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.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-51). Also available on the World Wide Web.

This study explores how high technology companies interact with their Lead User throughout the innovation process. Thereby, the study focuses on the interaction, after a company approached their Lead User. By using existing literature on the Lead User, the process of innovating as well as the interaction with users in product development, an analytical model was developed. This model served as the basis for the interview guide as well as to present and analyse the empirical data. Due to the fact that this study looks at the Lead User interaction from a different perspective, where little knowledge exists, a qualitative strategy was pursued. In this connection, three companies within the high technology context were studied and a cross-case analysis conducted. Based on our findings, seven conclusions could be drawn. Our conclusions are that: (1) high technology companies mainly interact with the Lead User through ordinary methods; (2) the content of interaction differs in each phase; (3) the outcome of interaction in each phase is mainly the same throughout the companies; (4) there is always one function responsible for the Lead User, which is the same throughout the innovation process; (5) the main incentive for the Lead User to cooperate is intrinsic motivation; (6) the studied companies do not interact with the Lead User when launching the product; and (7) the outcome of the Lead User interaction is seen as being products of a more incremental than radical character. After presenting the conclusions, the implications were displayed. Thereby, the main implications are that companies are recommended to interact with their Lead User throughout the innovation process, in order to align their products to the Lead User’s needs and therefore to reduce the risk and uncertainty of failing on the market. In this connection, it also important for companies to get into face-to-face discussions, to get feedback and understand the needs of the Lead User. Furthermore, companies need to consider that the Lead User is intrinsic motivated, which means by allowing the Lead User to be part of the innovation process and having an influence on the development, companies do not need to provide further financial rewards. Additionally, the Lead User cannot merely be found outside the boundaries of the firm but also within the company.

With the rise of powerful mobile devices and the broad availability of computing power, Automatic Speech Recognition is becoming ubiquitous. A flawless ASR system is still far from existence. Because of this, interactive applications that make use of ASR technology not always recognize speech perfectly, when not, the user must be engaged to repair the transcriptions. We explore a rational user interface that uses of machine learning models to make its best effort in presenting the best repair strategy available to reduce the time in spent the interaction between the user and the system as much as possible. A study is conducted to determine how different candidate policies perform and results are analyzed. After the analysis, the methodology is generalized in terms of a decision theoretical framework that can be used to evaluate the performance of other rational user interfaces that try to optimize an expected cost or utility.

Computer users often suffer from poorly designed support systems that hinder them from performing their work efficiently and with satisfaction. The evidence is found in observations of users at work, interviews, evaluations of systems, and numerous reports of systems with poor usability that fail from start. Those who use the systems are proficient in their work, and those who develop systems are proficient in software engineering. These two groups have often little knowledge and understanding of each other’s worlds and their vocabularies are quite different. In systems development projects, users are often confronted with representations of their work that they hardly recognize. Systems designers compose these representations in an attempt to reduce the complexity of the work practices in a way that is appropriate for systems development. It is very difficult for users to appreciate the consequences fully on their future work situation from such representations, since they are removed from the social setting and often describe work in a fragmentized way. The unfamiliar view of their work may make the users less inclined to participate in the forthcoming design process. This thesis presents research performed to increase the usability of systems in working life and to explore conditions that facilitate the design of systems that really support the users work. The research comprises field studies in different work contexts, e.g. health care, dentistry, public service, and transportation. Information on the essentials of work has been gathered and analyzed to learn how such findings can be translated into systems design. Another goal has been to explore how to make the most of users’ experiences and skills to assure systems that better fit their work. Along with a growing awareness of the importance of user involvement in design, a participatory design process including the analysis and design of work has evolved.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the biggest problems for many companies today. By analyzing history records (profiles) of its customers, organization can effectively adapt its business activity to users needs and create better products and services. Proper analysis of customer profiles can help to predict the behaviour of the customers. After grouping customer profiles by similar attributes, company can easier handle its interactions with similar users. Such group profiling can also help to identify needs of new customers on their first interaction with the company. The biggest problem in implementing such systems is the management of a vast array of customer data. Data mining technologies can help to solve this problem and help the ebusinesses to better understand their e-customers. This work reviews data mining methods, such as Nearest Neighbors, Decision Trees and Association Rules, which can be effectively used for customers grouping and profiling. A new conceptual model of Users Recognition System is suggested. The new model uses profiles created from customer history records for identifying new customers. The suggested model has been tested experimentally and results prove the possibility of practical application of this model.

Motivated by potential applications in wireless sensor networks, this thesis considers the problem of communicating a large number of correlated analog sources over a Gaussian multiple-access channel using non-orthogonal code-division multiple-access (CDMA). A joint source-channel decoder is presented which can exploit the inter-source correlation for interference reduction in the CDMA channel. This decoder uses a linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) multi-user detector (MUD) in tandem with a MMSE joint source decoder (JSD) for multiple sources to achieve a computational complexity that scales with the number of sources. The MUD and the JSD, then iteratively exchange extrinsic information to improve the interference cancellation. Experimental results show that, compared to a non-iterative decoder, the proposed iterative decoder is more robust against potential performance degradation due to correlated channel interference and offers better near far resistance.

