Due to the increasing prevalence of tablets in families, tablets have become a major platform for computer play for pre-school children. While children may potentially learn great deal from tablet play, it is at present unclear to what extent tablets support the wide variety of play activities that characterise their play and that form a necessary basis for children's development. This thesis presents the results of a heuristic evaluation, inspecting the play modes that presently are supported by children’s tablet games. The evaluation focused on the extent to which the mode of play was designed to correlate with children’s stage of development. Theoretical models representing the social and cognitive stages of play were used to examine all tablet games, examining how they support solitary play, parallel play, group play, functional play and dramatic play. The results show that for most of the investigated games, the age declaration correlates with their supported mode of play. More specifically, the investigated games supported solitary play, group play, functional play, constructive play and dramatic play in ways that were appropriate for their target age. However, none of the games supported parallel play, which is an important play form for children between 2 to 3 years old. Furthermore, very few games supported group play and constructive play. The conclusion is that while tablet game designers seem to understand and acknowledge the cognitive development of their target users, they pay less attention to the social modes of play corresponding to children's development stages.

Despite the knowledge on the interaction between humans and computers, too many IT systems show great deficits when it comes to usability. Every day we run into technology that makes our every day life and our work unnecessarily complex and difficult because of the IT systems that are not designed to support our tasks in a usable way. This thesis deals with different aspects of usability and the process of how to develop usable IT systems effectively. Primarily, the systems concerned are used in professional work, such as case handling systems in large government organisations. The main objective of this research is to understand which essential factors in the system development process that facilitate the development of usable IT systems. Another key subject is how human-computer interaction (HCI) knowledge can be integrated into systems development, in particular the integration of user-centred design (UCD) and agile software development. The research is based on a qualitative approach and on reflections from my own experience in development projects. It also includes exploratory studies and design cases. The attempts of bridging the gap between HCI and software engineering have not been notably successful in practice. To address some of these problems, there is a need for a more precise definition of user-centred design, which is proposed in the thesis. Also, the complicated reality of systems development is not considered enough by HCI researchers and practitioner. To reach better results, UCD has to be integrated as a natural part of the development process. In the thesis, I argue that the agile approach together with UCD can be a good starting point for this integration. The agile approach emphasises that responding to change in development is more important than strictly adhering to a plan. Also, it prioritises regular deliveries of working software over extensive models and documentation. However, from an HCI perspective, agile processes do not inherently provide the required support for user-centred design. Nevertheless, the basic values and specific methods of agile development may have the potential to work very well together with UCD. For instance, iterative development is fundamental to both user-centred design and agile development. Finally, the research addresses how iterative methods can be used to find design solutions that support the users to cope with the problems of overview and control in case handling work.

Computers have become an everyday encounter, not at least in work settings. These computers must support the user in order for her to work in an effective and efficient manner. The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has among other things been focusing on this issue, and there are numerous methods and activities that aim at helping developers to develop usable computer systems. However, the methods and activities must be used in practice in order to be beneficial, not only within research, thus the methods must make sense to the system developers, as well as the organization in which they shall be applied. Furthermore, the organization must change in order to incorporate these methods and activities, and this change must impact a larger part of the organization than just the IT-department. My research has revolved around the introduction of usability methods in public authorities, in particular user-centred systems design (UCSD). My methodology has been action research, which implies a close collaboration with practitioners. Some of the methods used to gather data have been interviews, participatory observations, research diaries and field studies. In this licentiate thesis I present my work up to date and the theories that have informed my understanding of organizations and organizational change. Furthermore I have been influenced by the sensemaking theory, which can be used in order to understand how people make sense of technology, methods and organizational change. With the help of these theories, I extend my results further than presented in the papers. The notion of organizational change when introducing usability issues has not achieved sufficient attention in the HCI-field. This thesis is a step towards an understanding of this issue. Furthermore, I have, with the results from my papers together with the theories presented shown that although formal documents can be used to promote change, it is not enough. Rather there is a need to further explore the interplay between formal aspects and the situated work, and how to enhance sensegiving in this sensemaking process.

