The aim of this essay is to examine three separate Swedish public libraries and their respective websites on the grounds of the usability sciences. I firstly had to summarize the main properties of the usability-field in order to gain an extended knowledge of its purposes and possible usage for today’s library systems. I was then able to apply the extended knowledge in the examination of the three library websites and the purpose of determining whether or not they were designed according to the standards set by the usability-sciences. Usability is a rather new science that deals with the dissection and examination of computer-based systems, in order to find the key components that make systems user-friendlier. With user needs being the main focus of its research, usability tries to meet all the different needs of the modern user and construct systems that are less system-centered and more user-centered. As a result, the field of usability has been forced to rely on other scientific fields that have long dealt with human behaviour, such as the fields of Sociology and Psychology to be able to grasp the complexities of human information behaviour. For the field of Library- and Information Science (LIS), the introduction of usability has been fairly recent and may therefore take a while to fully implement into the practice. However as this essay will show, several Swedish public libraries have already made the daring leap and  are well on the road to evolving more user-friendly websites and systems. Hopefully, this new transition will also give them an edge in the highly competitive information-sphere of today.

In order to increase the independence in everyday life of the elderly population, we have developed a lifting aid for loading in the private car trunk. Independence from outside assistance affects self-esteem in a positive direction and can help increase the quality of life for a large group of individuals. As people age and experience changes in performance, it is important that aids and support is available, particularly to reduce the experience of aging and it’s increasing physical limitations. The aim was to develop a function prototype characterized by simplicity, which facilitates loading of the private car trunk. The project was conducted at the request of Autoadapt AB, which is one of the leading actors in car adaptations for individuals with disablilities. A function prototype of the product Easy Load has been produced through dynamic product development and its various tools. In an attempt to meet the requirements of simplicity and ease of use, concepts such as universal design and usability affected the project. In order to find a user need that could form the basis of the project, proceedings began with a pre-study that included observations and group interviews of members in a pensioner club in Halmstad. The Product development work continued with several brainstorming sessions with participants from a number of the university's engineering programs. Ideas from the sessions, together with the results from the benchmarking, formed the basis for final product design and function. A key requirement was that the product could be fitted in sedan car models with easy grips and without any permanent fixings. Construction of the prototype was made mostly in the University’s mechanical workshop, using both self-constructed and sourced components. Stress and installation testing and risk analysis pursuant to FMEA highlighted deficiencies that the project group sought to adjust. In cases where this did not happen, the project group made concrete improvement proposals to simplify further development. This project shows that lifting aids products without permanent fixings are possible to develop for use in sedan car models. Specific product criteria have been met through a designed function prototype for loading in the private car trunk.

This thesis investigates how web agencys in Stockholm use, value and incoroprate the terms usability, user experience and interaction design in their work process. The purpose of this study is to investigate how creative professionals works with the notions of usability, user experience and interaction design with focus on the end user. Our definition of creative professionals is every employee at a web agency involved in the work process of developing digital artefacts in any capacity. We wanted to investigate how these notions are considered, consciously or unconsciously, during the workprocess. Semi-structured interviews were conducted at three different web agencys with eight different employees. The result of the study has shown that all web agencys have a constant focus on the end-user during the entire development of digital artefacts towards their customers.This focus is kept during the whole process, from the development of a concept based on knowledge on both the customer and the end-users, until the release of the end-product. The work and design methods differs between the different web agencys in which way they incorporate end-users in the process.

This thesis addresses the problem of usability in the context of administration of access control systems. We seek to relate the notion of declarative semantics, a recurring theme in research in access control, with usability. We adopt the concrete context of POSIX ACLs and the traditional interface for it that comprises two utilities getfacl and setfacl. POSIX ACLs are the de facto standard to which POSIX conformant systems such as Linux and OpenBSD adhere. The natural semantics of getfacl and setfacl is operational. By operational we mean that the semantics of these are speci ed procedurally. We have designed and implemented an alternate interface that we call askfacl whose natural semantics is declarative. Declarative semantics means "what you see is what it is." We also discuss our design of askfacl and articulate the following thesis that underlies our work: If the natural semantics of the interface for ACLs is declarative, then a user is able to more quickly, accurately and confidently, inspect and edit ACLs than if the semantics is operational. To validate our thesis we conducted a between participant human-subject usability study with 42 participants. The results of our study measurably demonstrate the goodness of declarative semantics in access control.

Machine-readable privacy policies have been developed to help reduce user effort in understanding how websites will use personally identifiable information (PII). The goal of these policies is to enable the user to make informed decisions about the disclosure of personal information in web-based transactions. However, these privacy policies are complex, requiring that a user agent evaluate conformance between the users privacy preferences and the sites privacy policy, and indicate this conformance information to the user. The problem addressed in this thesis is that even with machine-readable policies and current user agents, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of a conflict between privacy preferences and privacy policies. The problem arises partly because current standards operate at the page level: they do not allow a fine-grained treatment of conformance down to the level of a specific field in a web form. In this thesis the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is extended to enable field-level comparisons, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional field-specific conformance information. An evaluation of a prototype agent based on these extensions showed that they allow users to more easily understand how the website privacy policy relates to the users privacy preferences, and where conformance conflicts occur.

