Visual search is an important component of many human-computer interactions and a critical task in a variety of domains. These include screening for prohibited items in x-ray imagery of luggage in airports, identifying anomalies in medical imagery, and looking for unusual activity and changes over time in satellite imagery. Unlike many other human-machine interface tasks where a small error rate is quite acceptable, a crucial element of visual search tasks in these application areas is that a single mistake can have catastrophic consequences. Thus, any improvements in technology, interfaces, or human processes that can be made to aid visual search would be invaluable in these safety critical areas. Furthermore, even when one does not consider consequential activities such as cancer screening and airport security, most human-computer interactions involve some search component, and the impact of even small improvements is magnified by a high frequency of use. This thesis explores how some of these issues affect individuals' and teams' ability to perform visual searching tasks. Considerations such as group size and display configuration are examined, as are novel interfaces that aid search on tabletop and wall displays. The overarching goal of this work is to provide system designers with immediately implementable advice and guidelines on how to improve their systems in respect to visual search and to outline further research in this critical area.

Visual search is an important component of many human-computer interactions and a critical task in a variety of domains. These include screening for prohibited items in x-ray imagery of luggage in airports, identifying anomalies in medical imagery, and looking for unusual activity and changes over time in satellite imagery. Unlike many other human-machine interface tasks where a small error rate is quite acceptable, a crucial element of visual search tasks in these application areas is that a single mistake can have catastrophic consequences. Thus, any improvements in technology, interfaces, or human processes that can be made to aid visual search would be invaluable in these safety critical areas. Furthermore, even when one does not consider consequential activities such as cancer screening and airport security, most human-computer interactions involve some search component, and the impact of even small improvements is magnified by a high frequency of use. This thesis explores how some of these issues affect individuals' and teams' ability to perform visual searching tasks. Considerations such as group size and display configuration are examined, as are novel interfaces that aid search on tabletop and wall displays. The overarching goal of this work is to provide system designers with immediately implementable advice and guidelines on how to improve their systems in respect to visual search and to outline further research in this critical area.

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Mobile Geographical Information Systems are becoming a more and more important tool for presenting geographical data. They are used to support decision making processes, present an overview of distributed information or are in a form of location based services. The problem lies in the fact that mobile devices have limited resources and should still be able to present massive amounts of content. Ideally, the user and the conditions in which the program runs are well defined, but this is usually not the case. This thesis provides a sample prototype implementation of a mobile GIS developed as an alternative to an existing web-based user interface (UI). It focuses on specific conditions present on mobile devices, ways of presenting the data and possibilities of reusing existing elements from the web UI that could be suitable for the mobile environment.

Hospitals have limited budgets, making the cost of an examination important. A whole-body MRI scan is much less expensive than a PET-CT scan, making the MRI desirable in cases when the result from the MR machine will be sufficient. Also, unlike CT, MRI does not rely on ionizing radiation, which is known to increase the risk of developing cancer. To make the most out of the MRI results, an efficient visualization of the data is important. The goal of this project was to develop an application that would facilitate radiologists’ evaluation of whole-body MRI data of lymphoma patients. This was achieved by introducing a fused image between two types of MRI images, offering simplified loading of all the study MRI data and creating a rotatable maximum intensity projection from which points can be selected and zoomed to in other types of images. Unfortunately the loading of the data and some parts of the interaction is somewhat slow, which is something that needs to be addressed before this application could become a possibly useful tool for the radiologists.

Touchscreen technology is gradually becoming more popular and massive in our present society to the point where it is hard to find a person that has never used this interface system. Handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets are predominantly based on touchscreens as the main way to interact with them. Nevertheless, that is not the case when it comes to personal computers either desktop machines or laptops which are still chiefly based on traditional keyboard and mouse as their main input system. In this study we explore the potential that touchscreen based interface can offer for personal computers carrying through an observational experiment with six participants that were asked to perform a list of tasks using both traditional keyboard-mouse interface and touchscreen interface. The measurements during the observation concerned time and error rate for every task. Each participant was interviewed right after the completion of the observational phase in order to get a qualitative insight on their views and perceptions regarding both interfaces. The data collected was analyzed based on some existing models within touchscreen interface and human-computer interaction that have been elaborated in previews research. The final results led to the conclusion, that touchscreen-based interface proved to be slower and have higher error rate than traditional interface in a big number of the tasks performed by the participants. Similarly, the general perception of the people towards having touchscreen on a personal computer still seems a bit doubtful, although they do see some concrete positive aspects about this interface. Nevertheless, touchscreen outperformed traditional interface in some particular tasks. This implies that touchscreen interface has a clear potential for personal computers that would let users utilize these machines in a much broader and more interactive way than people do it today with the traditional keyboard-mouse interface.

