Icons are an important part of the user interface design. By representing objects and actions, they can quickly and efficiently convey information as well as make an interface more aesthetically pleasing for the user. Nowadays, the flat design is used as the industry standard while skeuomorphic icons fade away. In this study, we aimed to examine the value of both icon styles for a segment of users aged 7-9 years old. We tested the ease of use, recognition, and preference for skeuomorphic and flat design icons with twenty pupils from a Swedish primary school (N=20), using three experiments to measure these parameters. In the first experiment, participants completed simple tasks in an educational application prototype. The second experiment involved selecting icons with certain meaning from a grid. Lastly, the participants were presented with five pairs of icons and asked to choose which one they liked better. Although our results did not find a statistically significant difference in the ease of use or recognition for this age group, we found that the children had a strong preference towards the skeuomorphic design. Therefore, we suggest that skeuomorphic icons should be used in interfaces specifically designed for children, as they are more aesthetically pleasing for the users and do not affect the ease of use or recognition in a negative way.

This dissertation offers a wide-ranging examination of the half-length sacred figure over the door in medieval and early Renaissance Italian art. Drawing on a wealth of visual material that has attracted little attention among scholars, it argues that such images played a vital role in the religious lives of their beholders, transforming doorways into sites of devotional experience both within and beyond the church. Depicted incompletely, the holy body joined with the threshold below it to form a synthetic, composite image, one that invited the imaginative and corporeal participation of the viewer. This project employs various lenses to interpret the meaning and function of works about which scant written documentation comes down to us. In addition to considering scriptural metaphor and exegetical thought regarding the significance of doors, it explores the relationship of overdoor frescoes, mosaics, and reliefs to sacred icon panels, suggesting that the former might be recognized as wall icons, possessive of a heightened devotional appeal. It also uses overdoor images to illuminate broader spiritual and artistic concerns, including the nature of passage to the Christian afterlife, and the interaction between picture and frame, a topic central to Renaissance illusionism. Serving as an introduction to an important yet overlooked aspect of Italian visual culture, this text provides a conceptual framework for understanding a vast corpus of images that were essential to everyday piety, and that inflect our view of familiar art historical narratives.

This dissertation reveals significant aspects of the use and understanding of prints in seventeenth-century Sicily by exploring their function in the realm of sacred images. It centers on three of the most substantial printmaking ventures carried out in Palermo and Messina: Ottavio Gaetani's Icons of Mary (Palermo, 1663), Placido Samperi's Iconology of the Virgin (Messina, 1644), and Giordano Cascini's St. Rosalia (Palermo, 1651). All three books treat religious subjects and feature intaglio prints claiming to reproduce the sacred images – paintings, sculptures, and mosaics – that constitute a crucial element of each narrative. The project examines the production of these works and the subsequent textual and visual responses made on the island and at farther distances. The three chapters treat each book both as a collection of prints and as an exchange between text and image that renders those prints as evidence for the value and flexibility of images. The first chapter focuses on Gaetani’s collection of icons of the Virgin from through the island and the utilization of prints as effective surrogates for those miraculous images. In the second chapter, the lines between devotional and art historical value are questioned in Samperi’s illustrated collection of paintings and sculptures depicting the Virgin. The third chapter unfolds the strategies by which prints were presented as evidence of a cult’s material history and continued to inform St. Rosalia’s legitimacy. In doing so, the chapters reveal a range of possible understandings of the relationship between prints and their sources, as well as active manipulations of that relationship to a range of ends. The dissertation identifies a Sicilian approach to generating historical, political, and sacred narratives that was inventive in both depending on and incorporating the reproduction of images in print.

Informative sound design serves as an indicator to the player that something just happened, it can be urgently needing the players immediate attention, or serve as a feedback for a job well done. This paper studies how players interpret different informative sounds, how confident they are about their interpretation, and why they interpret the sound that way.

The aim of this study is to examine how the Graphical User Interface of League of Legends’ ability icons for champions evolved from 2009-2023. This was done by conductinga formal analysis of three different champions from the game League of Legends that haveundergone Visual and Gameplay Updates. The value of this case study was the understandingof the evolution of GUI in games over a long period of time. This may help game artists tounderstand how a coherent graphic design language is formed for a specific game and how itevolves over time to reflect design changes in games.

