New social networking and social web tools are becoming available and are easing the process of customizing online social environments. With these developments in technology, core design efforts are being extended beyond usability for individual users and beginning to include notions of sociability for the engagement of communities of users. This thesis is an investigation of these developments. It is guided by the principal research question: how do you design for social engagement in an online social environment intended to facilitate interaction in a community of users? To address this question, this thesis presents a domain-community model developed from the communities of practice concept and the Work Domain Analysis model used in Cognitive Work Analysis. The domain-community model provides a basis for the design a composition of web components for an online social environment that will addresses issues of social engagement and domain effectiveness. In a case study, the domain-community model was used as a basis for the redesign of a social networking portal used by an international development leadership community called UCP-SARnet. A social network analysis of core members of UCP-SARnet was conducted before and after the portal was redesigned. From the social network analysis, it was concluded that the structure of UCP-SARnet was positively affected by the redesign: core group members reported they knew one another significantly more after the redesign of the website than before the redesign. User experience measures of the UCP-SARnet portal, website usage data, and a tally of website communication activity also changed significantly with the redesign of the website. This provided more evidence that a design informed by Cognitive Work Analysis and communities of practice produced a measurable effect on the structure of the UCP-SARnet online community. As such, this model can provide a basis for designers of online communities to more systematically account for social phenomena in relation to collective efforts in a given work domain. Furthermore, it is expected the effectiveness of the model can be taken forward with future work by refining the domain-community model, developing techniques to translate the model into interface concepts, and building practices for community-based research and design.

This thesis analyzes the relationship between users&rsquo / characteristics and users&rsquo / interface preferences. An online survey is developed for this study. This survey composed of two types of questions: (1) users&rsquo / personal information such as age, gender, country, cognitive structure, and also computer experience and (2) user interface elements. More than 2,500 participants from 120 different countries throughout the world completed our survey. Results were analyzed using cross tables. Our findings show that there is a relationship between users&rsquo / characteristics and users&rsquo / interface preferences. In the presence of this relationship, an artificial neural network model is developed for the estimation of the interface preferences based on the user characteristics.

People began to interact with their own environment since their birth. Their main organs to sense their surroundings are their hands, and this is the most natural way of interaction in human-human interactions. The goal of this dissertation is to enable users to employ their hands in interaction with computers similar to human-human interaction. Using hands in the computer interaction increases both the naturalness of computer usage and the speed of interaction. One way of accomplishing this goal is to utilize computer vision methods to develop hand interfaces. In this study, a regular, low-cost camera is used for image acquisition, and the images from camera are processed by our novel vision system to detect user intention. The contributions are (i) a method for interacting with a screen without touching in a distributed computer system is proposed, (ii) a benchmark of four hand shape representation methods is performed using a comprehensive hand shape video database, and (iii) a vison-based hand interface is designed for an application that queries a video database system, and its usability and performances are also assessed by a group of test users to determine its suitability for the application.

As access to information changes with increased use of technology, privacy becomes an increasingly prominent issue among technology users. Privacy concerns should be taken seriously because they influence system adoption, the way a system is used, and may even lead to system disuse. Threats to privacy are not only due to traditional security and privacy issues; human factors issues such as unintentional disclosure of information also influence the preservation of privacy in technology systems. A dual pronged approach was used to examine privacy. First, a broad investigation of younger and older adults' privacy behaviors was conducted. The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of privacy across technologies, to discover the similarities, and identify the differences in what privacy means across contexts as well as provide a means to evaluate current theories of privacy. This investigation resulted in a categorization of privacy behaviors associated with technology. There were three high level privacy behavior categories identified: avoidance, modification, and alleviatory behavior. This categorization furthers our understanding about the psychological underpinnings of privacy concerns and suggests that 1) common privacy feelings and behaviors exist across people and technologies and 2) alternative designs which consider these commonalities may increase privacy. Second, I examined one specific human factors issue associated with privacy: disclosure error. This investigation focused on gaining an understanding of how to support privacy by preventing misclosure. A misclosure is an error in disclosure. When information is disclosed in error, or misclosed, privacy is violated in that information not intended for a specific person(s) is nevertheless revealed to that person. The goal of this study was to provide a psychological basis for design suggestions for improving privacy in technology which was grounded in empirical findings. The study furthers our understanding about privacy errors in the following ways: First, it demonstrates for the first time that both younger and older adults experience misclosures . Second, it suggests that misclosures occur even when technology is very familiar to the user. Third, it revealed that some misclosure experiences result in negative consequences, suggesting misclosure is a potential threat to privacy. Finally, by exploring the context surrounding each reported misclosure, I was able to propose potential design suggestions that may decrease the likelihood of misclosure.

