The use of visual aesthetics has been found to contribute to feelings of a positive Web experience. Accordingly, studies report strong correlations between aesthetics and facets of user experience like usability and credibility, but does this hold for accessibility also? Some believe that Web aesthetics impedes accessibility, while most Web designers perceive that the accessibility initiative is restrictive design-wise. These misconceptions have slowed down the advancement of an inclusive Web. Firstly, it is clear that the relationship between Web aesthetics and accessibility is still poorly understood. Secondly, tools capable of analysing the aesthetic quality of Web pages and relaying associated accessibility status information are lacking. This thesis addresses these two problems. In order to investigate this relationship, the aesthetic judgements of 180 users were elicited to help classify Web pages based on their visual quality using Lavie and Tractinsky's framework. The classified Web pages were then technically and manually audited for accessibility compliance using 4 automated tools, and 11 experts who used a heuristic evaluation technique known as the Barrier Walkthrough (BW) method to check for barriers which could affect people with visual impairments. Our results consistently showed that Web pages judged on Lavie and Tractinsky's classical aesthetic dimension as being `clean' had significant correlations with accessibility, suggesting `cleanness' to be a suitable proxy measure for accessibility. Expressive dimensions showed no such correlations. This insight was used to develop the EIVAA tool aimed at predicting the aesthetic quality of Web pages and using the information to provide accessibility ratings for the pages. Quantitative evaluations show that the tool is able to predict aesthetic quality in a way that mimics gold standards, especially along the design dimension `clean' where we observed tool-human correlations as strong as 0.703, thus making the associated accessibility predictions also acceptable. We envision that our findings will give the Web community a more holistic understanding of the interactions between the use of aesthetics and accessibility, and that our tool would inform Web developers of the implications of their designs.

The World Wide Web (Web) has become a key technology to provide access to on-line information. The Mobile Web users, who access the Web using small devices such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), make errors on entering text and controlling cursors. These errors are caused by both the characteristics of a device and the environment in which it is used, and are called situational impairments. Disabled Web users, on the other hand, have difficulties in accessing the Web due to their impairments in visual, hearing or motor abilities. We assert that errors experienced by the Mobile Web users share similarity in scope with those hindering motor-impaired Web users with dexterity issues, and existing solutions from the motor-impaired users domain can be migrated to the Mobile Web domain to address the common errors.Results of a systematic literature survey have revealed 12 error types that affect both the Mobile Web users and disabled Web users. These errors range from unable to locate a key to unable to pin-point a cursor. User experiments have confirmed that the Mobile Web users and motor-impaired Web users share errors in scope: they both miss key presses, press additional keys, unintentionally press a key more than once or press a key too long. In addition, both small device users and motor-impaired desktop users have difficulties in performing clicking, multiple clicking and drag selecting. Furthermore, when small device users are moving, both the scope and the magnitude of the errors are shared. In order to address these errors, we have migrated existing solutions from the disabled Web users domain into the Mobile Web users domain. We have developed a typing error correction system for the Mobile Web users. Results of the user evaluation have indicated that the proposed system can significantly reduce the error rates of the Mobile Web users.This work has an important contribution to both the Web accessibility field and the Mobile Web field. By leveraging research from the Web accessibility field into the Mobile Web field, we have linked two disjoint domains together. We have migrated solutions from one domain to another, and thus have improved the usability and accessibility of the Mobile Web.

The objective of the thesis is to introduce the reader to the topic of user interfaces and their design, to provide basic information about the concepts and methods used for the development of user interfaces. The author based the theoretical part of the work on a particular interface design approach - user centered design. The practical part applies selected methods that are described in the theoretical part, the optimization and design of a user interface for a specific application is described. The design process precedes an analysis of other competitive products, the identification of target groups of clients and their needs, the optimization of existing key processes, the development of existing functionalities and proposals for the implementation of new functionalities. Against this background, the author creates a web application interface design and associated mobile application designs. The end of the work deals with designing a model for payments as a system service and outlines possible further extensions of the system.

Blogs serve multiple purposes, resulting in several types of blogs that vary greatly in terms of quality and content. It is important to evaluate the quality of blogs, which requires appropriate evaluation criteria. Unfortunately, there are minimal studies on framework and the specific criteria and indicators for evaluating the quality of blogs. Moreover, quality is related to user perception, and should therefore be evaluated by the receivers. This dissertation examines the criteria and indicators that blog users consider important for evaluating the quality of blogs, and develops a user-centered framework for evaluating quality by conducting user surveys and post-survey email interviews. The personal characteristics that affect the users’ choices of criteria to evaluate the quality of blogs are examined as well. The study’s findings include 1) the criteria that users consider important when evaluating the quality of blogs are content quality, usability, authority, and blog credibility; 2) the indicators that blog users consider most important for evaluating the quality of blogs are understandability, accuracy, believability, currency, ease of use, and navigation; and 3) gender, education level, age, profession, purpose of use, and specific interests affect the user’s choices of criteria for evaluating the quality of blogs. Future research may involve exploring and applying the framework developed in this study to build automatic quality blog identification system for the purpose of assisting web users and information specialists to identify quality blogs.

