Tämä tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää, miten yritykset hyödyntävät ja käyttävät sosiaalista mediaa ja millaiseen tarkoitukseen. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on myös evaluoida mahdollisia ohjeita, joita yritykset antavat työntekijöilleen sosiaalisen median hallinnointiin. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli myös löytää erilaisia esimerkkejä ja tietoa markkinoinnista sosiaalista mediaa hyödyntäen. Tutkimus on toteutettu kvalitatiivista tutkimusmenetelmää hyödyntäen. Eli kyseessä on laadullinen tutkimus. Teoriassa tutkimusta lähestytään kirjallisuuteen perehtyen. Tarkoituksena on löytää artikkeleita, joissa on käsitelty kyseistä aihetta tai sen osa-alueita. Kirjallisuudesta huomattiin, että kyseistä aihetta oli tutkittu todella paljon kokonaisuutena. Tutkimus ei ole rajoittunut mihinkään tiettyihin yrityksiin, kuten kotimaisiin. Tarkoituksena oli löytää tietoa sosiaalisen median käytöstä yleisesti ottaen. Sosiaalinen media ja sen käyttö yrityksissä on kasvanut huimasti viimeisen 10 vuoden aikana. Sosiaalista mediaa suositaan koko ajan enemmän. Yritykset hyödyntävät yhä enemmän sosiaalista mediaa asiakas hankintoihin ja tavaramerkin markkinoinnissa. Sosiaalista mediaa suosii yleensä pienemmät tai keskikokoiset yritykset. Syynä siihen on resurssien ja raha määrän ero suuriin yrityksiin verrattuna.

Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena on luoda käytettävyysraportti Purot.net-wikin käytettävyydestä ja selvittää katseenseurannan merkitystä käytettävyystestauksessa. Purot.net-wikin käytettävyyttä ja katseenseurannan merkitystä arvioidaan käytettävyystestauksesta saadun aineiston ja kokemuksien perusteella. Tutkimuksen tuloksena luon Purot.net-wikin kehittäjille käytettävyysraportin ja arvioin katseenseurannan tuomia käytännön haasteita ja hyötyjä, sekä tarjoan ohjeita kokemuksieni perusteella katseenseurantatestien järjestäjille. Toivon käytettävyysraportin auttavan Purot.net-wikin kehittäjiä saavuttamaan korkeamman käytettävyyden omaavan tuotteen. Tutkimus osoitti, että katseenseuranta tuo helpotuksia käyttäjätestauksesta saadun tiedon arviointiin. Katseenseurantalaitteiston luomat katseen liikeradat videokaappauksen päällä helpottavat huomattavasti tallenteiden analysointia. Lisäksi katseenseurannan avulla luodut lämpökartat, liikeradat ja statistiikka auttavat ongelmien ja kiintopisteiden löytämisessä. Jotta kaikki katseenseurannan hyödyt saataisiin käyttöön ja hyödynnettyä, testitilanteen, käyttötapauksien ja laitteiston käytön suunnittelu vaatii huomattavasti enemmän aikaa, kuin käytettävyystestauksen järjestäminen ilman katseenseurantalaitteistoa. Tutkimus on samoilla linjoilla kirjallisuuskatsauksen kanssa katseenseurannan tuomasta suuresta datan määrästä, sekä sen arvioinnin ja vertailun haastavuudesta. Tutkimus kuitenkin osoitti kirjallisuuskatsauksen vastaisesti, että katseenseurantalaitteet ovat nykyään helpommin saatavilla tavalliselle kuluttajalle, sekä niiden kustannukset ovat parhaimmillaan hyvinkin alhaiset. Kattavammat tuotteet maksavat huomattavasti enemmän edelleen ja ovat puhtaasti suunniteltu akateemisen tutkimuksen tarkoituksiin. Tutkimuksessa myös huomattiin, että kirjallisuudessa ei ole tutkittu paljon wikin käytettävyyttä ja sen käytettävyyteen vaikuttavia tekijöitä.

