Abstract In today’s business world, the delivery of superior information technology services has become an important deliverable for successful organisations. This study focuses on the end user perception of information technology service quality in manufacturing organisations. The study focuses on one manufacturing organisation, namely Nissan South Africa, a supplier of quality vehicles to South African customers. The main research problem describes the necessity of having a tool in place that can measure users’ perception of information technology service quality. The two subproblems describe the change of perception regarding information technology service quality when measured from a functional area or designation level perspective. The functional area represents the various departments within an organisation and the designation level, the hierarchical position of the employee within an organisation. A broad literature review is conducted and a theoretical foundation is developed and relevant service quality models are reviewed and adjusted in order to construct a model to measure information technology from a service quality perspective. The information has been collected by means of a questionnaire, which was distributed to approximately 1200 users. i i The overall perception of the information technology service quality, as experienced by the Nissan user base, is rated as above average customer satisfaction. No significant differences are identified between the demographic levels and the dimensions of the service quality model. Even though the model used in this study provides a good indication of the information technology service quality, it needs to be refined on a continuous basis in order to ensure that it is aligned with the dynamic nature of information technology.

This study examines the importance of relevance criteria in end-user evaluation of valuable or high relevant information.

This thesis is concerned with temporal factors from the perspective of the interactive designer/interface designer and usability as a construct for guiding design activity. The research reported herein examines the many factors which emerge when considering the name of interaction at the user interface. Temporal Aspects of Usability (TAU) is presented as a multivariate construct. It is neither a property that exists 'in the head alone' not is it an aspect of the system but rather an emergent property arising from task based interactions. From a theoretical perspective, it is argued that the inclusion of temporal considerations to the task model more fully specifies 'Usability' as a design construct. A model of TAU is evolved and validated utilizing situated interviews with designers. This resulted in an Enhanced model of TAU. A method for developing temporally informed task models, KAT-LITTER (Leveraging Interactions Through Effective Responses), provides temporal design heuristics as the confluence of, KAT (Knowledge Analysis of Task) a task analysis method, and the enhanced TAU model. As a method, KAT-LITTER is device independent, data centered, domain specific and necessarily independent of existing implementations. A process evaluation of KAT-LITTER showed that it influenced the design process in two significant ways: firstly, designers using KAT-LITTER spent more time reasoning about temporal issues than designers using KAT alone, and secondly these same designers considered a broader spectrum of temporal issues. The development of TAU, its accompanying method, KAT-LITTER, complete with a notational system for analysis represent a significant step forward.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "December, 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-77). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 35-37). Also available on the World Wide Web.

<p>Most software is now developed by professional programmers, and the millions of users of “shrink-wrapped” applications never meet the developers. The skills of professional programmers are obviously required in many software development projects. However, there are also reasons, ranging from practical and economical to philosophical and educational, why people without this background may want to develop their own applications or tailor applications to their own use.</p><p>The general purpose programming languages and development tools used by professional programmers are not suitable for people outside this profession. Instead, people outside this profession need more high-level tools that allow them to express solutions using domain and task specific terms. Despite the accumulated experience from such environments within the end-user programming community, creating a new application development environment for a domain or task remains a large development task, and can be too time-consuming and costly to be found worthwhile.</p><p>This thesis presents an approach to reducing the effort needed in developing extensible application composition environments for end users. We use the term “end user” in the same way as the end-user programming community, to denote a person who wants to develop an application or tailor an application to a specific use, without needing professional programming skills. The work in the thesis was initiated based on experience from development of proof-of-concept implementations of such environments in two European research projects. With this background, a set of user and developer roles are identified and organised into a value chain for development of such environments. Further, the approach combines the research areas of component-based software engineering and end-user programming to propose an overall architecture, component frameworks and tools suitable to support development of such environments. The validity of the results is established through partial prototyping of the frameworks and tools, combined with qualitative analyses of how these can be fully implemented and of their suitability for their intended purpose.</p><p>The main contributions of this thesis are:</p><p>• a value chain for development of application composition environments, with identification and description of tasks of each of the identified developer roles;</p><p>• an overall architecture for developing extensible application composition environments based on component frameworks;</p><p>• architecture of two component frameworks defining mechanisms and rules of behaviour for components ensuring extensibility at runtime and edit time;</p><p>• definition and description of a set of UML stereotypes for modelling domain frameworks based on the component frameworks, and a mapping to Java/JavaBeans allowing a code generator tool to produce part of the implementation;</p><p>• definition and description of tools which use the model of a domain framework as input and partially transform the work of creating composition environments and editors for domain objects from a programming task to a configuration task.</p>

