the gender differences in the ways that people go about problem solving in end-user programming situations.

When computational systems become increasingly mobile and ubiquitous, digital information and the use of computational systems may increasingly be immersed into the physical and social world of objects, people and practices. However, the digital, physical and social materials that make up these hybrid spaces have different characteristics and are hard to understand for users. In addition, users are themselves part in constructing and re-constructing the hybrid spaces. The main question addressed in this thesis is whether making aspects of the digitally mediated hybrid spaces observable and accessible provides support to users. The observability may provide support for the specific task at hand or help in building an understanding for what the system does and how, an understanding that is needed to explain system output and to cope with service breakdowns. The fundament of the approach is to empower users of computational systems to actively make sense of the system themselves. Two prototype services are described, Socifer and MobiTip. Their common denominator was to make digitally mediated parts of the hybrid spaces observable to users. Without disqualifying other kinds of information, the work focussed on digitally mediated social trails of other users. Building on experience from the prototype work and an investigation into in seamful design, observability and awareness, I have investigated the effects of making a computational system’s social context observable to users in a way that - is separated from the service’s main functionality in the interface, allowing it to become peripheral and non-obtrusive; - uses simple models and little interpretation; - to some extent opens up the service to allow for user appropriation of both service content and functionality; and - is informative rather than proactive in order to empower the user rather than acting on the user’s behalf. By designing systems that fulfil these criteria I claim that the user will be supported in performing the task at hand, with or without the service, and that with service use, the user will become more and more aware of the possibilities and limitations of the underlying technology. In addition, the digitally mediated hybrid spaces where physical, social and digital contexts meet constitute application domains in themselves, domains that users may enjoy exploring.

Analogy is ubiquitous in human cognition. One of the important questions related to understanding the situated nature of analogy-making is how people retrieve source analogues via their interactions with external environments. This dissertation studies interactive analogical retrieval in the context of biologically inspired design (BID). BID involves creative use of analogies to biological systems to develop solutions for complex design problems (e.g., designing a device for acquiring water in desert environments based on the analogous fog-harvesting abilities of the Namibian Beetle). Finding the right biological analogues is one of the critical first steps in BID. Designers routinely search online in order to find their biological sources of inspiration. But this task of online bio-inspiration seeking represents an instance of interactive analogical retrieval that is extremely time consuming and challenging to accomplish. This dissertation focuses on understanding and supporting the task of online bio-inspiration seeking. Through a series of field studies, this dissertation uncovered the salient characteristics and challenges of online bio-inspiration seeking. An information-processing model of interactive analogical retrieval was developed in order to explain those challenges and to identify the underlying causes. A set of measures were put forth to ameliorate those challenges by targeting the identified causes. These measures were then implemented in an online information-seeking technology designed to specifically support the task of online bio-inspiration seeking. Finally, the validity of the proposed measures was investigated through a series of experimental studies and a deployment study. The trends are encouraging and suggest that the proposed measures has the potential to change the dynamics of online bio-inspiration seeking in favor of ameliorating the identified challenges of online bio-inspiration seeking.

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 userinterface 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.

Networks have expanded from the workplace and scientific labs into the home. Consequently, managing networks is no longer only a job for skilled network administrators, but has also become one for general home users, who have to deal with various home network management tasks such as network/device configuration, security management, and troubleshooting to name but a few. However, many home network users have difficulty managing these tasks due to the inherent complexity of the home network and the lack of management tools designed for non-skilled network users. This dissertation addresses the problem of network management for non-skilled network users by investigating a home network management tool with a new interaction model called Eden. Eden is an interactive home network management tool based on direct manipulation. It eliminates the need for users to see all the technical minutia of the network while still allowing users to perform management tasks with a simple drag-and-drop of visually represented networking devices and network settings. The user interface evaluation showed that Eden is intuitive and easy enough for general home users to use. The usability evaluation showed that Eden performed better overall than existing tools and that the majority of the study participants preferred Eden over the existing tools for future use. My contributions are twofold. First, I present what is to my knowledge the first fully direct manipulation system designed specifically for home network management. Secondly, my evaluation highlights a number of properties in my design--particularly in my conceptual model--that improve users' understandings of the network, and their ease with managing it.