With the evolution of communication and hardware technology, mobile phones evolved from the voice communication to the multi-function, the scope of mobile phone applications had completely changed. In this era of rapid technological progress, the shorter product lifecycle and higher replacement rates of smartphone induce competition in the relevant industry become more intense. Various industries introduce new products and applications in efforts to cope with the increasing challenges, but how many features are used by users? In the cause of real connection between mobile phone and users, the control must with a good user interface, but the needs of industries identified do not necessarily conform to user's needs, ignoring the user's thoughts often lead to product failure, master the needs of user is the key to success. Therefore, this study uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the theoretical foundation, adds the Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) and the induction of the human-machine interface (or User Interface, UI) design principles (diversity, intuition) as external variables, to further explores the attitude of using smartphone . The results: (1) diversity, compatibility, positive influence on perceived usefulness, but intuition don't influence significantly; (2) diversity, intuition, compatibility, positive influence on perceived ease of use; (3) perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, relative advantage positive influence on the attitude of use; (4) trialability, observability influence on the attitude of use is not significant, and trialability existence negative relationship with the attitude of use.

With the development of the network, people are increasingly used to exchanging information on the Internet. Therefore, the capability of robot controller should not be limited to control robots locally. The objective of this thesis is to provide a system, the screenplay based performance platform of Robotic puppet shows (SBPP), commanding multiple robots; each robot performing its own role based on a script composed by the developed authoring tool. Wherever and whenever a user wants to use SBPP, he/she just needs connect to the network and begins to design a script. SBPP consists of three parts: the graphic authoring platform (GAP) of screenplays for robotic puppet shows, the screenplay interpreter (SI) for multi-morphic robots, and robots themself. The work of this thesis is concentrated on the implementation of the GAP and robots (model: DARwIn-OP) control. The GAP provides options for a variety of robots to users. The users can easily design their own robot scripts merely by drag-and-drop operating on icons representing the actions, behavior, and short scripts, respectively. Whenever a script is created or updated, GAP will automatically save the script as an XML file format internally. In addition, robots can be conducted to express their emotions orally by utter the lines composed. The system is demonstrated by a play of ¡§do-as-I-do¡¨ and recoded in a video at YouTube:¡¨ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ErTOgAQSo¡¨.

User interface (UI) has become the key element of modern information systems (ISs) and is commonly viewed as one of the decisive factors for the success of an IS project. Many component-based development tools have been introduced by software vendors to meet the needs of designing a variety of UIs. Such modern design tools offer system developer vehicles to create sophisticated UIs with a few codes. However, the modeling methodology from the stages of user requirement modeling to UI modeling based on the modern design tools is virtually lacking. This study presents an integrated modeling methodology, which integrates the unified modeling language with interface drawing and interface glossary to provide a seamless and graphical approach and specifications for component-based UI modeling from user requirement modeling. A real-world case using the integrated approach is presented and a prototype system is developed to illustrate the concepts, application, and the advantages of using the proposed methodology.

Modeling software with unified modeling language (UML) and model driven architechutre (MDA) concept have become the new paradigm of modern systems analysis and design. Several CASE tools have been introduced to facilitate the transformation from platform independent model (i.e., class diagram) to platform specific model, and thereby enhance the efficiency of system development. This research presents a systematic methodology which integrated the UML and MDA concept with CASE tool to transform the class diagram into web-based user interface during the system development process. A real-world case using the integrated techniques is presented and the Rational Rose is used to illustrate the concepts, application, and the advantages of using the proposed methodology. With this approach, the system developer can transform class diagram into web-based user interface automatically and thereby enhance the efficiency of system development.