Over the history of interaction design, concepts and methods of prototyping have been significantly developed to address new challenges faced by the field and the ever-going advancement of new technologies. Some of the important developments are related to the notions of mixed-fidelity prototyping, experience prototyping, and prototypes as filters. Building upon these developments, this study explores a multiple-fidelity prototyping approach, that is, using progressively higher fidelity prototypes in iteration. The study focused particularly on the design of user engagement. It documented, and contributed to, an actual design process of Xplore, an augmented reality game-based learning application. Three participatory design-style workshops employing low-, mixed-, and high-fidelity prototypes were conducted respectively. Thematic analyses of participants’ interactions revealed sets of themes in the workshops, which reflected the changing focus and scope of the design space. The implications of the results obtained in the study highlighted the role of prototypes of each fidelity level in engaging users in a design process, as well as the potential benefits of combining multiple fidelity prototypes when designing for user engagement.

Abstract Organizations continuously strive to engage customers in the services development process. The social web facilitates this process by enabling novel channels for voluntary feedback-sharing and collaborative interaction through social media and technologically advanced environments. The component parts of these environments are information systems that are linked with social media and designed for large displays to support interactivity. The work performed during this research involved the design and assessment of operational software features for encouraging user engagement through publicly displayed information systems. Drawing upon socio-psychological theories and interconnecting them to the seven social influence design principles listed in the Persuasive Systems Design model, this dissertation examines the role of persuasive software features in altering human behavior with respect to engagement in feedback-sharing and collaborative interaction. The dissertation consists of five quantitative studies, including one Twitter survey (involving 403 respondents) and four experiments with publicly displayed Twitter-based systems (involving 284 users), that successively complement each other to address the main research question: How can social influence design principles persuade people to engage with publicly displayed systems that are integrated with social media? The results of these studies reveal interplay between the design principles and indicate that they have the capacity to improve the persuasiveness of information systems and predict the behavioral intentions of users to engage with such systems in the future. Based on these findings, a framework for studying socially influencing systems (SIS) is proposed. This framework is potentially instrumental in achieving a richer understanding of how to effectively harness social influence for enhanced user engagement through socio-technical environments and for the future development of persuasive information systems. / Tiivistelmä Organisaatioiden palvelukehityksen tavoitteena on sitouttaa ja innostaa asiakkaita. Sosiaalinen verkko edistää tätä prosessia tarjoamalla uusia väyliä niin vapaaehtoiselle palautteenjaolle kuin sosiaalisessa mediassa ja edistyneissä teknologisissa ympäristöissä tapahtuvalle interaktiiviselle yhteistyöllekin. Nämä ympäristöt koostuvat tietojärjestelmistä, jotka on yhdistetty sosiaaliseen mediaan, ja jotka on suunniteltu interaktiota edistäville suurille näytöille. Tässä tutkimuksessa on suunniteltu ja arvioitu ohjelmisto-ominaisuuksia, joiden tarkoitus on suostutella ja osallistuttaa julkisesti esilläolevien tietojärjestelmien ja näyttöjen kautta. Tutkimus nojaa sosiopsykologiseen teoriapohjaan, ja yhdistää näitä seitsemään sosiaalisen vaikuttamisen suunnitteluperiaatteeseen, jotka on kuvattu vaikuttavien suunnittelumenetelmien mallissa. Tämä väitöstyö tutkii vaikuttavien ohjelmistollisten ominaisuuksien osuutta käyttäytymisen muuttamisessa kohdistuen erityisesti siihen, miten loppukäyttäjää voidaan suostutella jakamaan palautetta ja ottamaan osaa interaktiiviseen yhteistyöhön. Työ koostuu viidestä määrällisestä tutkimuksesta, jotka vastaavat tutkimuskysymykseen: kuinka sosiaalisen vaikuttamisen suunnitteluperiaatteet voivat suostutella ja vakuuttaa ihmiset käyttämään julkisesti esilläolevia järjestelmiä, jotka on yhdistetty sosiaaliseen mediaan? Tutkimuksista yksi on Twitter-kyselytutkimus (403 vastaajaa) ja neljä tutkimusta tehtiin julkisesti esilläolevalla Twitter-pohjaisella järjestelmällä (284 vastaajaa). Tutkimusten tulokset osoittavat mainittujen suunnitteluperiaatteiden keskinäisen vuorovaikutuksen, sekä kuinka niiden avulla voidaan parantaa tietojärjestelmien vaikuttavuutta ja ennustaa tulevaa käyttöä. Tutkimustulosten pohjalta työssä luodaan viitekehys sosiaalisesti vaikuttavien järjestelmien tutkimukseen. Tämä viitekehys on keskeisessä asemassa pyrittäessä saavuttamaan syvällisempi ymmärrys siitä, kuinka käyttäjiä voidaan suostutella hyödyntämällä sosiaalista vaikuttamista. Viitekehystä voidaan käyttää myös vaikuttavien järjestelmien kehittämisessä.