Creating and encouraging longer-lasting relationship between designed products and its users is one of the goals that researchers in Sustainable HCI trying to achieve. The attachment framework is proposed by previous study that aims to provide knowledge and insight for designers to create longer-lasting relationship between products and users. As arguments have been made that there is a gap between Sustainable HCI theory and design practice. The attachment framework is one of the well established theoretical frameworks that need effective knowledge transformation from theory to practice. The aim of the study is to design, develop and evaluate a web-based interactive tool -- StickyDesignSpace, which helps product designers to embed the attachment framework into their design background research process. The study employs a research through design approach which focuses on the creation of innovative artifacts to solve practical problems. A web-based tool was designed and developed through the grounding, ideation and iteration process. And a high-fidelity prototype was evaluated by four design participants. The results indicated that the web tool StickyDesignSpace fostered the participated designers' attachment-related thinking by providing attachment design principles and generic design properties in a two dimensional space for organizing design background research data. Furthermore, the tool promoted the participated designers' attachment design knowledge transformation from background research process to design ideation process. According to participants' design objectives and background research goals, the tool also showed flexibility to be applied in other design process such as design idea formation and design evaluation process. The study shed light on the possibility of creating interactive tools to communicate sustainable HCI design frameworks to design practitioners, and offer the insights of how design practitioners integrate the attachment framework into their design thinking and process.

The ways people express their opinions and sentiments have radically changed in the past few years thanks to the advent of social networks, web communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information can be a key factor for marketers who want to create an image or identity in the minds of their customers for their product, brand, or organisation. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions, in fact, involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far. Hitherto, online information retrieval has been mainly based on algorithms relying on the textual representation of web-pages. Such algorithms are very good at retrieving texts, splitting them into parts, checking the spelling and counting their words. But when it comes to interpreting sentences and extracting meaningful information, their capabilities are known to be very limited. Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis, in particular, can be grouped into three main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified into categories based on the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of affective keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus. Early works aimed to classify entire documents as containing overall positive or negative polarity, or rating scores of reviews. Such systems were mainly based on supervised approaches relying on manually labelled samples, such as movie or product reviews where the opinionist’s overall positive or negative attitude was explicitly indicated. However, opinions and sentiments do not occur only at document level, nor they are limited to a single valence or target. Contrary or complementary attitudes toward the same topic or multiple topics can be present across the span of a document. In more recent works, text analysis granularity has been taken down to segment and sentence level, e.g., by using presence of opinion-bearing lexical items (single words or n-grams) to detect subjective sentences, or by exploiting association rule mining for a feature-based analysis of product reviews. These approaches, however, are still far from being able to infer the cognitive and affective information associated with natural language as they mainly rely on knowledge bases that are still too limited to efficiently process text at sentence level. In this thesis, common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques on two common sense knowledge bases was exploited to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data. The engine was tested on three different resources, namely a Twitter hashtag repository, a LiveJournal database and a PatientOpinion dataset, and its performance compared both with results obtained using standard sentiment analysis techniques and using different state-of-the-art knowledge bases such as Princeton’s WordNet, MIT’s ConceptNet and Microsoft’s Probase. Differently from most currently available opinion mining services, the developed engine does not base its analysis on a limited set of affect words and their co-occurrence frequencies, but rather on common sense concepts and the cognitive and affective valence conveyed by these. This allows the engine to be domain-independent and, hence, to be embedded in any opinion mining system for the development of intelligent applications in multiple fields such as Social Web, HCI and e-health. Looking ahead, the combined novel use of different knowledge bases and of common sense reasoning techniques for opinion mining proposed in this work, will, eventually, pave the way for development of more bio-inspired approaches to the design of natural language processing systems capable of handling knowledge, retrieving it when necessary, making analogies and learning from experience.

The developing stages of communication system for the physically disabled persons with speech and language impairments are presented in this master job. The system was developed in pursuance of international Eureka project E! 2707. The author tried to take notice of disables situation in society of 21’st century and tried to formulate the problems witch appearing then disables trying to use modern communication technologies (internet, e-mail, text typing). A review of compensation method for disables was done. Also the market of compensatory devices was reviewed. Only when analysis of users was done, compensatory methods for physically disabled person was review, and facilities was sum up, the model of communications system and the demo version of software for the physically disabled persons with speech and language impairments was created. The design software lets to type text, to use e-mail possibilities, to browse Internet. All these functions can be achieved using one or two ON-OFF buttons and virtual keyboard. The experiments shows that is possible to achieve text typing speed approximately 20 symbols per minute.