This thesis explores how Natural User Interface (NUI) interaction and Multiple Display Technology (MDT) can be applied to an existing Freight Management System (FMS), to improve the command and control interface of the dispatch operators. Situational Awareness (SA) and Task Efficiency (TE) are identified as being the main requirements for dispatchers. Based on studies that have been performed on SA and TE in other time critical occupations such as Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) and Air Traffic Control (ATC), a substitute dispatch display system was designed with focus on courier driver and freight management systems and monitoring. This system aims to alleviate cognitive overheads without disrupting the flow of the existing CFMS by providing extended screen area matched with a natural input mechanism for command and control functionality. This Master’s thesis investigates which of commercial state-of-the-art interface tools is best to use in a wide Field-of-View (FOV) multiple screen display and to dicern if there is any practical impact that a proposed NUI system will have to courier dispatching. To assess the efficacy of such a hypothetical system the author has developed an experimental prototype that combines a set of three monitors in a Multi-Monitor System to create the overall display system, accompanied with two traditional and two advanced NUI direct and indirect interaction techniques (mouse, trackpad, touch screen and gesture controller). Experiments using the prototype were conducted to determine the optimum configuration for control/display interface based upon task effectiveness, bandwidth and overall user desirability of these methods in supporting behavioural requirements of dispatch workstation task handling. The author use the well-studied and robust Fitts' Law for measuring and analysing user behaviour with NUIs. Evaluation of the prototype system finds that the multi-touch system paired with the multi-monitor system was the most responsive of the interaction techniques, direct or indirect. Based on these findings, employing such an interaction system is a viable option for deployment in FMS's. However for optimal efficiency, the firmware that supports the interactivity dynamics should be re-designed so it is optimized to touch interaction. This will allow the multi-touch system to be used effectively as an affordance technology. Although the gesture interaction approach has a lot of potential as an alternative NUI device, the performance of gesture input in this experimental setting had the worst performance of all conditions. This finding was largely a result of the interface device limitation within the wide FOV display range of the multi-monitor system. Further design improvements and experimentation are proposed to alleviate this problem for the gesture tracking and for the touchscreen modalities of interaction.

The elderly experience their health getting significantly deteriorated as they age. They suffer not only from chronic diseases but from various geriatric diseases such as high blood pressure, arthritis and cardiovascular disease. Their mental health also retreats creating challenges for the elderly from the loss of short term memory to dementia. Furthermore, after they retire, the elderly’s social network decreases as their social activities are inevitably limited to a small group of people like families and friends. With the face of such impairments in their physical, mental and social health, many elderly cannot help but are being institutionalized or sent to specialized places like nursing homes, which provide them professional care. However, a study indicates that most Americans prefer to stay in their homes as they get older since they can maintain their social connections to neighbors and friends, be close to their medical caregivers in town as well as attain emotional comfort and security with familiar surrounding and environments. On top of that, Americans of all ages value on keeping their ability of independence and autonomy by controlling their lives in general. Various health care-aid devices and services appear to offer specific support to health care activities for the elderly in their homes. However, such aids have more focused only on when the elderly’s health is degraded or on very specific areas such as tracking health data like blood pressure, blood sugar and calorie intakes. The elderly need comprehensive understanding about their health problems, healthy daily habits and timely interactions with their families and caregivers, in order to keep independent living safely in their places. Smart Home technology has much potential to support the elderly’s independent living as well as interactions with others. To better understand this, we conducted a user-centered design project which looks at the management of the elderly’s health enabled by Smart Home technology.

Today we can see how companies are making significant investments in various methods and tools to access and utilize the users’ knowledge for the purpose of innovation efforts. What many highly innovative companies try to accomplish with these investments is to develop and establish sustained producer-user ecosystems. The aim of these ecosystems is often to encourage users to collaborate with each other and with the producer in order to generate innovations related to the offering of the producer. However, although these ecosystems are proven to create new innovation opportunities for companies, it has been shown that a close collaboration with many users brings about a number of challenges for companies. For example, it can be costly and time-consuming to establish and utilize large numbers of user relationships and it can be difficult to align the innovation interests of established producers with those of the users. Moreover, the fact that many innovating users have relationships to one another can contribute to conflicts of interests and established producers may have to balance stability and change within the ecosystem. Another challenge in the utilization of user relationships is that it is not only dependent on the direct interaction with users but also the internal dissemination and utilization of information related to the users’ needs. This dissemination can be problematic since it is costly and difficult to forward timely and reliable information about the users’ needs. Consequently, the aim of this thesis is to better understand how companies that are operating within sustained producer-user ecosystems can leverage user relationships for the purpose of innovation. The research forming the foundation for this thesis was carried out within two established medical technology companies that successfully had developed innovations within this type of ecosystems. Quantitative and qualitative data was collectedand a number of different analyses were conducted. The results reveal that these ecosystems can be understood as a system where direct and indirect user experiences are distributed among employees and users. This in turn implies that employees utilization of user relationships can be understood as a function of the extent to which employees knows and values the pertinence of their own as well as others direct and indirect user experiences as well as accessibility and cost of seeking user-information from other people. The results demonstrate that when companies experience high costs related to the acquisition of user experiences they may benefit from employing users to occupy boundary-spanning roles. However, the thesis reveals how the utilization of such boundary-spanning roles brings with it a number of organizational challenges. Moreover, an important aspect of success tends to be the utilization of relationships to so-called transformational users. These users experience problems with established producers' current products before the majority of users, they adopt new technologies earlier than their peers, and they cooperate with established producers for the purpose of transformation of a product field in order to obtain or maintain a central position within the ecosystem. Furthermore, the results reveal how established producers and users are jointly engaged in value creation through various collaborations. However, the results also indicate that the utilization of user relationships for innovation within these types of ecosystems is, to a large extent, a matter of managing tensions emerging within and around these collaborations. On a general level, this thesis points to the potential benefits of considering producer-user ecosystems as a comprehensive perspective, which may explain how companies gain and sustain a competitive edge, rather than one out of many approaches that companies can apply in order to leverage user relationships for innovation. / <p>QC 20140918</p>