Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 51-53). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2009. / Adviser: Avelino Gonzalez. Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-288).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Industrial Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-223).

This inductive study investigates interactions within groups of visitors during a science center visit. Using simplified interaction analysis of recorded videos; I explore the group dynamics in terms of what determines who takes the lead while multigenerational groups interact with different types of experiments. From the observations, I suggest that the age of different group members and specific design aspects of the experiments play the most important roles in the emergence of leadership. Teenagers in a group tend to take the leadership and dominate during a group interaction, while young children like to explore freely leading the group from one experiment to the next without focusing on finishing them properly. As for the design aspects, if an experiment requires cognitive skills then adults and teenagers take the lead but if an experiment requires physical skills and provides immediate feedback then young children take the lead. I also suggest, instead of guiding the young children in the group, adults tend to become observers during engagements. This study will be useful for researchers and interaction designers who are focusing their work on the behavior of multigenerational groups in science center or museum settings.

published_or_final_version / Mechanical Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Mechanical Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

Gestural interfaces are user interfaces controlled by users’ gestures, such as taps, flicks and swipes, without the aid of a conventional pointing device, such as a mouse or a touchpad. The development of touch screen technology has resulted in an increasing number of inventive gestural interfaces. However, recent studies have shown that well-established interaction design principles are generally not followed, or even violated by gestural interfaces. As a result, severe usability issues start to surface: the absence of signifiers for operative gestures, the weakening of visual feedback, the inability to discover every possible actions in the interface, as well as the lack of consistency, all of which are undermining the user experience of these interfaces thus need to be addressed. Further analysis of existing gestural interfaces suggests that the sole dependence on gestural input makes interface design unnecessarily complicated, which in turn makes it challenging to establish a standard. Therefore, an approach to supplement gestures with user attention is proposed. By incorporating eye gaze as a new input modality into gestural interactions, this novel type of interfaces can interact with users in a more intelligent and natural way by collecting input that reflects the users’ interest and intention, which makes the interfaces attentive. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, a system was built to utilise eye-tracking techniques to detect visual attention of users and deliver input data to the applications on a mobile device. A paradigm for attentive gestural interfaces was introduced to provide insights into how such interfaces can be designed. A software prototype with attentive gestural interfaces was created according to the paradigm. It has been found in an experiment that the new type of interfaces helped users learn a new application faster, and modestly increased their accuracy when completing tasks. This provided evidence that attentive gestural interfaces can improve usability in terms of learnability and effectiveness This study is focused on interfaces of mobile devices whose major input mechanism is a touch screen, which are commonly seen and widely adopted. Despite the fact that eye-tracking capability is not generally available on these devices, this study demonstrates that it has great potential to facilitate interfaces that are both gestural and attentive, and it can enable new possibilities for future user interfaces. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

Mobile social software tools have great potential in transforming the way users communicate on the move, by augmenting their everyday environment with pertinent information from their online social networks. A fundamental aspect to the success of these tools is in developing an understanding of their emergent real-world use and also the aspirations of users; this thesis focuses on investigating one facet of this: the exchange of social media. To facilitate this investigation, three mobile social tools have been developed for use on locationaware smartphone handsets. The first is an exploratory social game, 'Gophers' that utilises task oriented gameplay, social agents and GSM cell positioning to create an engaging ecosystem in which users create and exchange geotagged social media. Supplementing this is a pair of social awareness and tagging services that integrate with a user's existing online social network; the 'ItchyFeet' service uses GPS positioning to allow the user and their social network peers to collaboratively build a landscape of socially important geotagged locations, which are used as indicators of a user's context on their Facebook profile; likewise 'MobiClouds' revisits this concept by exploring the novel concept of Bluetooth 'people tagging' to facilitate the creation of tags that are more indicative of users' social surroundings. The thesis reports on findings from formal trials of these technologies, using groups of volunteer social network users based around the city of Lincoln, UK, where the incorporation of daily diaries, interviews and automated logging precisely monitored application use. Through analysis of trial data, a guide for designers of future mobile social tools has been devised and the factors that typically influence users when creating tags are identified. The thesis makes a number of further contributions to the area. Firstly, it identifies the natural desire of users to update their status whilst mobile; a practice recently popularised by commercial 'check in' services. It also explores the overarching narratives that developed over time, which formed an integral part of the tagging process and augmented social media with a higher level meaning. Finally, it reveals how social media is affected by the tag positioning method selected and also by personal circumstances, such as the proximity of social peers.

Visualization is a powerful tool for data exploration and analysis. With data ever-increasing in quantity and becoming integrated into our daily lives, having effective visualizations is necessary. But how does one design an effective visualization? To answer this question we need to understand how humans perceive, process, and understand visualizations. Through visualization evaluation studies we can gain deeper insight into the basic perception and cognition theory of visualizations, both through domain-specific case studies as well as generalized laboratory experiments. / Engineering and Applied Sciences