The information search process within a website can often be frustrating and confusing for website visitors. Navigational structures are often complex and multitiered, hiding links with several layers of navigation that user's might be interested in. Poor navigation causes user frustration. Adaptive navigation can be used to improve the user's navigational experience by flattening the navigational structure and reducing the number of accessible links to only those that the user would be interested in. This examines the effects on a user's navigational experience, of using adaptive navigation as the main navigational structure on a website. This study measured these effects by gathering survey responses from over 1,000 users. The survey recorded users' perceptions of navigational effectiveness and efficiency as well as user satisfaction and efficacy. Users were assigned into nine treatment groups that provided variations in navigational change frequency and the order of navigational links. Surveys were used to identify the effects of navigational change frequency and navigational link ordering on the user's navigational experience. The survey found that adaptive navigation works best when change occurs on a page-by-page basis and links are ordered alphabetically.

The issue of high school reform has received national attention during the first part of the 21st century. One idea brought forth in this restructuring effort has been the desire to create high schools with smaller student populations. However, in an era of tight budgets, where resources are not always available to build more schools, educators have explored the possibility of dividing existing large high schools into smaller units. This restructuring approach has many titles, but is frequently referred to as a Smaller Learning Community (SLC). Since 2000, the federal government has pledged $245 million to schools willing to create SLCs. This research has studied the schools in Florida that have received the federal implementation grant and have established SLCs. The 39 Florida high schools that were awarded the federal grant in 2000, 2001, and 2002 served as the population for this study. Twenty schools in the population completed a 45-item survey which measured implementation of five key SLC elements:(a) accountability, (b) autonomy, (c) identity, (d) instructional focus, and (e) personalization. Based on the survey results, an implementation score was determined for each participating school. Based on 5-point Likert scale (with a not applicable option) for the 35 questions that pertained to the five elements, a total score of 175 was the maximum amount possible. Individual responding school scores ranged from 104.7 - 157.1. The overall implementation score was also correlated with selected school indicators. Survey respondents also provided rationale for the implementation of SLCs and perceived benefits to students, teachers, and parents. In general, the survey respondents agreed that SLCs at their schools addressed the five key elements. The implementation scores and teacher comments, however, provided evidence that the levels of implementation of SLCs across the state varied in terms of the elements. Suggestions for future research and educational practices are provided

The video-based computational analyses of human face and gesture signals encompass a myriad of challenging research problems involving computer vision, machine learning and human computer interaction. In this thesis, we focus on the following challenges: a) the classification of hand and body gestures along with the temporal localization of their occurrence in a continuous stream, b) the recognition of facial expressivity levels in people with Parkinson's Disease using multimodal feature representations, c) the prediction of student learning outcomes in intelligent tutoring systems using affect signals, and d) the personalization of machine learning models, which can adapt to subject and group-specific nuances in facial and gestural behavior. Specifically, we first conduct a quantitative comparison of two approaches to the problem of segmenting and classifying gestures on two benchmark gesture datasets: a method that simultaneously segments and classifies gestures versus a cascaded method that performs the tasks sequentially. Second, we introduce a framework that computationally predicts an accurate score for facial expressivity and validate it on a dataset of interview videos of people with Parkinson's disease. Third, based on a unique dataset of videos of students interacting with MathSpring, an intelligent tutoring system, collected by our collaborative research team, we build models to predict learning outcomes from their facial affect signals. Finally, we propose a novel solution to a relatively unexplored area in automatic face and gesture analysis research: personalization of models to individuals and groups. We develop hierarchical Bayesian neural networks to overcome the challenges posed by group or subject-specific variations in face and gesture signals. We successfully validate our formulation on the problems of personalized subject-specific gesture classification, context-specific facial expressivity recognition and student-specific learning outcome prediction. We demonstrate the flexibility of our hierarchical framework by validating the utility of both fully connected and recurrent neural architectures.

