This project aimed to investigate factors that help architects and designers to evaluate thesustainability of their ideas in the early stage of building design through Life Cycle Thinkingin a more simplified and comprehensible way. In order to achieve this goal, the author tookadvantage of valuable tools for ideation, realization and validation that are used in aninnovation process. The findings helped the author to realize what are the needs of thearchitects and designers to be able to step into the road of sustainability and raise theirknowledge about how to bring Life Cycle Thinking into their design process. Analyzingempirical findings and the competitors made it clear that some features, which are actuallydemanding attention from architects and designers, are missing in the current existingsolutions. As a result, a digital ideation tool was brought to this project through UserInterface (UI) Design. The noted solution is an add-on feature which is compatible and can beadded to the current digital tools and other Building Information Modelling (BIM) softwarefor a better fulfillment of architects and designers requirements.

Public announcement systems have since long been a key communication method for airports. Visualcommunication, in the form of display systems, in conjunction with vocal announcements reach a broadaudience. Automating the process of generating announcements can increase effectiveness and profitability ofairports. Additionally modern text to speech technologies present airports with the possibility of announcing information in numerous languages, independent of employee language knowledge. This thesis includes the development process and result of a web-based announcement system for use in airport environments. The system utilizes modern text to speech technologies to achieve intelligibleannouncements created through an intuitive and user friendly interface.

Research relating to VUIs (voice user interface) such as voice assistants like Siri, Google Home, and Alexa has mostly been focused on general usage, error handling, and privacy concerns. This study focuses on mental models in relation to VUI - how users' presumptions about scope and how VUIs work match the reality. Specifically, this study aims to find out how mental models of VUIs form and evolve as well as whether or not mental models of VUIs affect usage. An online survey directed towards Google Home users showed its respondents, mainly identified as early adopters and primary users, showcasing a good mental model of Google Home together with frequent and varied usage as well as self-expressed knowledge. Due to suspected distortion of results caused by recruiting from an interest group on Facebook, study results are not considered to be representative to the population (VUI users in Sweden). This study showed that users base their mental models of VUIs around conventions found in human-to-human conversation and that these mental models evolve through feedback and error handling and can be improved by users exploring and testing more use cases for the VUI.

This thesis sets out to investigate hedonic and cultural web interface design elements present on wine tourism destination websites. The thesis focuses on explaining several cultural frameworks and especially the notion of localization, globalization, culturability, and cultural markers, the high/low context theory as well as tenets of hedonics in user interface design. The aim of the thesis was to develop a better understanding and knowledge about which localized design elements that exist and are important in the cultural context of wine tourism destination websites. Hence, the patterns found can help understand how to create and design websites that are culturally sensitive and globally congruent, thus meeting the needs and behaviors of users across different cultures and backgrounds. A web design analysis was conducted to answer the research questions and results were analyzed qualitatively. The results from the web design analysis indicate several similarities and differences found in web interface design elements between the investigated websites. The results found, indicate that the use of hedonic and cultural web interface design elements present on the interfaces investigated are highly context-dependent. Meaning that the websites are preferably considered being culturally dependent, and to a greater extent reflect and are used to motivate the cultural context examined and regional differences. Hence, the patterns found in web interface design elements are considered to be culturally sensitive to the context of wine destination websites and marketing aims of the websites investigated.  The findings can increase knowledge about hedonic aspects in cross-cultural design and can thus be used to help create culturally congruent and globalized interfaces for this specific context.

The goal of this thesis is to improve graphical user interface of Tone Mapping Studio(TMS) program. This program is being developed on the Faculty of Information Technology(FIT), Brno University of Technology (BUT) by doc. Ing. Martin Čadík, PhD. The current program is using framework Qt3 , which is old and not compatible with modern libraries. This program has to be rewritten to support current version Qt5. I will analyze other programs in the area of working with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images and video. Changes for improving the interface will be proposed and UX tests will be done. Second part will consist of comparing plug-ins for converting images to grayscale that already exists in TMS.

This thesis examines how usability and design improvements affect user engagement on a website. By conducting interviews and analysing user behaviour and feedback related to a job application form, the study demonstrates that enhancements in usability and design can lead to improved quality in user responses. Specifically, an increase in the length and quality of text field input was observed, along with improved responses regarding profile pictures, links, and documents. However, there are certain limitations to consider, including the fact that participants were aware of the monitoring during the interviews, which could influence the authenticity of the results. Additionally, other factors that could have influenced user engagement were not taken into account, making it difficult to solely attribute the changes to usability and design improvements.

Dream Quest(2014) introduced the Roguelike deckbuilder as a game genre. The genre later became popular with the help of Slay the Spire in 2017. As the genre is still fairly new, there are not a lot of tools for designing games of said genre. Taking inspiration from games of the same genre could be a solution to such a problem, one way to do so is via modding. Slay the Spire offers an extensive modding API to users which lets users create new cards, items, events, and even characters. By utilizing these features, it is possible to create a concept for a new game. To use the API, however, would require users to be familiar with programming, which could take a long time to learn for a beginner. Thus, a UI, The Creator was created to let users without experience create mods for Slay the Spire. The UI lets users create cards with different actions and properties without the need to interact with the source code.

