The aim of this research was to explore the user participation behaviours in the emerging structure of organisational social media platforms; a term coined and defined in this thesis. This emerging community structure originates from technical discussion forums and knowledge repository systems, and appears to be concerned with solving user problems, generating professional and technical content, and facilitating interaction in the external organisational domain. This research has explored three such platforms in the software and technology sector; namely, the SAP Community Network, the Oracle Community site, and Microsoft's professional platforms, MSDN and TechNet. Qualitative open-ended interviews were conducted and analysed under the interpretive paradigm, to generate a theoretically-grounded account on the use of social media tools in this context, the benefits and value outcomes gained, the underlined reasons and motivations that drive participation, and the emerging impact of active contribution as external users gain recognition. It was found that organisational social media platforms enable the development of rich technical content, personalised experience and thought leadership, creating in this way an environment for problem solving, professional development and expert recognition. The voluntary participation observed is evidently underlined with a combination of altruistic attitudes (e.g. satisfaction, enjoyment and a pro-sharing attitude), reciprocal helping behaviours (e.g. paying it forward, and sharing knowledge and experience) and personal gain expectations (e.g. visibility, recognition and career advancement). The individual platform users appear to acquire participation roles based on their technical expertise (newbie, knowledgeable and expert) and on the level of engagement they wish to undertake (lurker, contributor, community influencer and recognised user). A group of highly active users is formed in this way at the top tier of participation that establishes channels for professional credibility, product feedback and external advocacy through a close relationship with organisational members. These findings suggest that organisational social media platforms can constitute a new interface with the external environment and a potential business model, under which flexible forms of communication and interaction affect the support infrastructure changing the way in which customer service can be delivered, product and sales advocacy can be established, and innovation and product development can be achieved; complementing in this way internal processes with external activity.

With housing in the UK responsible for over a quarter of all building related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the impact of occupant behaviour on such emissions. One area where occupant behaviour contributes largely towards emissions is space heating within domestic buildings. Despite technological improvements in the efficiency of heating systems, controls have become increasingly complex. Hence, there is a need to enable people to use their heating controls effectively in order to help reduce the associated CO2 emissions. This research found that significant numbers of people were excluded from using digital programmable thermostats, in particular people over 50 years old. The first study examined the scale of exclusion relating to digital programmable thermostats installed at a specific housing development. A second study explored in detail the reasons for exclusion from successfully programming a range of digital programmable thermostats. This was an in-depth usability study of heating controls that focused on the usability issues experienced by older people and was published in the Journal of Engineering Design. Based upon the outcomes of the first two studies a more inclusive heating control interface prototype was developed. The prototype demonstrated a reduction in both cognitive demands and associated user exclusion. Task success rates increased by 56.3% amongst older participants, and detailed energy modelling indicated that energy savings of 14.5-15.6% annually could be achievable. This work suggests that a more inclusive heating control interface could enable energy savings in the region of 15% through reducing the cognitive demands. Furthermore, this research challenges the existing paradigm and shows that inclusive design research may contribute to sustainable development in an environmental, as well as social, capacity.

Multimedia learning is today a part of everyday life. Learning from digital sources on the internet is probably more common than printed material. The goal of this project is to determine if measuring user interaction in a interactive manual can be of use to evaluate the effectiveness of the manual. Since feedback of multimedia learning materials is costly to achieve in face-to-face interaction, automatic feedback data might be useful for evaluating and improving the quality of multimedia learning materials. In this project an interactive manual was developed for a real-world report generating application. The manual was then tested on 21 test users. Using the k-nearest neighbour machine learning algorithm the results shows that time taken on each step and the number of views on each step did not provide for good evaluation of the manual. Number of faults done by the user was good at predicting if the user would abort the manual and in combination with the number of acceptable interactions the usability data did provide for a better classification then ZeroR classification. The conclusions can be questioned by the small dataset used in this project.

