För att brandmännen på flygplatser ska känna sig trygga när olyckan är framme är det viktigt att de får den information som krävs för att veta hur de ska agera när en flygfarkost kraschar. Utöver att vara ett stöd vid skarpa lägen ska Brand- och räddningsinstruktionen, BRI, vara ett läromedel i brandmännens utbildning och ett komplement under resten av deras yrkesliv. Dagens BRI uppfattas av användarna som en tråkig hemsida som inte är anpassad för dem, därför handlar detta examensarbete om hur BRI bör utformas för att vara användbar, samt bidra till lärande och en god användarupplevelse. Detta arbete har varit en iterativ användarcentrerad designprocess. Arbetet började med en kontextuell undersökning hos användaren för att fastställa deras behov. Utifrån dessa behov resulterade arbetet i ett förslag på ett grafiskt användargränssnitt som följer Saabs grafiska profil och som genom tester visar sig uppfylla användarnas centrala behov. Det visualiserades med en interaktiv prototyp. Genom att strukturera visualiseringarna med tillhörande text, se till att ingen information är dold och tillämpa en konsekvent navigeringsstruktur påverkas användarupplevelsen positivt. Denna studie har identifierat vikten av samspelet mellan information och visualisering för att främja användbarhet och inlärning. / When accidents happen it’s important that the airport's fire fighters feel safe with the knowledge that they have. This is why it’s important that they receive the information that is needed so that they know how to act when an aircraft crashes. In addition to being an aid during critical situations the Fire and Rescue Instruction, FRI, is a digital data bank, which is used to educate new fire fighters, and also to keep fully trained fire fighters up to date. Users perceive the FRI as a boring website which isn't designed for them. Which is why this master thesis will investigate how the FRI should be designed to improve the user experience and increase the learning effect. The process, which has been implemented during this thesis, is an iterative user-centered design process. The work began with a contextual inquiry to determine the users' needs. Their needs were then used to develop a user interface concept that followed Saab's graphic profile. The users’ then evaluated the concept to make sure that it met the users' key requirements. The concept was visualized with an interactive prototype. A positive user experience can be accomplished by structuring the visualizations with its corresponding text, you should also ensure that no information is concealed and apply a consistent navigation structure. This study has identified the importance of the interaction between information and visualizations to promote the learning effect and usability.

This empirical work aims to investigate the impact of using multimodal communication metaphors on e-learning systems’ usability, overall user experience and affective state. The study proposed a triple evaluation approach to avoid the problem of conventional assessment relying only on usability measurements of efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfactions. Usability in that sense refers only to the functionality and pragmatic side of the product and neglects other aspects of the system. Learning is a cognitive and repetitive task, requiring learners’ attention as well as their interest. Therefore, when delivering content, in addition to the pragmatic functionality, an e-learning system should provide a constructive overall user experience and positive affective state. Doing so will ensure user engagement, facilitate the learning process and increase learners’ performance. The impact of using five different communication metaphors was evaluated in three dimensions using the proposed approach. Within the usability dimension, the evaluation criteria involved measuring system efficiency, effectiveness, user satisfaction and learning performance. Within the user experience dimension, the evaluation criteria involved measuring pragmatic aspects of the user experience, the hedonic aspects of user experience in terms of stimulation as well as identification and the overall system attractiveness. Within the affective state dimension a self-assessments manikin technique was used in conjunction with biofeedback measurements, and users’ valence, arousal and dominance were measured. The study found that system attractiveness and the hedonic user experience had a profound impact on users’ learning performance and attitude toward the tested system. Furthermore, they influenced users’ views and judgement of the system and its usability. The communication metaphors were not equal in their influence within the evaluation criteria. Empirically derived guidelines were produced for the use and integration of these metaphors in e-learning systems. The outcome of the study highlights the need to use the triple evaluation approach in the assessment of e-learning interfaces prior to their release for better adoption and acceptance by end users.

Companies are dependent on continuously provide the market with new products to keep its market position and profitability level. The companies examined in this thesis are two bigger Swedish enterprises that have a long history in a mature business-to-business context providing industrial goods to the market. This work examines how users are involved in the different innovation and product development activities. The problem is to understand how business-to-business companies co-operate with stakeholder and users, when in the product life cycle that is done, and who are the ones doing the actual innovation. The methodological approach for the work was deductive, building a theory including innovation, strategy and user theories that was empirically tested and followed by an analysis and conclusion of the found evidence. Key findings: Most if not all innovations in mature market are routine ones. There is lack of strategic focus due to micromanagement that shifts focus rapidly. Innovations are often found in the beginning and in the end of the product life cycle. Mature markets tend to utilize a more closed innovation model as opposite to an open model. Users are not heavily involved in the actual innovation process. Stickiness and tacit knowledge is quite big in large corporation event though there is said to be a strategic focus on the customers. Implications: More involvement of users, especially lead users, will lead to more innovations. Utilising strategic buckets of different sizes for spreading the resources on different innovation types (routine/disruptive/discontinuous) to become successful

