Root cause analysis (RCA) is a process in Scania carried out to understand the root cause of vehicle breakdowns. It is commonly done by studying vehicle warranty claims and failure reports, identifying patterns that are correlated to the breakdowns, and then analyzing the root cause based on those findings. Vehicle usage is believed to be one of the factors that may contribute towards the breakdowns, but the data on vehicle usage is not commonly utilized in RCA. This thesis investigates a way to help RCA process by introducing a dataset of vehicle usage based on position data gathered in project FUMA (Fleet telematics big data analytics for vehicle Usage Modeling and Analysis). A user-centered design process of a visualization tool which presents FUMA data for people working in RCA process was carried out. Interviews were conducted to gain insights about the RCA process and generate design ideas. PACT framework was used to organize the ideas, and Use Cases were developed to project a conceptual scenario. A low fidelity prototype was developed as design artifact for the visualization, and a formative test was done to validate the design and gather feedback for future prototyping iterations. In each design phase, more insights about how visualization of vehicle usage should be used in RCA were obtained. Based on this study, the prototype design showed a promising start in visualizing vehicle usage for RCA purpose. Improvement on data presentation, however, still needs to be addressed to reach the level of practicality required in RCA. / Root cause analysis (RCA) är en process på Scania som används för att förstå rotorsaken till fordons behov av reparation.Oftast studeras fordonets försäkringsrapporter och felrapporter, för att identifiera och analysera mönster som motsvarar de olika behoven för reparation. Fordonsanvändningen tros vara en av de faktorer som bidrar till reparationsbehoven, men data angående detta används sällan i RCA. Denna rapport undersöker hur RCA-processen kan dra nytta av positionsdata som samlats in i projekt FUMA (Fleet telematics big data analytics for vehicle Usage Modeling and Analysis). En användarcentrerad designmetodik har använts för att ta fram ett visualiseringsverktyg som presenterar FUMA-data för personer som deltar i RCA-processen. Intervjuer har genomförts för att samla insikter om RCA-processen och för att generera designidéer. PACT-ramverket användes sedan för att organisera idéerna, och användningssituationer togs fram för att skapa ett konceptuellt scenario. En low-fidelity prototyp togs fraför personer som deltar i RCA-processenm som en designartefakt för visualiseringen och ett utvecklande test genomfördes för att validera designen och samla in feedback för framtida iterationer av prototyping. Under varje design-fas, samlades mer insikter om hur visualiseringen av fordonsanvändning skulle kunna användas för RCA in. Baserat på detta, visade design-prototypen en lovande start för visualisering av fordonsanvändning i RCA. Förbättringar på hur data presenteras måste dock genomföras, så att rätt genomförbarhet för RCA uppnås.

Despite advances made in modern electronic devices, their use by older people is significantly lower than for younger people. They experience difficulties using devices due to a combination of physical, cognitive and ‘generational’ differences. Many studies try to adapt devices to make them more usable, but they do not consider how older people feel in terms of attitudes towards technology or their existing habits. Seven participants were interviewed about their current use of technology, as well as their attitudes to modern technology, and a personal inventory was created for each participant. The interviews generated themes relating to how participants feel that technology is not made for them, barriers to their use, and generational differences as well as arguments against modern technology use and perceived negative aspects of technology. Some design considerations were created and illustrated using features from the most commonly used devices that suited the interviewees’ attitudes, behaviours and opinions.

The HCI community is well aware of the gap between research and practice in the field. The issue is often discussed in terms of the applicability and adaption of theories and methods to the real world, but both categories seem insufficient for explaining how practitioners navigate the complexity of the problems they work on. This study takes a more fundamental perspective, inspired by theories of reflective practice and design. As a consequence, the attention is shifted to the framing of a problem that happens prior—or in parallel—to the use of theories and methods. Six case studies were collected through semi-structured interviews to investigate this position. The findings point towards a rather small set of techniques which are used for supporting the (re-)framing of a problem in an often pragmatic and informal way. A model locating the methods in their respective stages is proposed; and the methods are related to other research to suggest additional possibilities not mentioned by the participants of this study. What most clearly distinguished HCI practitioners from designers in other professions was their distrust in their own intuition, and the key role they attached to the user in response.