This thesis investigates the effect of incorporating various information visualisation techniques and non-speech sounds (i.e. auditory icons and earcons) in email browsing. This empirical work consisted of three experimental phases. The first experimental phase aimed at finding out the most usable visualisation techniques for presenting email information. This experiment involved the development of two experimental email visualisation approaches which were called LinearVis and MatrixVis. These approaches visualised email messages based on a dateline together with various types of email information such as the time and the senders. The findings of this experiment were used as a basis for the development of a further email visualisation approach which was called LinearVis II. This novel approach presented email data based on multi-coordinated views. The usability of messages retrieval in this approach was investigated and compared to a typical email client in the second experimental phase. Users were required to retrieve email messages in the two experiments with the provided relevant information such as the subject, status and priority. The third experimental phase aimed at exploring the usability of retrieving email messages by using other type of email data, particularly email threads. This experiment investigated the synergic use of graphical representations with non-speech sounds (Multimodal Metaphors), graphical representations and textual display to present email threads and to communicate contextual information about email threads. The findings of this empirical study demonstrated that there is a high potential for using information visualisation techniques and non-speech sounds (i.e. auditory icons and earcons) to improve the usability of email message retrieval. Furthermore, the thesis concludes with a set of empirically derived guidelines for the use of information visualisation techniques and non-speech sound to improve email browsing. / Taibah University in Medina and the Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia.

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Internet är för många en självklarhet för att kunna dela och ta del av information. För andra kan användandet av internet vara frustrerande och exkluderande. En sådan grupp är personer med olika former av synnedsättningar. För dessa personer finns vissa verktyg tillgängliga så som screen readers. Dessa underlättar för personer som är helt eller delvis blinda men kan upplevas som långsamma att använda för personer som till viss del klarar av att utan stöd av en screen reader. För att underlätta för dessa personer kan ljud användas i olika delar av användargränssnittet. En studie genomfördes för att undersöka hur en modifierad navigeringsmeny med ljud påverkar tiden det tar för användare att lösa navigeringsrelaterade uppgifter i en webbapplikation. Webbapplikationen använde sig av en simulering av synnedsättningen glaukom (grön starr). Resultaten visade inte på några statistiskt signifikanta skillnader varken gällande tiden det tog att lösa uppgifterna eller hur svår navigeringsmenyn upplevdes att använda. Utifrån detta dras slutsatsen att ljud inte påverkar hur lätt eller svårt det är för användare att lösa navigeringsrelaterade uppgifter.

This thesis investigates the assumed affordance of haptic technology in a wearable context. This work position itself within the internet of things where wearable and connected objects have established themselves as a sub-domain in the area. Some argued that haptic technologies provide certain benefits when creating interfaces for wearable technologies. However, their seams to be a lack of studies investigating the natural responses to haptic technology from a user perspective. To investigate the assumed benefits of haptic technology, we have developed a prototype of a wearable haptic system. This system consists of two jacket were each jacket contains 16 touch sensitive sensor and haptic actuators. All interactions with the sensor of one jacket are mirrored with a haptic feedback in the other jacket. The purpose of this system is to investigate the initial responses and accord of haptic technology by users. The reason for doing this is to develop guidelines for further investigation into haptic technology as a means for creating wearable objects with a non-screen based interfaces.The study concludes there to be some merit to the use of rhythm for creating haptic interaction patterns as well as haptic technology affording a simple and natural dialog in human computer interaction. Further, we also conclude that there is some merit to haptic affording faster learning curves in novel non-screen based interaction and are suitable for providing clear feedback. This study also shows limitations for haptic technology. Haptics seem less proficient for interfaces existing in a system as well as handling errors. This study also proved problematic because of the lack in clearly defined methods for investigating novel non-screen based interfaces.In chapter two of this thesis we first present a theoretical overview of wearable’s generally and how haptic technology position itself within wearable technology. In chapter three, we move on by introducing our methods of research. Based on our theory we then frame the technological outline of the project and practical implementation. We follow this by presenting the results in chapter five from our user testing conducted with the prototype. We end our thesis with a discussion in chapter six with presenting the principal findings together with our discussion and future developments in chapter seven.