The objective and motivation behind this research is to provide applications with easy-to-use interfaces to communities of deaf and functionally illiterate users, which enables them to work without any human assistance. Although recent years have witnessed technological advancements, the availability of technology does not ensure accessibility to information and communication technologies (ICT). Extensive use of text from menus to document contents means that deaf or functionally illiterate can not access services implemented on most computer software. Consequently, most existing computer applications pose an accessibility barrier to those who are unable to read fluently. Online technologies intended for such groups should be developed in continuous partnership with primary users and include a thorough investigation into their limitations, requirements and usability barriers. In this research, I investigated existing tools in voice, web and other multimedia technologies to identify learning gaps and explored ways to enhance the information literacy for deaf and functionally illiterate users. I worked on the development of user-centered interfaces to increase the capabilities of deaf and low literacy users by enhancing lexical resources and by evaluating several multimedia interfaces for them. The interface of the platform-independent Italian Sign Language (LIS) Dictionary has been developed to enhance the lexical resources for deaf users. The Sign Language Dictionary accepts Italian lemmas as input and provides their representation in the Italian Sign Language as output. The Sign Language dictionary has 3082 signs as set of Avatar animations in which each sign is linked to a corresponding Italian lemma. I integrated the LIS lexical resources with MultiWordNet (MWN) database to form the first LIS MultiWordNet(LMWN). LMWN contains information about lexical relations between words, semantic relations between lexical concepts (synsets), correspondences between Italian and sign language lexical concepts and semantic fields (domains). The approach enhances the deaf users’ understanding of written Italian language and shows that a relatively small set of lexicon can cover a significant portion of MWN. Integration of LIS signs with MWN made it useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing. The rule-based translation process from written Italian text to LIS has been transformed into service-oriented system. The translation process is composed of various modules including parser, semantic interpreter, generator, and spatial allocation planner. This translation procedure has been implemented in the Java Application Building Center (jABC), which is a framework for extreme model driven design (XMDD). The XMDD approach focuses on bringing software development closer to conceptual design, so that the functionality of a software solution could be understood by someone who is unfamiliar with programming concepts. The transformation addresses the heterogeneity challenge and enhances the re-usability of the system. For enhancing the e-participation of functionally illiterate users, two detailed studies were conducted in the Republic of Rwanda. In the first study, the traditional (textual) interface was compared with the virtual character-based interactive interface. The study helped to identify usability barriers and users evaluated these interfaces according to three fundamental areas of usability, i.e. effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. In another study, we developed four different interfaces to analyze the usability and effects of online assistance (consistent help) for functionally illiterate users and compared different help modes including textual, vocal and virtual character on the performance of semi-literate users. In our newly designed interfaces the instructions were automatically translated in Swahili language. All the interfaces were evaluated on the basis of task accomplishment, time consumption, System Usability Scale (SUS) rating and number of times the help was acquired. The results show that the performance of semi-literate users improved significantly when using the online assistance. The dissertation thus introduces a new development approach in which virtual characters are used as additional support for barely literate or naturally challenged users. Such components enhanced the application utility by offering a variety of services like translating contents in local language, providing additional vocal information, and performing automatic translation from text to sign language. Obviously, there is no such thing as one design solution that fits for all in the underlying domain. Context sensitivity, literacy and mental abilities are key factors on which I concentrated and the results emphasize that computer interfaces must be based on a thoughtful definition of target groups, purposes and objectives. / Das Ziel und die Motivation hinter dieser Forschungsarbeit ist es, Anwendungen mit benutzerfreundlichen Schnittstellen für Gehörlose und Analphabeten bereitzustellen, welche es ihnen ermöglichen ohne jede menschliche Unterstützung zu arbeiten. Obwohl es in den letzten Jahren technologische Fortschritte gab, garantiert allein die Verfügbarkeit von Technik nicht automatisch die Zugänglichkeit zu Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IKT). Umfangreiche Verwendung von Texten in Menüs bis hin zu Dokumenten führen dazu, dass Gehörlose und funktionale Analphabeten auf diese Dienste, die