Software Engineering is a rapidly changing area, especially in terms of its technological foundation. The computer and information technology changes both the kind of systems to be built and the methods and tools available with which to build them. To be able to stay competitive there is no doubt that managing knowledge is very important to the corporate learning process. But even when companies are superior to their competitors technologically, they often find it hard to handle knowledge within the company. Knowledge is to know, to be aware of something. Knowledge that have been gained by action, by exercise of a profession, is the most valuable knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be expressed by words and numbers, while tacit knowledge is not easily expressed and thus hard to formalize and write down. This licentiate’s dissertation presents the results from efforts in communicating, measuring and preserving knowledge. Approaches for communicating knowledge to individuals with no or little knowledge within the software development domain are presented. Furthermore, experiences regarding knowledge management at team level (small group) are presented. Our study show that knowledge is hard to measure, and thus difficult to preserve in text or number format. Instead, we propose that you should build social networks and rely more on oral communication.

Mobile handheld devices have become friends in people’s daily lives. Frequent usage of available applications, especially video streaming, causes exponential growth in mobile IP traffic. Service providers and application developers need to know the tradeoff between the end-to-end (e2e) performance and cost since, not fully met expectations of customers from those applications cause reduced usage of services, revenue, and growth in the churn rate. The user-centric approach, which involves users into the assessment of the performance of a particular service or application, has become important within the inter-disciplinary research field Quality of Experience (QoE). The ultimate goal is to obtain simplified QoE models on particular applications based on the underlying network-based performance metrics as well as other non-technical metrics related to the end-user. Android smartphones that use open-source code and well-documented Application Programming Interfaces (API), facilitate researchers to do low-level and network-based performance analysis on end-user mobile devices while considering user feedback. In this thesis, the influential factors for Android smartphone-based QoE are studied. The relation between the quantified user-perceived QoE metric, i.e., Mean Opinion Score (MOS), and the artifacts in real-time video streaming such as blockiness and jerkiness caused by network-level metrics, e.g., Packet Delay Variation (PDV), Maximal Burst Size (MBS), and video bit rate are identified. Challenges in assessing the user-perceived QoE of video with the focus on memory effects are discussed. The relation between the objective metric of user reaction time and the user-perceived QoE is presented. Furthermore, different methods to assess end-user-perceived QoE such as Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), Experience Sampling Method (ESM), and preliminary online survey are described. Further influential factors, e.g., context, user routines, user lifestyle, and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as Round Trip Time (RTT) and Server Response Time (SRT), are studied. The thesis is concluded with preliminary findings that relate the instantaneous total power consumption to the jerkiness of a real-time video stream with evidences such as stalling events.

Emotions are thought to be a key factor that critically influences human decision-making. Emotion regulation can help to mitigate emotion related decision biases and eventually lead to a better decision performance. Serious games emerged as a new angle introducing technological methods to learning emotion regulation, where meaningful biofeedback information displays player's emotional state. This thesis investigates emotions and the effect of emotion regulation on decision performance. Furthermore, it explores design and evaluation methods for creating serious games where emotion regulation can be learned and practiced. The scope of this thesis was limited to serious games for emotion regulation training using psychophysiological methods to communicate user's affective information. Using the psychophysiological methods, emotions and their underlying neural mechanism have been explored. Through design and evaluation of serious games using those methods, effects of emotion regulation have been investigated where decision performance has been measured and analyzed. The proposed metrics for designing and evaluating such affective serious games have been exhaustively evaluated. The research methods used in this thesis were based on both quantitative and qualitative aspects, with true experiment and evaluation research, respectively. Serious games approach to emotion regulation was investigated. The results suggested that two different emotion regulation strategies, suppression and cognitive reappraisal, are optimal for different decision tasks contexts. With careful design methods, valid serious games for training those different strategies could be produced. Moreover, using psychophysiological methods, underlying emotion neural mechanism could be mapped to provide optimal level of arousal for a certain task. The results suggest that it is possible to design and develop serious game applications that provide helpful learning environment where decision makers could practice emotion regulation and subsequently improve their decision making.