Duolingo is a popular mobile language-learning application that has been around the market since 2012 and has been researched in its language-learning abilities. It is crucial for mobile language learning applications to keep their users interested, nevertheless, as users easily lose interest in continuing their language study. This thesis looks at how Duolingo's gamified system design implements persuasive principles to increase user engagement. The thesis aims to advance the knowledge of user engagement in language learning apps and help create useful mobile language learning applications. To achieve the goal, it was necessary to determine which persuasive principles were being applied by Duolingo's gamified system design. This was done using the Persuasive System Design (PSD) model by Oinas Kukkonen and Harjumaa (2009). The research consisted of qualitative semi-structured interviews with 8 young adults living in Sweden. The aim of the interviews was to find detailed, deep, empirical data and compare it to a theoretical framework using thematic analysis. The results of these interviews showed that Duolingo's gamified system design effectively applies persuasive principles to engage and encourage language learners. However, it was discovered that several persuasive principles needed to be improved in order to further enhance user involvement. This study adds to the understanding of persuasion by demonstrating how these principles can be applied to other mobile language learning applications to increase user engagement.

This  research  emphasizes  the role  of  social  media  in  customer  acquisition  retention.Furthermore, it investigates insights that have the potential to benefit tech startups inshaping  their  strategies  and  effectively  allocating  resources  to  achieve  consistentcommunication with their customer base. The field of research is particularly relevant dueto the research gap present in the literature that does not investigate how technologystartups should approach the initial acquisition and retention of the user base, consideringthe limited resources available to these newborn organizations. The research providesinsights into customers' perceptions of brands and companies on social media platforms.It offers intuitions on how to enhance customer trust through these platforms and whichare the preferred way of interaction between customers and companies both on and offsocial media.The study was performed using qualitative and quantitative primary data with the purposeof gaining a deep understanding of the research topic. However, the focus has been puton the quantitative data aiming to create objective and generalizable  results, seekingunbiased findings.The  results  of  the research  showed  how important it  is  to  have  an  effective CRM(Customer Relationship  Management) system as well as  being able to identify  theaudience, understanding, therefore, the communication method that best fit the chosentarget, with the aim of interacting with them in the expected and preferred way, beingthus one step closer on achieving customer retention and acquisition.