auf Computersystemen existieren, nicht zugreifen können. Folglich stellen die meisten bestehenden EDV-Anwendungen für diejenigen eine Hürde dar, die nicht fließend lesen können. Onlinetechnologien für solche Art von Gruppen sollten in kontinuierlichem Austausch mit den Hauptnutzern entwickelt werden und gründliche Untersuchung ihrer Einschränkungen, Anforderungen und Nutzungsbarrieren beinhalten. In dieser Forschungsarbeit untersuche ich vorhandene Tools im Bereich von Sprach-, Web- und anderen Multimedia-Technologien, um Lernlücken zu identifizieren und Wege zu erforschen, welche die Informationsalphabetisierung für Gehörlose und Analphabeten erweitert. Ich arbeitete an der Entwicklung einer nutzerzentrierten Schnittstelle, um die Fähigkeiten von Gehörlosen und Nutzern mit schlechter Alphabetisierung durch Verbesserung der lexikalischen Ressourcen und durch Auswertung mehrerer Multimediaschnittstellen zu erhöhen. Die Schnittstelle des plattformunabhängigen, italienischen Gebärdensprachen (LIS) Wörterbuches wurde entwickelt, um die lexikalischen Quellen für gehörlose Anwender zu verbessern. Ich integriere die LIS-lexikalischen Ressourcen mit der MultiWordNet (MWN)-Datenbank, um das erste LIS MultiWordNet (LMWN) zu bilden. LMWN enthält Informationen über lexikalische Beziehungen zwischen Wörtern, semantische Beziehungen zwischen lexikalischen Konzepten (Synsets), Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen italienischer und Gebärdensprache-lexikalischen Konzepten und semantischen Feldern (Domänen). Der Ansatz erhöht das Verständnis der tauben Nutzer geschriebene, italienischen Sprache zu verstehen und zeigt, dass ein relativ kleiner Satz an Lexika den wesentlichen Teil der MWN abdecken kann. Die Integration von LIS-Zeichen mit MWN machte es zu einem nützlichen Werkzeug für Linguistik und Sprachverarbeitung. Der regelbasierte Übersetzungsprozess von geschriebenem, italienischem Text zu LIS wurde in ein Service-orientiertes System überführt. Der Übersetzungsprozess besteht aus verschiedenen Modulen, einschließlich einem Parser, einem semantischen Interpreter, einem Generator und einem räumlichen Zuordnungs-Planer. Diese Übersetzungsprozedur wurde im Java Application Building Center (jABC) implementiert, welches ein Framework für das eXtrem Model Driven Design (XMDD) ist. Der XMDD-Ansatz konzentriert sich darauf die Softwareentwicklung näher zum konzeptionellen Design zu bringen, sodass die Funktionalität einer Softwarelösung von jemandem verstanden werden kann, der mit Programmierkonzepten unvertraut ist. Die Transformation richtet sich an die heterogene Herausforderung und verbessert die Wiederverwendbarkeit des Systems. Zur Verbesserung der E-Partizipation der funktionalen Analphabeten wurden zwei detaillierte Studien in der Republik Ruanda durchgeführt. In der ersten Studie wurde die traditionelle, textuelle Schnittstelle mit der virtuellen, charakterbasierten, interaktiven Schnittstelle verglichen. Diese Studie hat dazu beigetragen Barrieren der Benutzerfreundlichkeit zu identifizieren. Anwender evaluierten die Schnittstellen bezüglich drei grundlegender Bereiche der Benutzerfreundlichkeit: Effektivität, Effizienz und Zufriedenstellung bei der Problemlösung. In einer anderen Studie entwickelten wir vier verschiedene Schnittstellen, um die Benutzerfreundlichkeit und die Effekte der Online-Hilfe (konsequente Hilfe) für funktionale Analphabeten zu analysieren und verglichen verschiedene Hilfsmodi (einschließlich zusätzlicher Textinformationen, Audio-Unterstützung und mit Hilfe eines virtuellen Charakters) bezüglich der Verbesserung der Leistungsfähigkeit von teilweisen Analphabeten, um ihre Zielstellung zu erreichen. In unseren neu gestalteten Schnittstellen wurden Anweisungen automatisch in die Swahili Sprache übersetzt. Alle Schnittstellen wurden auf der Grundlage der Aufgabenbewältigung, des Zeitaufwands, der System Usability Scale (SUS) Rate und der Anzahl der Hilfegesuche bewertet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Leistungsfähigkeit der teilweisen Analphabeten bei Nutzung der Online-Hilfe signifikant verbessert wurde. Diese Dissertation stellt somit einen neuen Entwicklungsansatz dar, bei welchem virtuelle Charaktere als zusätzliche Unterstützung genutzt werden, um Nutzer, die kaum lesen können oder sonstig eingeschränkt sind, zu unterstützen. Solche Komponenten erweitern die Anwendungsnutzbarkeit indem sie eine Vielzahl von Diensten wie das Übersetzen von Inhalten in eine Landessprache, das Bereitstellen von zusätzlichen akustisch, gesprochenen Informationen und die Durchführung einer automatischen Übersetzung von Text in Gebärdensprache bereitstellen. Offensichtlich gibt ist keine One Design-Lösung, die für alle zugrundeliegenden Domänen passt. Kontextsensitivität, Alphabetisierung und geistigen Fähigkeiten sind Schlüsselfaktoren, auf welche ich mich konzentriere. Die Ergebnisse unterstreichen, dass Computerschnittstellen auf einer exakten Definition der Zielgruppen, dem Zweck und den Zielen basieren müssen.

This thesis presents results from a qualitative case study on environmentally minded technology designers, and provides an account of how these designers think, differ and behave. Through semi-structured interviews, we interview designers at a large mobile phone manufacturer. The responses of environmentally minded designers are contrasted with traditional designers. The findings lead to a discussion on the differing roles, tradeoffs and standards between these two groups of designers.