With the improvement of ICT, the e-book offers a new opportunity to help improve the children’s reading. There are arguments about choosing e-books or printed books for children, but the e-book provides some new features that printed do not have, thus to find out what is the good factors of the e-books will help the development of the e-books. I have discussed the relationship between children and reading, and furthermore, what is a good design of e-book is discussed, this aims to find the ways to design e-books that will encourage children to read and help improve the engagement between children and e-books. For finding the good factors of the e-book design, interviews with children and their parents were made. Each family is treated as an individual case. I have found out what are the most common opinions in these 11 families and what are differences between the preferences of parents (including grandparents) and children. The different tastes from younger children to the older children is also included in the findings. Due to the amount of the interviewed in the study, including all the data in a single case seems to get a lot of mass, thus the cross-case synthesis helps to get a clear result. This study reveals that not all the children have accessed to e-books, and the preferred feature between parents and children are not all different. The preferred interfaces of e-books from parents to children are quite the same, most of the interviewee choose the interface which is colourful, cartoon and with animations. However, one of the mothers also mentioned that animation is an argued feature that may limit the children’s imagination. What’s more, all of the parents mentioned that the screen of the e-books need to be improved, but this is also considered that the informing to the parents of the screen is needed. Moreover, both parents and children are interested in the read-aloud feature of the e-books, apart from this, parents are more focusing on the interactive features, animations while children prefer gamifications.

The ethical issues that researchers encounter in experiment are usually debated upon. Ethical issues are scrutinized and reported in the law, medicine and psychology areas of study. Independent boards are commonly employed to vet the ethical aspect of experiments in the above mentioned areas of study. However, in the software engineering area of research, it is not entirely like that as researchers just follow the guidelines of their respective institutions. Ethical principles of right and wrong, codes of conducts, codes of rules, and external standards that govern an organization, must be considered and followed during the research. Experiments must be designed on utmost ethical rules and values. These ethical rules must be followed and reported, as researchers conduct their experiments. Ethics in research is inevitable however; its application in software engineering might not be direct. Four fundamental principles of research ethics being informed consent, scientific value, beneficence, and confidentiality are the major pointers of ethical issues in SE experiment. The focus of this thesis was to find out the ethically related issues reported by researchers while they conducted their research on students. This study used a systematic mapping review method, to gather and analyse reported experiments that were conducted with students as subjects, by classifying and identifying ethical issues that are reported in software engineering experiment over the past few years. The studies reviewed were published within the years 2000 and 2016, and from 12 journals and conference proceedings. The search strategy identified 2512 papers, of which 70 were identified as relevant or primary studies. The findings revealed that researchers in SE research pay minimal attention to issues of ethics. No reporting guidelines developed over the years suggesting that researchers are obligated to report issues of ethics. However, one aspect seems to be considered most in the reports; beneficence, where researchers seek to motivate the students to participate in their study. In a nutshell, experiment in SE field of study does not have higher risk on its human subjects as compared to other fields of study. Ethical issues are hardly debated or never mentioned in the SE experiment publication. In the near future, experiment reporting guidelines, must be developed in order to promote or suggest to researcher to give details about ethical issues, especially when it involves human (students) subjects.

Tämä kandidaatintutkielma perehtyi vakuuttavaan teknologiaan Apple Watch -älykellossa. Tutkielman ensimmäisessä osassa esiteltiin kirjallisuuskatsauksen kautta älykellojen taustaa ja tutkittava laite. Sen jälkeen luotiin katsaus vakuuttavan teknologian perusideaan ja esiteltiin Persuasive Systems Design -malli vakuuttavan teknologian sovellusten analysointiin. Toisessa osiossa suoritettiin analyysi Apple Watchin vakuuttavasta teknologiasta käyttäen PSD-mallia. Kellosta löytyi vakuuttavia ominaisuuksia aktiivisuuden kannustamiseen, käyttäjän tehtävien tuen ja vuorovaikutteisen tuen korostuessa. Pohdinnassa mietittiin älykellojen mahdollisuuksia vakuuttavina laitteina. Tutkielman motivaationa oli älykellojen yleistyminen viime vuosina, sekä niiden henkilökohtaisuus mobiililaitteina. Tutkimusmetodina toimi kirjallisuuskatsaus yhdistettynä kirjallisuuteen perustuvaan analyysiin.