As electronic waste and unsustainable Information- and communication product consumption is a growing global problem, more effective tools are required for people and businesses to measure and improve their social and environmental impacts. The Agenda 2030 plan for sustainable development addresses this issue and calls for proper and safer treatment of material extraction, recycling and disposal. TCO Development have created an IT impact assessment tool which addresses this specific problem by giving procurers and purchasers the ability to browse and compare sustainable IT products. To be an effective tool, usability and user engagement attributes have to be considered, as well as the context of the user. The target audience of IT procurement officers are defined and a qualitative study is conducted to evaluate which changes to the design are important to implement to increase the usability and user engagement of the IT sustainability impact assessment tool. The evaluation of the tool shows general positive feedback towards the general layout, design and functionality. Only a few severe errors are discovered which are identified to be in the filtering process. Errors regarding the sensitivity of the slider tool, the excess of options when choosing a TCO certificate version, and confusing terminology while choosing a product type are a few problems which are discovered. A few corrective design alterations were presented based on these discoveries. Moving forward, the iterative design process should continue to address the remaining usability errors. Furthermore, developers and designers should prioritize improving the aspects of data accuracy, transparency as well as system integration to improve corresponding user engagement attributes. / Elektroniskt avfall och ohållbar konsumtion av informations- och kommunikationsprodukter är ett växande problem i världen. Fler och effektivare verktyg behövs för att människor och företag ska kunna mäta och förbättra sin sociala och miljömässiga påverkan. Agenda 2030-planen för hållbar utveckling berör denna fråga genom att efterlysa säkra och hållbara metoder för materialutvinning, återvinning och avfallshantering av produkter. TCO Development har skapat ett verktyg som bedömer IT-produkters klimatavtryck vilket tillåter inköpare och upphandlare att gå igenom och jämföra hållbara IT-produkter med varandra. För att fungera effektivt behöver verktygets attribut för användbarhet och användarengagemang tillgodoses. Vidare behöver kontexten för verktygets användning analyseras. Målgruppen för verktyget definierades och en kvalitativ studie genomfördes därefter för att identifiera vilka designförändringar som är viktiga att implementera för att öka användbarheten och engagemanget hos användarna. Resultatet av studien visar att det finns en generell positiv attityd gentemot den allmänna layouten, designen och funktionaliteten hos  verktyget. Endast ett fåtal allvarliga avvikelser upptäcktes och kunde isoleras till filtreringsprocessen. Känsligheten av skjutreglaget, ett överflöd av certifieringsalternativ att välja bland, samt missvisande terminologi vid val av produkttyp är några problem som upptäcktes. Utifrån dessa, kunde förslag på åtgärdande designförändringar presenteras. I framtiden bör TCO Development fortsätta arbeta iterativt med designprocessen och fokusera på de kvarvarande användbarhetsavvikelserna. Vidare bör utvecklare och designers prioritera verktygets förmåga att presentera korrekt och transparent data, såväl som integrationen med externa system. På så vis kan de tillhörande attributen för användarengagemang förbättras.

Digital growth and the adaption of internet-based solutions, particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning, have dramatically changed the way design is done today. This rapid change in technology has challenged the level of automation, which influences the human-automation interactions with the available colour-design tools (academic and commercial). As colour design and selection are known to be one of the most critical steps of any art or design journey, the currently available tools use one over the other approaches, from the automation-levels spectrum, when it comes to contextual search for colour palettes, colour-extracting, and colour compatibility. On the one hand, fully automated approaches could exclude the designers’ intervention; on the other hand, fully manual approaches could be affected by human errors and weaknesses. Both approaches tend to have problems when used in colour design tools, such as restricting the designers’ freedom, overwhelming designers with information-overload and option-widget clutter that exist in the interfaces of such tools, or limiting designers by the functionalities offered by the tool based on its purpose, causing it to partially support certain parts of the designers’ colour selection process rather than the whole process. The thesis focuses on investigating the possible solutions for balancing the automated and manual methods for generating colour palettes and supporting the designers’ non-standardised colour-selection processes while tailoring the solution to intellectually stimulate and engage designers who work in different design fields, in comparison with the Adobe Explore Page–which is one of the most well-known and established colour design tools in today’s market and one of the applications that offers a contextual search feature. To fulfil the purpose of this research, a web-based application was prototyped (named Paletto), which consists of the requirements for enabling the rapid generation and exploration of colour palette variations, supporting end-users to contextually search for palettes, and allowing users to apply constraints (via a preference selection list) for a holistic palette adjustment. Afterwards, the proposed application was evaluated with 20 individuals from the target audience, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to prove the concept according to participants’ acceptance, estimate Paletto’s effectiveness on their workflow and design process, examine their engagement and experience when completing the exploratory tasks, and gather additional insights about the design or the conceptual design and implementation of the application. Paletto generally received positive responses towards (1) the accuracy and relevance of its search results, (2) the selection feature and its adaptability and flexibility for human interventions, and (3) the system’s feedback in terms of information accessibility (e.g., search word and number of pages in the pagination). However, the palette generation feature had partially negative responses where participants showed annoyance, confusion, and thought it was complicated. At the same time, several participants appreciated the diversity of the generated palettes and the conceptual design of Paletto in general. Paletto found to effectively facilitate the colour-selection process and designers’ workloads in several areas, such as: fulfilling the end-user goals of producing quality palettes to be used in design projects; resources-efficiency (e.g., money-preserving, effort facilitation, and time-saving) for inspirational image gathering; automatic colour extraction and palette generation; providing freedom and support of decision making to explore colour combinations and variations via the iterative preferences selection; supporting colour-pattern identification in the selections; providing variation and relevant results when searching inspirational image gathering with accurate colour extractions that represent the searched images. Moreover, Paletto proved to offer greater user engagement and a better user experience in comparison with Adobe’s Explore Page. This was due to the felt involvement and the continuous interactivity offered by Paletto’s search and preference-selection features that allowed iterative palette generation and modification. In conclusion, the evaluations indicated some pain-points and gaps in the current design that were discussed in this thesis, and are accordingly recommended to be investigated in future work.