<p>The inability of standard cognitive science, the information-processing approach, to provide theoretical underpinnings for designing usable computer-based systems has already been noted in the literature. It has further been noted, with varying degrees of clarity, that the breakdown of standard cognitive science in this respect is not an independent event, but that it rather is coupled with the spreading of computer use, that is, the appearance of personal computers, which brought into plain view the incommensurability of humans and present-day computers, and the difficulty in "interfacing" them to each other. In this work, the insufficiency of standard cognitive science is investigated towards demonstrating that it lies in the fallacious assumption and reliance on mental representations as formally defined physical entities on which mental operations are performed. It is further argued that, if the formal approach within cognitive science is seriously taken, then cognitive science cannot account for some important cognitive processes, namely abstraction and interpretation.</p><p>In its empirical part, this study is related to a concrete development project. With respect to a possible application within it, some newer cognitive theories are reviewed and discussed, namely those that take into account environment, society, situation, and artefacts. Based on these considerations and the theoretical findings regarding standard cognitive science, a method for designing user interface is proposed and applied. Inspired by phenomenology and bearing similarities with nondirective counselling, it is referred to as "user-directed" method. Possible approaches to assessment of its validity are discussed.</p>

<p>This project aims to investigate the impact of culture on the results of established methods of usability testing. The production and use of technologically advanced information and communication applications are no longer restricted to the Western world, and there are indications that usability testing procedures developed for use in, e.g., Europe or the US do not give reliable results in countries such as India, China or Malaysia. This project is an in-depth investigation of the cultural specifics that go into usability test situations in three countries: Denmark, India and China. In a second phase we want to explore possible developments of the testing methods in order to avoid cultural bias and produce comparable results across countries of the world</p> / This research is a part of project of Culturalusability. http://culturalusability.cbs.dk/

The user interface is the direct mediator between the user and the system. It is one of main factors which influences how fluently and with what time resources system could be integrated into business process and how fast systems deployment could be performed. User interface is one of the most important points in software design, because it determines quality and rate of project implementation. Software design methodologies, based on Unified Modeling Language (UML), Oracle CASE, introduced by C. Finkelstein, D. J. Anderson, V. Balasubramanian, A. Granlund, D. Lafreniere, D. Carr are analyzed in this paper. The user interface modeling method based on data flow specification is presented in this work; the software prototype of modeling user interface based on this method is implemented.

Investigations into past accidents at nuclear power generating facilities such as that of Three Mile Island have identified human factors as one of the foremost critical aspects in plant safety. Errors resulting from limitations in human information processing are of particular concern for human-machine interfaces (HMI) in plant control rooms. This project examines the application of Ecological Interface Design (EID) in HMI information displays and the effects on operator situation awareness (SA) for turbine secondary systems based on the Swedish Forsmark 3 boiling-water reactor nuclear power plant. A work domain analysis was performed on the turbine secondary systems yielding part-whole decomposition and abstraction hierarchy models. Information display requirements were subsequently extracted from the models. The resulting EID information displays were implemented in a full-scope simulator and evaluated with six licensed operating crews from the Forsmark 3 plant. Three measures were used to examine SA: self-rated bias, Halden Open Probe Elicitation (HOPE), and Situation Awareness Control Room Inventory (SACRI). The data analysis revealed that operators achieved moderate to good SA; operators unfamiliar with EID information displays were able to develop and maintain comparable levels of SA to operators using traditional forms of single sensor-single indicator (SS-SI) information displays. With sufficient training and experience, operator SA is expected to benefit from the knowledge-based visual elements in the EID information displays. This project was researched in conjunction with the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at the University of Toronto and the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) in Halden, Norway.

In response to growing concerns over the susceptibility of water distribution systems to contamination, this thesis presents the design and evaluation of an ecological display for an intelligent water monitoring system. Work Domain Analysis and Control Task Analysis were used to uncover the information requirements of the display. The work domain model in this thesis is one of a limited number of such models to include a representation of the automation. The resulting ecological display was evaluated in a comparative usability study against an alternative display based on a competitor’s product. Nine certified water operators participated. The displays were compared across three categories of usability measures: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. No significant differences were observed. The results, however, helped identify design changes for the display. The implications for the design of intelligent automation displays, and the challenge of designing displays in parallel with early development of automation systems, are discussed.

In response to growing concerns over the susceptibility of water distribution systems to contamination, this thesis presents the design and evaluation of an ecological display for an intelligent water monitoring system. Work Domain Analysis and Control Task Analysis were used to uncover the information requirements of the display. The work domain model in this thesis is one of a limited number of such models to include a representation of the automation. The resulting ecological display was evaluated in a comparative usability study against an alternative display based on a competitor’s product. Nine certified water operators participated. The displays were compared across three categories of usability measures: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. No significant differences were observed. The results, however, helped identify design changes for the display. The implications for the design of intelligent automation displays, and the challenge of designing displays in parallel with early development of automation systems, are discussed.