The temporal behavior in applications involving visual data can be critical for the correctness of some programs. Forms/3 allows the user to specify temporal behaviors in an independent way, without introducing extraneous code in the original spreadsheet, whereas some other languages define new language devices specific to time. In this thesis, we present the implementation of a new user interface for temporal programming in Forms/3 and the results of two empirical studies. The results of the first study show that one of the models for temporal programing in Forms/3 is more suitable for end users than a traditional stream-based approach representative of the approach used by many other languages. The results of our second experiment show that the explicit information provided by the approach can help the users to judge the correctness of their spreadsheets. / Graduation date: 2002

Most software is now developed by professional programmers, and the millions of users of “shrink-wrapped” applications never meet the developers. The skills of professional programmers are obviously required in many software development projects. However, there are also reasons, ranging from practical and economical to philosophical and educational, why people without this background may want to develop their own applications or tailor applications to their own use. The general purpose programming languages and development tools used by professional programmers are not suitable for people outside this profession. Instead, people outside this profession need more high-level tools that allow them to express solutions using domain and task specific terms. Despite the accumulated experience from such environments within the end-user programming community, creating a new application development environment for a domain or task remains a large development task, and can be too time-consuming and costly to be found worthwhile. This thesis presents an approach to reducing the effort needed in developing extensible application composition environments for end users. We use the term “end user” in the same way as the end-user programming community, to denote a person who wants to develop an application or tailor an application to a specific use, without needing professional programming skills. The work in the thesis was initiated based on experience from development of proof-of-concept implementations of such environments in two European research projects. With this background, a set of user and developer roles are identified and organised into a value chain for development of such environments. Further, the approach combines the research areas of component-based software engineering and end-user programming to propose an overall architecture, component frameworks and tools suitable to support development of such environments. The validity of the results is established through partial prototyping of the frameworks and tools, combined with qualitative analyses of how these can be fully implemented and of their suitability for their intended purpose. The main contributions of this thesis are: • a value chain for development of application composition environments, with identification and description of tasks of each of the identified developer roles; • an overall architecture for developing extensible application composition environments based on component frameworks; • architecture of two component frameworks defining mechanisms and rules of behaviour for components ensuring extensibility at runtime and edit time; • definition and description of a set of UML stereotypes for modelling domain frameworks based on the component frameworks, and a mapping to Java/JavaBeans allowing a code generator tool to produce part of the implementation; • definition and description of tools which use the model of a domain framework as input and partially transform the work of creating composition environments and editors for domain objects from a programming task to a configuration task.

Although end-user support is an important aspect of EMR implementation, it is not known in what ways it affects EMR success. To investigate this topic, a case study of end-user support for an open-source EMR was conducted in an Ontario Family Health Organization using 7 semistructured interviews based on the DeLone and McLean Model of Information System Success. Second, documentation for an open-source and proprietary EMR was analyzed using Carroll’s Minimalism as a theoretical framework. Finally, themes from this thesis were compared and contrasted with a multiple case study that examined support for a commercial EMR in 4 Ontario family health teams. Main findings include the role of informal support, which was important for ensuring that data are documented consistently, which in turn enabled information retrieval for providing better preventive care services. Also, formal support was important for mitigating problems of system quality, which had potential implications for patient safety.

Although end-user support is an important aspect of EMR implementation, it is not known in what ways it affects EMR success. To investigate this topic, a case study of end-user support for an open-source EMR was conducted in an Ontario Family Health Organization using 7 semistructured interviews based on the DeLone and McLean Model of Information System Success. Second, documentation for an open-source and proprietary EMR was analyzed using Carroll’s Minimalism as a theoretical framework. Finally, themes from this thesis were compared and contrasted with a multiple case study that examined support for a commercial EMR in 4 Ontario family health teams. Main findings include the role of informal support, which was important for ensuring that data are documented consistently, which in turn enabled information retrieval for providing better preventive care services. Also, formal support was important for mitigating problems of system quality, which had potential implications for patient safety.