In the context of telecommunication networks, the user attribution problem refers to the challenge faced in recognizing communication traffic as belonging to a given user when information needed to identify the user is missing. This is analogous to trying to recognize a nameless face in a crowd. This problem worsens as users move across many mobile networks (complex networks) owned and operated by different providers. The traditional approach of using the source IP address, which indicates where a packet comes from, does not work when used to identify mobile users. Recent efforts to address this problem by exclusively relying on web browsing behavior to identify users were limited to a small number of users (28 and 100 users). This was due to the inability of solutions to link up multiple user sessions together when they rely exclusively on the web sites visited by the user. This study has tackled this problem by utilizing behavior based identification while accounting for time and the sequential order of web visits by a user. Hierarchical Temporal Memories (HTM) were used to classify historical navigational patterns for different users. Each layer of an HTM contains variable order Markov chains of connected nodes which represent clusters of web sites visited in time order by the user (user sessions). HTM layers enable inference "generalization" by linking Markov chains within and across layers and thus allow matching longer sequences of visited web sites (multiple user sessions). This approach enables linking multiple user sessions together without the need for a tracking identifier such as the source IP address. Results are promising. HTMs can provide high levels of accuracy using synthetic data with 99% recall accuracy for up to 500 users and good levels of recall accuracy of 95 % and 87% for 5 and 10 users respectively when using cellular network data. This research confirmed that the presence of long tail web sites (rarely visited) among many repeated destinations can create unique differentiation. What was not anticipated prior to this research was the very high degree of repetitiveness of some web destinations found in real network data.

Tikslas: ištirti žiniatinklių vartotojo sąsajos naudojimosi patogumą. Tyrimo objektas: žiniatinklių grafinės vartotojo sąsajos. Problema: šiandien internetinės svetainės yra labai populiarios, jas kuria visi. Dažniausiai kūrėjai neatsižvelgia į grafinės vartotojo sąsajos kūrimo reikalavimus, ir pateiktos internetinės svetainės būna perkrautos, netvarkingos. Todėl šiuo tyrimu siekiama atskleisti žiniatinklių vartotojo sąsajos problemas ir pateikti rekomendacijų internetinių svetainių kūrėjams. Tyrimo metodologija: žiniatinklių tyrimui buvo išskirti trys pagrindiniai kriterijai: atliktų žingsnių skaičius, atvertų puslapių skaičius, sugaištas laikas. O klaidų palyginimui buvo stebima judėjimo trajektorija. Naudotos priemonės: Selenium-ide-1.0.6 – fiksuoja visus atliekamus veiksmus, taip pat atkuria tą pačią veiksmų seką. Mozilla Firefox 3.0.15 – žiniatinklio naršyklė. Microsoft Office Excel 2003 – tyrime gautų duomenų suvedimui, lentelių ir grafikų sudarymui. Microsoft Office Word 2003 – ataskaitos paruošimui. Tyrimo apimtis: žiniatinklių vartotojo sąsajų tyrimui buvo parinktos 5 žiniatinklių grupės (kurios buvo panašios savo turiniu). Viso buvo tiriama 18 internetinių svetainių. Sugalvotos 5 užduotys. Tyrimo rezultatų apdorojimo ir pateikimo metodai: gauti tyrimo duomenys buvo susisteminti ir pateikiami stulpelinėse diagramose su detaliais aprašymais. Diagramos: užduotyje atliktų žingsnių skaičius, užduotyje atvertų puslapių skaičius, užduoties įvykdymo laikas, užduoties... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The goal of the final bachelor work – to research the convenience of the Web interface usage. The topicality of the subject, problems, goals and objectives are preceded. The interface usage, design technologies and requirements are analysed in the final work. The conception, classification and the system analysis are approved. The graphic usage interface, design, requirements, characteristic and technologies are enlarged. The research of web interface usage, environment, respondents, technologies, criterions, the results are approved in the work. Three main criterions were distinguished to fulfil the research: the number of performed steps, the number of opened pages, the delayed time. The criterions are necessary to compare webs . The trajectory of move is observed in order to accent the errors. Research results were systematised and presented in bar charts with detailed descriptions (comparison, error accent). The result of the research: not every Internet site is oriented towards the user. Oftentimes they are busy, non-qualitative, it is hard to find necessary information for users.