A vast majority of the people in the western world use software systems on daily basis for achieving their goals. To be able to do that each person needs to communicate what he or she wants to do to the system and receive a response. This communication needs to be easy for the user, especially when the system is new to him or her. Otherwise, the user either quits using the system; it takes a very long time or gets very irritated. A software team that is making new software needs to evaluate the usability of the system and various methods have been introduced in the literature to do that. My research focus in this thesis is on usability evaluation. I study particularly, how usability evaluation methods can be compared, what data should be gathered in usability evaluation to gain knowledge on how the software affects users who are getting new software for their daily work and how useful this data is to the recipients. Two experiments are reported in this thesis where results from using three different usability evaluation methods are compared. The main result from these two studies is that the think-aloud evaluation method should be used, if the goal of the evaluation is to gather as realistic information as possible on usability problems that the users will have when using the system. Furthermore four case studies are described in the thesis, in which usability evaluation was done by using the think-aloud method in co-operation with real users in their real work situation. These studies give much richer information on the actual use of the systems involved. The findings from one of these case studies indicate that the results from user observation done on a system that users have not seen before or used only for few days are rather similar to the results from usability evaluation done when users have used the system for a longer period. So the common practice of doing user observation on a software system that the participants have not seen before and then interpreting that the results will be the same for actual usage of the system when users will use the system for their real tasks for shorter or longer period is adequate.

This thesis explores change and resistance to change of IT systems in organisations from a sociotechnical perspective. The work is drawing on empirical data gathered during two Action Research projects in Swedish Health Care: one regarding the deployment of electronic patient record systems within health care organisations, and the other regarding the deployment of eHealth services geared towards patients and citizens. Resistance to change is classified as an indicator of social inertia, and the concept of counter-implementation, comprising three general strategies to obstruct change initiatives, is used to highlight the political aspects of social inertia. For the analysis, the concept of social inertia is used as a point of departure towards inertia in sociotechnical systems by applying values and principles from sociotechnical systems research, most prominently the interdependence-characteristic. This extended concept is used to show and discuss how IT systems can either enforce change or be a source of inertia preventing change in organisations, and such planned or inadvertent effects of implementing IT systems are discussed as a significant source of user resistance.

The risk of being involved in a traffic car accident increases with age. Countermeasuressuch as advanced driver assistance system and retraining programs have both been waysof trying to reverse this trend. This thesis sought to merge the two countermeasures byexploring the idea of a system that gives feedback on elders' driving. Two separaterequirement assessments were carried out with the aims to address what, when and howfeedback should be communicated to elderly drivers. Additional aims were to assessrequirements that could affect the acceptance and trust in relation to the system. Firstly,a literature review assessed requirements based on preexisting knowledge in relevantdomains. Secondly, focus group interviews with driver instructors and elderly drivers wereperformed to assess requirements in relation to the specific system idea. The resultsreveal several requirements that could serve as input to the design of the system. Theresults and their possible implications are discussed.

Bröstcancer drabbar dagligen ungefär 20 kvinnor i Sverige. Det är därför viktigt att se till att processen som dessa kvinnor och deras anhöriga genomgår fungerar väl och att upplevelsen är så bra som den kan vara under dessa omständigheter. Föreliggande projekt har genom ett tjänstedesignperspektiv undersökt hur bröstcancerprocessen upplevs av patienter. Detta med hjälp av intervjuer av både patienter och administratör inom bröstcancerprocessen. Dessa ledde fram till s.k. patientresor som beskriver hur processens olika steg ser ut men även hur patienterna upplevde dessa. Det skapades även patientresor utifrån hur landstinget vill och försöker få processen att se ut i dagens läge. Utifrån dessa patientresor hölls en workshop där fyra deltagare ifrån företaget Usify arbetade mot olika typer av visualiseringar av denna process. Visualiseringarnas fokuspunkter var väntan och känslor, då det hade framkommit under intervjuerna att väntan var det som upplevdes mest frustrerande och som den värsta delen under bröstcancerprocessen.   De idéer som framkom ur workshopen omarbetades sedan i två steg för att filtrera ut de designförslagen som ansågs mest passande. Dessa presenterades sedan för de tidigare intervjuade patienterna för att se om dessa överensstämde med deras upplevelser och ge dem möjligheten att ge sina åsikter. Resultatet visade att visualiseringarna kan kategoriseras i tre olika kategorier: statistik, verktyg och upplevelse. Dessa kategorier uppfyller separata behov och på så vis går alla designförslagen att använda i olika skeenden för olika ändamål. Något som upptäcktes under projektet var just hur väntan för patienterna resulterade i ett fel i tjänsten, de löften som dessa fick hölls inte av vården.   Inom tjänstedesign används ofta olika typer av visualiseringar för att upptäcka fel av den här karaktären. Problemet med väntan i visualiseringar är att dessa ofta är aktivitetsbundna, de vill säga att enbart aktiviteter avbildas. Väntan ses inte som en aktivitet och inkluderas därför sällan. Detta skulle kunna vara det som ligger till grund för att väntan förbises, i och med detta bör väntan inkluderas i visualiseringar. Förståelsen av väntan, som i bröstcancerprocessen upplevs som viktig för patienten, är något som kan leda till empati för patienten och ett resultat av detta projekt är att detta kan väckas med hjälp av visualiseringar av väntan.