Music streaming services aim to provide users with personalized content to avoid information overload and increase the user experience. Besides the recommender systems that are involved to ensure users are provided with their musical preferences, vocabulary can play a significant role in achieving personalization. Including personal pronouns is one way to implement personalization. However, looking into music streaming services it has yet to be discovered how the implementation of personalization via wording has its effect on the users' decisions, expectations, and satisfaction. The study aims to get a better understanding of how vocabulary framing in personalized playlist titles affects the user experience. The lack of knowledge makes it difficult to make wise decisions in wording and it could lead to ineffective use of vocabulary within playlist titles on music streaming services.  To carry out this study an online survey was conducted, and the data collected was stored in an API spreadsheet. The program SPSS was then used to further analyse the data to draw conclusions. Based on the results of the survey it was concluded that using wording that indicates personalization does have a significant effect on user choice and overall satisfaction within a music streaming platform. When given the choice of picking either a playlist with a title that indicates personalization or one where there is no indication of personalization, participants were significantly more drawn towards the playlists that indicate personalization.

Social media is replacing many of traditional media’s purposes, information gathering is one of them. In the digital culture today we use our phones, the internet, and social media in our daily lives, especially younger generations, and those generations could be relying their information gathering on social media. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to get a better understanding of which role social media plays in the information, news, and political gathering of Generation Z. The aim is also to investigate how Generation Z views potential threats, personalization, and fact-checking on social media. Those questions were answered through a semi-structured interview with 10 interviewees from different parts of Sweden that were within Generation Z. Generation Z has a beginning of birth year starting at 1997 to 2012 and were chosen because that generation is the first generation to be born and grow up with access to portable digital technology and internet. The results through the thematic analysis made six themes which were social media use, experience of misinformation, source dependency, physical vs digital newspaper perceived trustworthiness, fact-checking preferences, and personalization. The interviewees indicated that social media is their main source of information, news, and politics, a few used traditional media now and then but mostly social media platforms. The perceived ability of the interviewees was that they knew the importance of following and gathering information, news, and politics through trustworthy sources on the platforms. If the interviewees were interested in a subject they saw a post about or if it was considered important they would fact-check it, otherwise not. The interviewees knew more or less that they had seen misinformation, they had experienced personalization and had different opinions about it.

Forest machine operators work in an environment that requires simultaneous monitoring of several factors. This is done using a control and information system, MaxiXT, that should provide the right information at the right time. The interface plays an important role in improving efficiency and promoting a favourable working environment for operators. Therefore, it is important to have an interface that effectively meets the needs of users. The objective of this study was to design a prototype of a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for the forest machine drivers to find the information they need. The design thinking methodology was used in this study, with a focus on forest machine operators who are the users of the control and information system. The process involves conducting user research and user testing. The insights gathered from the user research, combined with the findings from literature studies, served as the foundation for developing the prototype. The prototype was tested in both Mid-Fi and Hi-Fi versions, generating valuable feedback and insights. Overall, the impressions of the future users were highly positive. The diverse personalities and backgrounds of the users revealed varying interests in interaction and expectations from the control and information system. This highlights the potential for personalizing the interface, while also providing default settings based on the most typical preferences of Swedish users. To ensure broader usability across a wider user group, it is essential to supplement this information with input from users in other countries.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Mobile phone's offer enriched ways of communicating and have become devices with a very strong personal attachment for most users. While being personal communication devices, mobile phones displays limits with user interfaces more focused on features and distinct applications rather thanproviding rich interactions with a focus on people and communication between people.The present project explores interaction design for the mobile phone as a more personal and social device. It's key outcome is the Relify concept with it's affiliated prototype. Relify is a mobile userinterface where presentation of people and communication is influenced by the character of the relationships with the people involved. Relify creates a personalized and flexible way for users to gain access to both personal communication and web feeds from third party services within aseamless user interface. This report describes the explorative design process leading to Relify, findings from field testing of it's prototype and design themes identified during the work. The work concludes that Relify demonstrates a personalized and fluent user interface with increased overview and a richer userexperience. Among it's experiential qualities is an increased sense of connection, that can excite communication between people. In summarizing the work, considerations and implications ondesigning mobile user interfaces are discussed against the experiences of this project.