User-Centred Design (UCD) was proposed in the 1980s and, since then, its philosophy has helped to solve design problems, regardless of the advances in technology over time. The standard ISO 9241:210 (2010), formerly ISO 13407, provides guidance in human-centred design principles and activities undertaken throughout the design lifecycle to further support UCD. In addition, since it was mentioned in ISO 9241:210, UCD has also utilised User Experience Design (UXD) in recent years. There are many approaches that support UCD to ensure it is more attainable when designing. In addition, large firms, such as HP, IBM and Microsoft, use anthropologists in their user research in order to make products more user-centred. However, the concept of UCD should, theoretically, be more widely used in all product design and it is intriguing as to why it is not as popular as it should be. As noticed in the real world, imperfect designs still frustrate us everywhere. The aims of this thesis were to investigate the difficulties of practicing a UCD approach in idea generation and to design solutions for idea generation that would encourage further practice of UCD/UXD. In the first part of the thesis, there is an exploration of the problems encountered when practicing UCD idea generation. When examining the process, a multitude of problems were found, with most blamed as being costly, time consuming and requiring complex skills. In addition, it was suggested that a systematic solution was required to overcome such difficulties. Therefore, later in this research, a systematic model is proposed and evaluated using participants (both designers and target users). Due to the fact that design practitioners are not usually researchers, further help to implement the model in the form of persona application software is needed. Hence, the concept of service design was employed to further assist with the use of the model. In the end, computer-aided development was introduced, together with the integration of the systematic UCD model. The UCD model and the software have been evaluated as effective from both the responses of product design practitioners and end-users. Future recommendations and the research limitations are also discussed in each chapter and the overall results are given in the last chapter. This thesis successfully provided the complete process during the exploration of the low usage problems of UCD, and solutions were presented to assist designers with their UCD/UXD in the future.

At large sporting events (LSEs), e.g. football matches and athletics events, the user experience has been shown to be highly variable (Nilsson, 2004; Nilsson et al. 2004). Reported problems include a lack of social interaction with fellow spectators, and insufficient relevant information on the events or the sporting action taking place (Nilsson, 2004; Nilsson et al. 2004; Esbjornsson et al. 2006; Jacucci et al. 2005). A possible solution is personalisation, making the mobile application adapt to the user, ensuring that only relevant information is retrieved and presented in a way that is suitable. This thesis is devoted to studying the user experience related to mobile personalization at LSEs. It aims to investigate how personalized mobile applications at LSEs can render the user experience more active and engaging in a contextually, socially and culturally relevant way. The thesis reviews different theoretical approaches to help to understand the concepts of interest e.g. personalization and user experience (Chapter 2). Research methods are also discussed including the challenge of adapting user-centred methods into the Chinese culture (Chapter 3). This thesis investigates the user experience of mobile personalization at LSEs by following the circle of user-centred research: It starts to consider user requirements and user experience at LSEs and derives the usage patterns that personalized mobile applications could usefully support (Chapter 4). Then it explores the relevant contextual factors at LSEs which could be used to prescribe the behaviour of a personalizable mobile application (Chapter 5). Next, it describes the user-centred process used to design personalizable interfaces for mobile applications used at LSEs. Four key elements of design are considered: content, conceptual, interaction and presentation design (Chapter 6). The final outputs of the design process were two personalized mobile prototypes for Chinese users at LSEs. These included versions based on either (1) user-initiated or (2) system-initiated personalisation. Finally it investigates the impact on user experience of mobile personalization at LSEs in two empirical studies (a field experiment and a lab-based experiment) with these prototypes (Chapters 7 and 8). Mobile personalization is shown to result in an enriched user experience across a range of activities that a spectator would undertake at a large sporting event. The thesis discusses primarily the effective design of mobile personalization, the design implications at LSEs, user experience design, and research methods for Chinese users (Chapter 9). In conclusion (Chapter 10), specific contributions and avenues for future work are highlighted.

Mobile handset technology has improved greatly in recent decades. Improvements in hardware and software conduce the importance of the handset as a computer. Whilst the mobile phone industry and researchers emphasise understanding users from sociological aspects, such as services, usage habits, functionalities and so forth; this research aims to seek the variables that impact upon users’ interactions with the phone from the root-individual differences. For the purpose of placing mobile phone users at the core of the interface design process, the individual differences of gender, cognitive style and user experience were applied as the main variables in this research. Accordingly, to examine individuals’ differences and their operational behaviour with phone interfaces, the effects of cognitive style and user experience present stronger impact on the user performance than gender. The two factors were then investigated with regard to individuals’ operational behaviour with phone interfaces. This research then developed categories to link the theoretical attributes of cognitive style and phone users’ practical operational behaviour. Furthermore, the impact of cognitive style on the users’ operational behaviour was also connected to individuals’ problem solving ability. Meanwhile, the effect of user experience was investigated with a novel methodology-Taxonomy of Experience. The results revealed necessary elements that the users cared about the most, and these differed from the interface design guidelines of phone industry. This PhD thesis presents the application of the triangulation method to explore the variables that impact upon individuals’ interaction with mobile phone interfaces, specially concerned with mobile phone interface design from a psychological perspective, and provides a deeper understanding of users for future design events. More importantly, this research delivered the concept of understanding users before conducting design.