User centered design is a process which aims to understand user needs and desires by using different tools and methods. This is challenging in the industry as companies have different goals compared to the academic discipline of user centered design. As companies have different goals, common UCD methods which are used in the academic field are often not used. Therefore, there is a gap in how UCD is done in practice compared to theory. Designers and user experience specialists must use the tools which are available, capitalize on the opportunity to use existing resources in the organization in order to understand users and their needs. Insights explain the why and the motivation of the consumer or user, and they are less apparent and intangible, hidden truths that result from continuous digging. Insights can be draw from several different sources, from data and qualitative sources. This thesis investigates from what available sources in an organization can insights be generated from in order to understand users and design better experiences, specifically from the organizations perspective. The purpose is not only to understand users but to drive the organization’s objectives and goals. This thesis uses an innovative collaborative workshop methodology, working with digital designers, to answer the research questions and as a result presents an insights generation model. The research has been specifically conducted for an organization, and from their available sources, but the methodology and model creation has the potential to be used in similar settings, domains or projects.

I dagens samhälle används Informations- och Kommunikationsteknik (IKT) på olika sätt och fritidshemmet ska följa med i utvecklingen av omvärlden. Fritidshemmet ska även utgå från elevernas behov och intressen. Syftet med denna studie är att skapa kunskap om hur pedagoger inom fritidshem använder IKT som verktyg för elevers meningsskapande, välbefinnande och utveckling i fritidshemmets verksamhet. Följande forskningsfrågor fokuseras: Hur beskriver pedagogerna vad elever gör med de digitala verktygen? Vilka faktorer beskriver pedagogerna som viktiga om IKT ska användas på fritidshem? Hur beskriver pedagogerna sin kompetens i att arbeta med IKT på fritidshem? Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt är det sociokulturella perspektivet som har sitt ursprung i Lev Vygotskijs teorier gällande utveckling, språk och lärande. En etnografisk ansats samt en kvalitativ metod har valts och empirin är således inhämtad med hjälp av observation samt semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultaten redovisas utefter våra tre forskningsfrågor. Resultaten grundar sig i empirin vilket samlades in genom observation och genom de semistrukturerade intervjuerna. Resultaten visar att pedagogernas intresse och tillgång till tid och digitala verktyg styr hur mycket de arbetar med IKT i verksamheten. Det framkommer även att surfplattan har fått en stor roll i dagens fritidshem eftersom den är smidig och lätt att bära med sig för att dokumentera och användandet har ökat markant de sista åren.

Conversational agents such as Siri, Google and Alexa are growing in popularity, and Artificial Intelligence in the form of natural language processing utilized by these agents is becoming more available and capable with time. Understanding how conversational agents are used today and what implications it has for our daily lives is important if this trend is going to continue. In this thesis I present how children interact with conversational agents today and the implications this has for families. Four families with children in the age of 6-9 were interviewed regarding how children interact with conversational agents today, what concerns parents have and how they view the agent. The results show that children regard the conversational agent as a tool, and that the primary interactions are entertainment and exploration. Parents were concerned what the agent might say when they are not there, and do not feel in control of the agent. In the beginning children have high expectations on the capabilities of the agent but quickly assess the capabilities through experimentation.

Home adpats to different life stages of family members. It provides an envrionment for kids to explore and learn. It balances the private life between adolescent and parents. However, it is different for families with Down syndrome because of their slow life path and demaning for time. This project aims to explore how might we improve the family relationship during the transition of living together in the context of a family with Down syndrome. I concentrate on the family plan for independent living: cooking-related activities. It is a long-term life project which demands time and higher motivation. From the research, parents have control over the learning process, which can influence young adults' confidence in making decisions and parents' building trust in their abilities. How might we support the process of collaborative learning for parents and DS young adult to achieve the long-period life project? Take the food planning as an example, this project explores touchpoints of trust building, learning transfer and decision-making points. "COOKIES" is a platform that connects different learning scenarios and on-going practice together. It helps to transfer the learning from outside home to the home cooking context. It motivates young adults with DS to leveling up missions defined by themselves. Parent's ambition is balanced with DS young adult's exploration. With the ability learned in this process, it can also influence several other domains of life choices.