Au cours des dernières années, le domaine du documentaire interactif s’est progressivement développé en raison des changements survenus dans le monde de l’Internet et d’études académiques croissantes sur le sujet. Pourtant, on sait relativement peu de choses sur la relation entre l’usager et le documentaire interactif. L’objet de cette étude est précisément de mesurer les attitudes et les interactions de l’usager exposé à un documentaire interactif décliné en différentes versions, disposant chacune d’un degré d’interactivité plus ou moins développé. L’étude de l’attitude des usagers nous a conduit à approfondir les notions d’engagement narratif, d’interactivité perçue, d’engagement perçu et d’attitude à l’égard du site Web documentaire interactif. Un autre objectif de cette étude est d’examiner la relation entre interactions réelles et perceptions des usagers. L’étude a cherché à comparer l’interactivité et la linéarité en terme d’engagement narratif et d’engagement perçu. Un travail de terrain a été conduit auprès de 360 étudiants jordaniens. L’échantillon a été divisé en trois groupes, chaque groupe visualisant un des 3 documentaires interactif et répondant au questionnaire relatif. L’étude a également utilisé deux logiciels pour tracer le comportement réel de l’usager. Les résultats de cette étude mettent à jour une relation significative entre d’une part le haut niveau d’interactivité réelle et d’autre part l’interactivité perçue et l’attitude à l’égard du site Web documentaire interactif. D’autre part, les résultats ont révélé une corrélation positive entre d’une part l’interactivité perçue et de l’autre l’engagement perçu et l’attitude à l’égard du site Web documentaire interactif. Cependant, l’étude n’a pas trouvé de corrélation entre l’interactivité perçue et l’engagement narratif. De plus, les résultats ont montré que l’interaction réelle des participants est positivement corrélée à leurs perceptions. Enfin, les participants qui ont regardé le documentaire linéaire sont significativement plus engagés dans la narration documentaire que les autres groupes. Cette étude présente enfin les résultats, les discute et envisage des perspectives futures. / In recent years, interactive documentary field has been gradually growing because of great changes in the world of Internet, promising interactive documentary projects, and the increase in academic studies within the field. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about the relationship between user and interactive documentary. The aim of this study was to measure users’ attitudes and actual interaction toward different levels of interactivity manipulated in two designed interactive documentaries. The users’ attitudes were categorized in this study as: narrative engagement, perceived interactivity, perceived involvement, and attitude toward the interactive documentary website. Another purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between users’ actual interaction and their perceptions. To fully understand interactive documentary, the study, therefore, sought to compare interactivity with linearity in terms of narrative engagement and perceived involvement. A sample of 360 participants was randomly divided into three groups and assigned to view three designed documentaries, and to answer the related questionnaire. The study also used software packages to measure and monitor users’ actual behaviors. The findings of this study indicated that there was a significant relationship between the high level of actual interactivity and both perceived interactivity, and attitude toward the interactive documentary website. On the other hand, the findings revealed that there was a positive correlation between perceived interactivity and both perceived involvement and attitude toward the interactive documentary website. However, the study did not find a correlation between perceived interactivity and narrative engagement. Moreover, the findings showed that the participants’ actual interaction was positively correlated with their perceptions, and the participants who viewed the linear documentary were significantly involved with the documentary narrative more than other groups. Discussion, limitation, and future studies were presented in this study.

No description available.