Musik-applikationen c3n play används på surfplattor och mobiltelefoner som har den kapacitiva pekskärmstypen. I dagsläget kan musik-applikationen enbart styras med fingrarna. Spelpjäser, utvecklades för att målgruppen skulle kunna kombinera fingerinmatning med något fysiskt och för att underlätta spelandet. En konvergerande produktutvecklingsprocess innefattande faser och aktiviteter tillämpades. Inledningsvis genomfördes en detaljerad informationsinsamling som grund för det fortsatta arbetet. Analys av konkurrenternas produkter och en benchmarking implementerades, för att både identifiera kraven som ställts på produkten och upprätta en kravspecifikation. Spelpjäsen delades in i tre delar: formen på hela spelpjäsen, mönster som gör att användarna kan identifiera varje spelpjäs och mönster på undersidan som programvaran kunde identifiera. Därefter genererades flera idéer på formen av spelpjäsen, vilka utvärderades med hänsyn till de uppsatta kraven. Idéer som ansågs uppfylla kraven bäst gick vidare till konceptgenereringsfasen, där fem olika förslag kunde visualiseras i skisser och CAD-modeller (Computer Aidid Design). Koncepten utvärderades och förbättrades för att tillfredsställa användarnas behov och förväntningar. Det slutliga konceptet på formen gjordes i fyra olika varianter, vilka framställdes som prototyper för vidare test av målgruppen. Konceptlösningar på spelpjäsens identifieringsmönster av användaren analyserades för att passa in i c3n play-användargränssnitten. Tekniken för att identifiera spelpjäsen mot den kapacitiva pekskärmstypen utvecklades via tester, där avstånd och vinklar på kontaktpunkterna bestämdes. Viktiga produktutvecklingsverktyg implementerades för att säkerställa såväl spelpjäsernas hållbarhet som miljövänlighet, med hänsyn till produktlivscykel, tillverkning, montering och tillförlitlighet samt kostnadsmedvetenhet. Därefter valdes lämpliga material samt en lämplig tillverkningsmetod. Detta resulterade i en produktfamilj bestående av åtta stycken spelpjäser som ändrar på var sin funktion i c3n play-applikationen. En spelpjäs som förändrar amplitud, resonans, högtpassfilter, lågt-passfilter, delay, zoom + pan, kompression och feedback. / The application c3n play can be used on tablets and mobile phones that have capacitive multi touchscreens. The application can only be controlled by using the finger input. Tangible user interface was developed so the target group can use something physically “checkers” in a combination with the finger input. A product development process comprising phases and activities was implemented. Initially a detailed information collection were conducted and used as underlying to the continued work. Competitors’ products were analyzed and a benchmarking was implemented to identify user needs and to be able to make a target specification. Checkers was divided in three parts, shape of the whole checker, pattern so users can identify every checker and a pattern on the bottom so the software can identify the checkers on the screen. After that ideas were generated and the shape of the checker was evaluated. Ideas that was considered to meet the user needs went on to concept generation phase, where five different proposals was visualized in sketches and CAD (Computer Aided Design) - models. Concepts was evaluated and improved to satisfy customer needs and expectations. Final concept of the shape was developed into four different variants that was prepared as prototypes for further testing by target group. Concept solutions on identification pattern was analyzed to fit c3n play user interface. Technology to identify the checker against capacitive screen was developed by tests. Where distance and angles of contact points was determined. Important product development tools was implemented to ensure the checkers sustainability. With respect to the product life cycle, environment, manufacturing, assembly, reliability and cost consciousness. Suitable materials and manufacturing method was then chosen. Resulted in a product family consisted of eight different checkers. Each checker can change a different function in the c3n play-application. Amplitude, Resonance, Highpassfilter, Low-passfilter, Delay, Zoom + Pan, Compression and Feedback.

This diploma thesis deals with global illumination and generally with the process of illumination of prepared scenes. A program for illumination management was written for this purpose. It can manage both direct and indirect illumination in interactive time. Simple and comfortable user interface allows for addition, deletion and change in light settings. Different types of both point and area lights are supported. In the course of all work, the program displays current illumination of the scene. With the help of this application, a series of different experiments will be carried out. We will explore the way users work during illumination, the way they perceive different properties of global illumination, various options of its control and its comparison with common direct illumination.