As video games have become have become more popular and as popular as music and movies, the need for more video game developers have increased also. But even though there are more people developing video games, there still exists usability issues in video games like also in general computer software. The purpose of the thesis is to find out how usability issues can be seen in video games. To find out the answer for this research question, research was done as literature review. There already existed a fair amount of literature relating to usability issues of video games. Also the usability issues of computer software were discussed a little bit as video games are similar to computer software. The research on existing literature provided usability issues to be discussed and to find out the answer.

Business Intelligence or BI can be defined as an umbrella term describing a combination of applications, infrastructures, tools, processes, best practises and methods to gather, prepare, provide and analyse data to support decision making activities in organizations. BI is noted to have ties to preceding research on similar systems, known as MIS, DSS and EIS-systems. BI is noted to have been born after requirement to answer the challenges of data gathering and turning the data into knowledge for decision-making. Early BI-development can be seen to have be affected by the development and lowering in costs of technologies in data gathering, analysis, interactivity and personal computing, as well as the introduction of spreadsheet programs in 1980s. Today, BI is noted to be the top investment-area for IT-organizations. Because of multidimensional nature and several viewpoints, it can be challenging to gain an overall view of the area. It is also noted, that a standardized framework of the different BI-related layers or aspects does not exist. The goal of this thesis is to identify which aspects can be noted central for BI, how the area has developed over time, how technological innovation has affected BI and which industries or aspects are noticed to have influenced the development most. Systematic Mapping Study is used as the main research methodology in this thesis, together with PRISMA, which is used for a more scrutinized review during the selection process. The methods were used to review a large number of studies, gathered from academic databases using a formalized search string. The process provided with two sets of primary studies with total number of 2020 for studying the trends and central aspects in the area of BI and 1414 for studying the industries. From the results, BI is noted to have gained popularity early 2000s, peaking in 2012–2013, while fading coming to 2016. The results show the central aspects for BI from high-level to be: strategic aspects, data warehousing methods and BI-infrastructure. From more detail, the central aspects are noted to be strategic aspects, data warehousing, BI-design aspects, real-time functionalities, visualization features, decision support, collaborative support, reporting and cloud infrastructure. The major industries influencing BI-development and research is noted to be finance and banking, healthcare, supply chain, e-commerce, manufacturing and education. Today, most notable interest is noticed in Big Data. In future, Big Data, self-service, collaboration features, visualization, user aspects and mobility are predicted as some of the rising topics. BI is noted shifting more into non-profit organizations and extending the use-context. Major changes in the area are seen to be caused by IT-base innovation, while most changes in BI may be seen to be caused by services-innovation where new industries and methods are found to utilize BI-technology. BI is noted as a very strategic entity, consisting of data warehousing methods, different decision support methods and technologies. In the future, BI-technology will be spread into more widespread use and the lessons learnt might be valuable for the predicted revolution caused by Big Data analytics and extended data collection and analysis.

The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of how children view learning games and learning applications and games that teach programming. It is rare to find studies that have first-hand experience with children’s views on the learning of programming through learning apps and games. This study looks to fill that gap by asking children directly through a questionnaire given to a class in Finland. Overall, the study found that the students in this study found programming favorable. Most students enjoyed programming and liked programming for a number of reasons including: to do something different, they like electronics, that there isn’t a lot of rules, can be fun, express creativity, can see what you have done on the computer, can use what you have done, like the feelings of writing something that works, and the challenge it presents. Some of the students wrote they disliked programming because it can be boring, can be too hard, and can be confusing. Many of the students liked learning apps because they offer a different way of learning than what they usually do. They seem to like the freedom that comes from using learning apps and which differs from learning from the teacher. They liked using the devices that learning apps were on. Some of the students also said that learning apps can be fun and entertaining. Some of the things the students didn’t like about learning apps was technical issues, such as apps that crash a lot. That the learning apps sometimes don’t help. That the learning apps can be confusing. That the apps can have too many ads. Some of the students also stated that they can be boring. And some said that they can be too easy. Some of the students’ suggestions on improving in learning apps were: make them harder, to use them more, make them more fun, have less ads, learn actual code syntax, and to include language options.