Informative sound design serves as an indicator to the player that something just happened, it can be urgently needing the players immediate attention, or serve as a feedback for a job well done. This paper studies how players interpret different informative sounds, how confident they are about their interpretation, and why they interpret the sound that way.

In this thesis, the user interface design was developed for an internal website to help employees' competence development by getting them to attend more activities for competence development. Since it is generally up to the employee to develop their competence, they must be motivated. Therefore, this thesis aimed to design the website to motivate employees to search for, choose and participate in more competence development activities. The method chosen to design this user interface consisted of 3 phases. The first phase consisted of a preliminary study to understand what motivated employees to apply for activities. This phase proved very important to the final design as most design decisions related to motivation were made during this phase. The second phase involved developing a LoFi prototype based on the preliminary study and refining it based on results from user tests conducted during this phase. The final phase involved designing and implementing a HiFi prototype in code based on the LoFi prototype and then testing the HiFi prototype for motivation. The results from the HiFi prototype tests showed that the website's user interface motivated employees to search for, choose, and attend more activities for competence development. These results showed that the method used did yield good results. However, because many key findings from this motivation-focused preliminary study were related to usability, it is impossible to know how the results would differ if the preliminary study had focused on usability instead of motivation. Although it could not be concluded that the focus on motivation was necessary to achieve these results, it did seem to force the designer to understand users’ needs on a deeper level which could contribute to better results.

Gaming, a widely adopted form of entertainment, brings out different reactions inpeople. While some perceive it as a leisure activity, other find it the element of violence that can be found troubling. Researchers have found that video games are associated with many advantages such as enhancing focus, multitasking ability and working memory. Educational games aim to create motivated learners, which can be described as enthusiastic, focused and engaged. To create motivated learners, it is important to stimulate players both through functionality and graphical design, as a poor graphical design can lead to unwillingness to continue playing. Therefore, it is important to conduct a thorough investigation on the impact of the user interface on user engagement in order to gain a comprehensive understanding. Previous research has highlighted the importance of extrinsic and intrinsic objectives, as well as the role of activities and emotions in player engagement. Moreover, the collective findings from previous research significantly enhance our understanding of player engagement and its importance in game design and educational settings. However, our research aims to specifically investigate the impact of user interface on user engagement and aim to contribute to the existing understanding in this specific area. This study focuses on addressing the issue of inadequate user engagement in the game SocioBalance. To do this, data on players' feedback of the user interface is collected to understand the source for its shortcomings and identify areas for improvement and subsequently update the user interface of the game. Players were invited to participate in a playtest session and a dedicated questionnaire is administered to gather feedback on the user interface. The findings indicated that by improving the user interface enhanced the clarity of the game's objective. Furthermore, a higher proportion of players found the game to be more appealing. In addition, there was an observed increase in the overall graphical experience and players' inclination to continue playing / Spel, är en allmänt accepterad form av underhållning, väcker diverse reaktioner hos människor. Vissa ser det som en fritidssysselsättning, medan andra anser att våldselement är oroande. Forskare har funnit att videospel är förknippade med många fördelar, exempelvis förbättrad fokus, förmåga att hantera flera uppgifter samtidigt och arbetsminne. Pedagogiska spel syftar till att skapa motiverade elever, vilket kan beskrivas som entusiastiska, fokuserade och engagerade. För att skapa motiverade elever är det viktigt att stimulera spelarna både genom funktionalitet och grafisk design, eftersom en dålig grafisk design kan leda till ovilja att fortsätta spela. På grund av detta är det viktigt att genomföra en noggrann undersökning av användargränssnittets inverkan på användarnas engagement för att få en omfattande förståelse. Tidigare forskning har framhävt vikten av extrinsiska och intrinsiska mål, samt rollen av aktiviteter och känslor för spelarnas engagemang. Dessutom förbättrar de samlade resultaten från tidigare forskning vår förståelse av spelarens engagemang och dess betydelse för speldesign och utbildningsmiljöer. Vårt forskningsprojekt syftar dock specifikt till att undersöka användargränssnittets inverkan på spelarnas engagemang och bidra till den befintliga kunskapen inom detta område. Denna forskningsstudie fokuserar på att adressera problemet gällande otillräckligt spelarengagemang i spelet SocioBalance. För att åstadkomma detta insamlades data angående spelarnas återkoppling på användargränssnittet för att förstå orsakerna för brister och för att identifiera potentiella förbättringsområden, varpå uppdaterades användargränssnittet. Spelare bjöds in för att delta i ett speltest och en speciell enkät användes för att samla in spelarnas synpunkter gällande användargränssnittet. Resultaten visade att förbättringar i användargränssnittet gjorde spelets mål tydligare, dessutom ansåg en större andel av spelarna att spelet var mer attraktivt. Vidare noterades en påtaglig förbättring av den övergripande grafiska upplevelsen samt en betydande ökning i spelarnas benägenhet att fortsätta engagera sig i spelet.