A website’s foundation should be its usability and its user engagement. Designers can go further and persuade users. The design practice of persuasive design revolves around affecting people indirectly by changing attitudes or behaviors through product features or service characteristics. This has been utilized in various fields with great success. The field of sustainability has become a new theme of study with the goal of influencing user behavior toward more sustainable actions. Researchers have claimed that persuasive design is an effective way to change behaviors and could be utilized to reach different sustainability goals with websites being a viable medium for this. Frameworks for the entirety of the design process have been suggested but there seems to be a lack of literature on guidelines for existing sustainability website designs. This thesis aims to provide guidelines for websites of sustainability-related projects by researching the involvement of similar projects through people’s experiences, motivations, and intentions along with identifying persuasive design characteristics that can increase engagement. The resulting guidelines will be useful for existing designs of websites for sustainability-related projects to increase its persuasive power. A literature review was conducted along with empirical methods of data collection such as a survey, semi-structured interviews, and competition analysis. Theory of planned behavior (TPB), Fogg Behavior Model (FBM), and the Persuasive Systems Design model (PSD) were utilized as theoretical frameworks for collecting data. The empirical methods results were analyzed through a table connecting the theoretical frameworks to understand the results. The findings suggested that people have strong motivations and positive attitudes toward sustainability-related projects but the involvement in such projects is affected by limited ability caused by different barriers. By optimizing the interactive system and applying the persuasive design characteristics, the barriers can be reduced, and the websites’ persuasive power can be increased. Five guidelines were suggested based on the empirical results. An evaluation of the guidelines was not conducted which is proposed as the next step for further research. / Grunden av en webbplats bör vara dess användbarhet och användarengagemang. Utifrån denna grund kan designers gå längre och övertala användare via webbplatsen. Persuasive design är ett tillvägagångssätt inom design vilket kretsar kring att indirekt påverka människors attityder eller beteenden genom produkt- eller tjänsteegenskaper. Detta tillvägagångssätt har använts framgångsrikt inom varierande områden. Hållbarhet har blivit ett nytt studietema med målet att påverka användarnas beteende mot mer hållbara åtgärder. Forskare har hävdat att persuasive design är ett effektivt sätt att förändra beteenden och skulle kunna användas för att nå olika hållbarhetsmål med webbplatser som ett möjligt medium för detta. Ramverk för hela designprocessen har föreslagits men det förefaller vara brist på litteratur om riktlinjer för befintlig design av hållbarhetsrelaterade webbplatser. Denna studie syftar till att ge riktlinjer åt webbplatser för hållbarhetsrelaterade projekt genom att undersöka involveringen av liknande projekt genom människors erfarenheter, motivationer och avsikter samt att identifiera övertalande egenskaper hos persuasive design som kan öka engagemang. De resulterande riktlinjerna kommer att vara användbara för befintliga designer av webbplatser för hållbarhetsrelaterade projekt för att öka dess övertalande kraft. En litteraturgenomgång utfördes tillsammans med empiriska metoder för datainsamling som semistrukturerade intervjuer, en enkät, samt en konkurrentanalys. Teorin om planerat beteende (TPB), Foggs beteendemodell (FBM), samt modellen för Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) användes som teoretiska ramverk för att samla in data. De empiriska metodernas resultat analyserades genom en tabell som kopplade samman de teoretiska ramarna för att förstå resultaten. Studiens slutresultat tyder på att människor har starka motivationer och positiva attityder till hållbarhetsrelaterade projekt men engagemanget i sådana projekt påverkas av begränsad förmåga orsakad av olika hinder. Genom att optimera det interaktiva systemet och tillämpa de övertalande designegenskaperna från persuasive design kan hindren minskas och webbplatsernas övertalande kraft kan ökas. Fem riktlinjer föreslogs baserat på de empiriska resultaten. En utvärdering av riktlinjerna har inte genomförts vilket föreslås som nästa steg för vidare forskning.

Even before the spread of COVID-19 video conferencing software has seen a steady rise in use. Due to their convenient way of offering a way of seeing the other participants live while talking to them, it is quite easy to see why this kind of software became more and more used throughout the years. Now, during the pandemic, video conferencing software is more used than ever before, especially in learning environments. Nevertheless, studies show that student engagement is rather low with university students who take part in online learning. Throughout this paper, we venture into discovering the reasons behind this lack of engagement and how it can be improved from a User Experience Design standpoint. With findings resulted from several previous studies and identified student problems and needs from those papers we created a prototype to test which features and design elements affected student engagement.