Background: Neck problems, tiredness, depression and other mental health problems are nowadays very common. Many people have difficulties addressing their health problems because they don’t have the motivation or ability to change their attitudes and behaviours. It would be important to offer them help and tools so that they would be able to take care of themselves better and improve their well-being. All sorts of technical equipment such as PC’s, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones have become part of people’s everyday life. There is a lot of potential to use these different technical devices as a tool for providing personal wellbeing programs and applications. These include games, social media and personal health applications. The Aim of the Study: The aim of this thesis is to study if tailoring a general mobile mental wellness training application for stress management is possible and how it could be done to meet the needs of people who suffer from certain kinds of complaints. It was proposed that if the mobile mental wellness training program would be tailored to offer help for a certain complaint that a person suffers, it would improve user experience and person’s wellbeing. Methods: This research was an empirical case study. Theoretical part of this study provides a review of articles and other relevant literature. Empirical part of this study consisted of a large questionnaire conducted for the students and employees of the University of Oulu (N=756) as well as user studies conducted for a smaller number of people (N=30) selected based on certain criteria. The user study participants were divided into three different groups according to their complaints: tiredness, depression, and neck problems group. These three complaints were top three according to the results of the background questionnaire. The user study consisted of a user experience study made in laboratory settings as well as a field trial period where the participants used the application independently and their actions were logged. The users were guided to use exercises that were expected to help them with their complaints. User tests were video recorded to prevent data loss. Findings: The results showed that there weren’t big differences in user experience of the application between different complaint groups. User experience of the application was seen quite positive, but some issues made usage unpleasant, e.g. the application was mentioned being boring. Use of the application did not have an effect on people’s wellbeing. However the two-week long test period did not seem to be long enough. On the other hand, results also showed that people usually suffer from many different complaints at the same time so it is not easy to set people under certain complaint group and tailor health application very specifically for one complaint at time.

Information communication technology (ICT) has opened a door for different sectors to benefit from ICT by using its potential tools. Health industry is one sector benefiting from ICT solutions for improving service quality and productivity. By using ICT as a tool, this study raised one of the major social and health concern, depression also known as depressive disorder. The aim of this study was to find the potential ICT based solution for an early detection and monitoring of depression. Individuals go through different phases of life for instance psychological trauma, sadness, sorrow, grief, unemployment and so on. The different life aspects lead individuals to depression and majority of us are not all fully aware of it. Time to time everyone feels down and gets the blues in reaction to frustration or a disturbing event which lasts a day or two. On the other hand, can last a lifetime and the illness is much more disabling. Blues has never been a cause for suicide but depression is. The society we live in and the social norms we follow can have an impact to some sort of depression. It is not intentional but unnoticed small acts in our daily life routine can contribute to depression too. To treat depression many practice therapy and/or medical treatments. Depending on the stage of depression some get cured, some still suffer, and some commit suicide. In addition to that, depression is risk factor for coronary artery disease, cardiovascular disease and stroke. It has been proved and witnessed that depressed individuals respond better to treatment at early stage of depression. By applying design science research (DSR) methodology as an approach, the ultimate goal of this study was to find optimal ICT based solution that can be used to monitor depression at early stage. Literature review was used to gather earlier knowledge on wearable technology and depression itself. While conducting the research, senior citizens are on focus as they are more prone to depression than younger generations. Criteria-based self-assessment questionnaire and interview are the methods used by physicians to diagnose depression and its stage. This trend is susceptible to misinterpretation and inaccuracy as the diagnosis often depends on patient’s subjective understanding of depression. Based on earlier knowledge, depression types and symptoms are listed on this study. From the major symptoms of depression; loss of interest in activity, stress and insomnia can be monitored using wrist worn device. As an artefact this thesis sets requirements for wearable device that can monitor heart rate, individual’s activity and sleep patterns. The collected data from the wearable device are physical and physiological data set, which can further be used as an additional input by physicians to determine the existence of depression and its current stage. This data input also helps in reducing the risk of misinterpreting diagnosis.