Game reviews play an important role in both the culture and business of games the words of a reviewer can have an influential effect on the commercial success of a video game. While reviews are currently used by game developers to aid in important decisions such as project financing and employee bonuses, the effect of game reviews on players is not known. Additionally, the use of game reviews to improve evaluation techniques has received little attention. In this thesis we investigate the effect of game reviews on player experience and perceptions of quality. We show that negative reviews cause a significant effect on how players perceive their in-game experience, and that this effect is a post-play cognitive rationalization of the play experience with the previously-read review text. To address this effect we designed and deployed a new heuristic evaluation technique that specifically uses game reviews to create a fine-grained prioritized list of usability problems based on the frequency, impact, and persistence of each problem. By using our technique we are able to address the most common usability problems identified by game reviews, thus reducing the overall level of negativity found within the review text. Our approach helps to control and eliminate the snowballing effect that can be produced by players reading reviews and subsequently posting their own reviews, and thus improve the commercial success of a game.

"Affordance" is an ecological psychology which can explain the interaction between the natural environment and its physical property of material with a combination of biology. This concept is first applied on interface design by Norman. Gaver also uses this theory to provides a evaluate framework for separating affordances from the perceptual information available about them. To those traditional book readers, the interface design of e-book is one of the reasons they refuse to use it. The user experiences of traditional reading are also have a serious effect on the e-book design. Designers of e-book cannot determine they should provide more traditional way to read or they can just make a whole new user experience on electronic reading. The goal of this study is to use ¡§Affordances¡¨ to discuss the difference between electronic and traditional reading, by using common tasks of traditional and electronic reading to observe user¡¦s action and performance. The main results are the following: the performance of e-book which this study used is lower than traditional book, because 1) Information on the interface is not clear that users may confuse, or make a wrong action. 2) Some functions didn¡¦t provide any instructions or information that can help users to know how to action. 3) The hardware of e-book is too slow that cannot reflect user¡¦s action. The main discussions of e-book as affordance approach are the following. 1) When there are multiple affordances available to choose, users will pick the most efficient one they perceived. 2) If users experienced some difficulty during action, they may choose another affordance to complete task. 3) If the perceived information of icon has multiple meanings to the users, it will cause a false or hidden affordance.

This research uses two approaches, Kansei Engineering Modeling and Usability, to discuss how different web design elements of on-line radio influence the feelings and the usage of the web. This research also uses multidimensional method to demonstrate the relative relationship of the virtual websites built for this research, in order to understand the feelings and usage of the web sites in the unit of the whole website. In the discussion of Kansei Engineering, ¡§clear¡¨, ¡§neat¡¨ and ¡§friendly¡¨ feelings were found in the websites with menu in the top and the left side of the webpage. As for listen-on-line icon, it is better that the icon stands outside the menu. In the perceptual map, which discusses the websites in whole, indicates the obviousness of the listen-on-line icon separate the 8 websites into two, meaning it¡¦s a good discriminant of online radio websites. In the discussion of usability, ¡§activity and concert information¡¨ and ¡§the name of the song and the artist playing¡¨ are positive to the increment of learnability, efficiency, design quality, listening contentment, content variety and satisfaction as a whole. Independent listening window is positive to the increment of learnability and efficiency. The perceptual map of the 8 websites of the usability study, ¡§activity and concert information¡¨ and ¡§the name of the song and the artist playing¡¨ are the most important discriminant, which can be used to increase the usability of on-line radio websites. The findings of the research are only true under the circumstances that the assumption of linearity is being proved. Following research can try other statistical method in order to get results that are more accurate.

<p>Detta arbete är det första steget i en lång process vars slutgiltiga mål är att utveckla en metod för automatisk övergång från en icke-generisk objektorienterad applikation till en generisk.</p><p>Helst borde stöd för en sådan transformation implementeras i en utvecklingsmiljö, IDE. En analogi skulle kunna dras till faktorisering av klasser, en operation som stöds av de flesta utvecklingsmiljöer idag. Som ett första steg i en pågående process är detta arbete tänkt att fungera som ett icke-trivialt exempel för framtida analys. Exemplet består av ett icke-generisk och ett generisk grafpaket som är skrivet i Java 1.4.2 respektive Java 5.0. Uppsatsen beskriver övergången från den icke-generiska till den generiska lösningen på systematiskt sätt som går att upprepa. Tanken är att detta arbete även skall kunna appliceras på andra språk och applikationer i framtiden.</p> / <p>This work is the first step in a long process, which final goal is to develop a method that automatically allows you to go from a non-generic object-oriented program to a generic one. Preferably, support for such a conversion should be implemented in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). An analogy could be drawn to the factorisation of classes, an operation supported by the most common IDEs today. As a first step in an ongoing process, this work is meant to be a non-trivial example for future analysis. The example project constitutes of a non-generic and a generic graph package, which is written in Java 1.4.2 and Java 5.0 respectively. The thesis describes the transition from the non-generic to the generic solution in a systematic and repeatable way. The idea is that this work could be applied to other languages and applications in the future, as well.</p>

Gemeinsamer Workshop von Universitaetsrechenzentrum und Professur "Rechnernetze und verteilte Systeme" der Fakultaet fuer Informatik der TU Chemnitz. Workshop-Thema: Mobilitaet Dieser Vortrag begruendet die Notwendigkeit beim Gestalten von Webseiten auf Gesichtspunkte der Benutzbarkeit einzugehen und zeigt Wege wie dies beruecksichtigt werden kann.