At the department of neuroscience at Uppsala University one of the research groups are working with motion vision. Motion vision is how seeing animal species process moving objects in their visual fields and how they experience self motion by generating an optic flow. This is important for animals of all sizes, everything from large mammals to insects. At the neuroscience department at Uppsala University they are using flies in their research as these are easier to work with than larger animals. Behavioral output as a result of visual stimuli is what is studied in the project I have been involved in as a part of this thesis. This is done by a track ball setup. The setup consists of a cup with a light plastic ball in it, from the bottom of the cup light airflow is added to reduce friction between the ball and the cup. A fly is tethered on top of the ball in such a way that when the fly is trying to walk the ball instead rotates accordingly. The ball rotation can then be measured by two sensors, both of which have been extracted from an optical mouse. There is no available, ready-made, software for reading the raw mouse data from the two sensors and from that input reconstructs the virtual movement path of the fly using. Therefore the purpose of this thesis has been to design and implement a user friendly and functional software system that fulfill this requirement. The design was done according to the principles of user-centered system design although with less formal documentation. This proved to generate a very good result. The end-users were included in every phase of the development process and it really was a huge advantage for the development process. Although all of the methods made available by the theories were not followed religiously, especially regarding documentation, that just displayed the power of agile methods were quality is more important than documentation. And the evaluation at the end of the project showed that the level of usability was high.

Hur publika displayer skall utformas och anpassas efter sin miljö på bästa sätt är ännu ett outforskat område. I takt med att miljöfrågor blivit än mer aktuella i dagens samhälle har det också etablerats ett behov av att förändra vårt beteende exempelvis i form av energieffektivisering. Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka hur en publik touchdisplay för elvisualisering skall utformas för att vara förståelig, intuitiv och säker från publik genans. En användarstudie i form av en utvärdering av en interaktiv touchdisplay kallad Urban Energy monterad i Göteborg har gjorts under ledning av Interactive Institute Swedish ICT. Touchdisplayens primära syfte är att uppmärksamma förbipasserande på stadens elförbrukning och uppmuntra till energimedvetenhet. I denna studie rekryterades 17 förbipasserande deltagare villiga att testa denna display med hjälp av två uppgifter och en enkät. Resultatet i form av skattningsvärden och observationsprotokoll genererade en tabell med problem och designlösningar. Utifrån användbarhetsstudien kunde slutsatser dras exempelvis angående visuellt interaktionsområde, feedback vid aktiva val, förståelse vid zoomning i tid, termhantering samt kontextens betydelse för publika touchdisplayer. Avslutningsvis ges en diskussion utifrån användbarhetsstudien kring väsentliga aspekter vid utformning av denna typ av display rörande energivisualisering, touchbaserade gränssnitt och social exponering framför publika installationer.

Denna studie har utvärderat användbarheten i systemet Minnesmark utifrån en målgrupp bestående av lärare i tjänst. För undersöka användbarhet och vad som påverkar hur individer upplever Minnesmark mättes även motivation och emotion och relaterades till systemet Minnesmarks användbarhet. I studien fann man ingen korrelation mellan emotion och upplevd användbarhet. Studien fann att individers inre motivation korrelerade positivt med upplevd användbarhet och påverkade individers inställning till användning. Motivation till användning kan därför ses som en grundsten när man undersöker användbarhet och bör tas i beräkning vid utveckling av nya system.