Rapid advances in electronic communication devices and technologies have resulted in a shift in the way communication applications are being developed. These new development strategies provide abstract views of the underlying communication technologies and lead to the so-called user-centric communication applications. One user-centric communication (UCC) initiative is the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) technology, which uses the Communication Modeling Language (CML) for modeling communication services and the CVM for realizing these services. In communication-intensive domains such as telemedicine and disaster management, there is an increasing need for user-centric communication applications that are domain-specific and that support the dynamic coordination of communication services commonly found in collaborative communication scenarios. However, UCC approaches like the CVM offer little support for the dynamic coordination of communication services resulting from inherent dependencies between individual steps of a collaboration task. Users either have to manually coordinate communication services, or reply on a process modeling technique to build customized solutions for services in a specific domain that are usually costly, rigidly defined and technology specific. This dissertation proposes a domain-specific modeling approach to address this problem by extending the CVM technology with communication-specific abstractions of workflow concepts commonly found in business processes. The extension involves (1) the definition of the Workflow Communication Modeling Language (WF-CML), a superset of CML, and (2) the extension of the functionality of CVM to process communication-specific workflows. The definition of WF-CML includes the metamodel and the dynamic semantics for control constructs and concurrency. We also extended the CVM prototype to handle the modeling and realization of WF-CML models. A comparative study of the proposed approach with other workflow environments validates the claimed benefits of WF-CML and CVM.

This thesis studies the writing of computer user documentation from a social perspective by examining the process of creating computer documentation and the role of documentation writers in the work place. This study consisted of in-depth interviews and observations of four writers of computer user documentation.

This study, done in collaboration with Storytel, aimed to investigate whether a shared audiobook live listening experience would add value to users of the Storytel app and how such a feature could be designed in terms of User Experience and User Interface. The purpose was to determine the minimal viable product (MVP) and if live listening with others is interesting in itself or else, what is the most basic interaction type required in connection to the listening. The aim was also to design the optimal solution, beyond technical, time and/or prioritization constraints. The method used was a combination of the IDEO design process with three phases (Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation), and Holtzblatt and Beyer’s (2016) five steps of Contextual Design (Gathering User Data, Compiling User Data, Ideation with User Data, Defining the Product and Making it Real). To investigate user opinions and requirements, surveys were sent out to Storytel users and authors on the four markets Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and India, resulting in a total of 448 responses. Based on this data, an extensive design work in three phases was carried out to achieve the result of a final design prototype of a live listening feature inside the Storytel app. In order to validate the design choices continuously in each phase, 15 user tests were achieved, whereof 4 initial tests, 10 interactive user tests and 1 focus group interview. The results show that there is certainly an interest for such a feature among some users, and the interest is bigger if an author participates. In general, users on the Indian market are more interested in the feature than users on the European markets. Authors are more interested than the average user in live listening and interacting with its listeners. An important finding was that the feature must include an element of interaction to make it relevant and interesting to users, which is why a prototype including emoji reactions was proposed as an MVP. In this version, the possibility to discuss is linked to an outsourced forum such as Google Meet. For the optimal design, a chat was included inside the application as this was concluded highly desired by users.

With the complexity increase of enterprise solutions, the need to monitor and maintain them increases with it. SAP Concur offers various services and applications across different environments and data centers. For all these applications and the services underneath, there are different Application Performance Management (APM) tools in place for monitoring them. However, from an incident management point of view, in case of a problem it is time consuming and non-efficient to go through different tools in order to identify the issue. This thesis proposes a solution for a custom and centralized APM which gathers metrics and raw data from multiple sources and visualizes them in real-time in a unified health dashboard called Pulse. In order to fit this solution to the needs of service managers and product owners, Pulse will go through different phases of usability tests and after each phase, new requirements will be implemented and tested again until there is a final design that fits the needs of target users.

This degree project is a design project that investigates digitization in the real estate industry and examines how far the real estate industry has come regarding the integration of new technology. The study highlights how companies work today and what problems and needs can be facilitated through digitization, more specifically the technology IoT (Internet Of Things). IoT makes it possible to connect different devices and sensors to the Internet in order to read information or control the functionality. The study is based on qualitative interviews which are analyzed through methods within User Experience (UX). The target group for the study is people who work with operation and maintenance of real estates. By creating personas and scenarios for the relevant target group, a greater understanding is created of how they work today along with what problems and needs they experience within their professional roles. Through methods within the User Interface (UI) a prototype is created which illustrates the information that is significant to the target group. The information from the properties is communicated via IoT devices. To enable communication between devices and prototype, the system Yggio is used, an API (Application Programming Interface) which is provided by the company Sensative. The study shows how a user-friendly interface can look, function and facilitate work in the real estate industry.

Hlávková Barbora. User experience focused on credibility in e-commerce. Brno: Mendel University in Brno, 2017. The thesis deals with User experience focused on credibility in e-commerce survey of the Y generation. To determine the perception of the credibility on e-shops was used eye tracking (n = 30) with in-depth interviews (n = 30) and questionnaire survey (n = 155). The aim of the thesis is to suggest general recommendations for e-commerce in terms of consumer trust.