Organisations increasingly perceive their employees as a great asset that needs to be cared for; however, at the same time, they view employees as one of the biggest potential threats to their cyber security. Organizations repeatedly suffer harm from employees who are not obeying or complying with their information security policies. Non-compliance behaviour of an employee, either unintentionally or intentionally, pose a real threat to an organization’s information security. As such, more thought is needed on how to encourage employees to be security compliant and more in line with a security policy of their organizations. Based on the above, this study has proposed a model that is intended to provide a comprehensive framework for raising the level of compliance amongst end-users, with the aim of monitoring, measuring and responding to users’ behaviour with an information security policy. The proposed approach is based on two main concepts: a taxonomy of the response strategy to non-compliance behaviour, and a compliance points system. The response taxonomy is comprised of two categories: awareness raising and enforcement of the security policy. The compliance points system is used to reward compliant behaviour, and penalise noncompliant behaviour. A prototype system has been developed to simulates the proposed model in order to provide a clear image of its functionalities and how it is meant to work. Therefore, it was developed to work as a system that responds to the behaviour of users (whether violation or compliance behaviour) in relation to the information security policies of their organisations. After designing the proposed model and simulating it using the prototype system, it was significant to evaluate the model by interviewing different experts with different backgrounds from academic and industry sectors. Thus, the interviewed experts agreed that the identified research problem is a real problem that needs to be researched and solutions need to be devised. It also can be stated that the overall feedback of the interviewed experts about the proposed model was very encouraging and positive. The expert participants thought that the proposed model addresses the research gap, and offers a novel approach for managing the information security policies.

Most software applications rely on the use of user-name and passwords to authenticate end users. This form of authentication, although used ubiquitously, is widely considered unreliable due to the users inability to keep them secret; passwords being prone to dictionary or rainbow-table attacks; as well as the ease with which social engineering techniques can obtain passwords. This can be mitigated by combining a variety of diferent authentication mechanisms, for example biometric authentication such as fingerprint recognition or physical tokens such as smart cards. The resulting multifactor authentication is typically stronger than any of the techniques used individually. However, it may still be expensive or prohibited to implement and more dificult to deploy due to additional accessories cost, e.g, finger print reader. Multi-modal biometric systems are those which utilise or are capable of utilising, more than one physiological or behavioural characteristic for enrolment, verification, or identification. So, in this research we present a multi-factor authentication scheme that is based on the user's own hardware environment, e.g. laptop with fingerprint reader, thus avoiding the need of deploying tokens and readily available biometrics, e.g., user keystrokes. The aim is to improve the reliability of the authentication using a multi-factor approach without incurring additional cost or making the deployment of the solution overly complex. The presented approach in this research uses unique sequential hardware information available from the user's environment to profile user behaviour. This approach improves upon password mechanisms by introducing a novel Hardware Authentication and User Profiling (HAUP) in form of Multi-Factor Authentication MFA that can be easily integrated into the traditional authentication methods. In addition, this approach observes the advantage of the correlation between user behaviour and hardware environment as an implicit veri_cation identity procedure to discriminate username and password usage, in particular hardware environment by specific pattern. So, the proposed approach uses hardware information to profile the user's environment when user-name and password are typed as part of the log-in process. These Hardware Manufacture Serial Part Numbers (HMSPNs) profiles are then correlated with the users behaviour, e.g., key-stroke behaviour that allows the system to profile user's behaviour dependent on their environment. As a result of this approach, the access control system can determine a particular level of trust for each user and base access control decisions on it in order to reduce potential identity fraud.

Social media such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and online communities plays an important role for knowledge production and diffusion as well as discussions among people. Among social media, online brand communities (OBCs) have recently received attention from both academics and practitioners due to the practical benefits of OBCs for consumers and companies. For consumers, knowledge sharing and its collective activities help them to make purchase decisions and to protect themselves against firms’ monopoly and oligopoly or collusion and anticompetitive actions. For companies, new ideas and feedback on brand products created by OBC members are useful input to develop new products and enhance existing product lines. Therefore, active content generation by community members is one of the critical success factors of OBCs. However, many scholars argue that only a few members who are more devoted to a community are tending to engage in OBC activities and many community members tend to remain in the periphery (sometimes called ‘lurkers') of the community by using OBCs merely for gathering information without any contributions. Therefore, it is important to make members in the periphery of the community transit to the core to increase members’ intentions and ‘devoted members’ to produce more valuable benefits for both consumers and firms. In spite of its importance, the literature is lacking in efforts to explain how and when community members in the periphery transit to the core of the community in a long-term perspective. This study aims to reveal how and why OBC members transit from the periphery to the core of the community and how to increase their intention to use OBC from a long-term perspective. OBC use behaviour is classified into, largely, two categories according to the purposes of an OBC: behaviour with a brand product consumption purpose; and behaviour with a social relationship building purpose. This study classifies OBC members as three clusters by social identity theory: tourists, minglers, and devoted members (devotees and insiders). The devoted members have valuable consumption knowledge of brand and strong social bonds in the OBC and the OBC members become a devoted member by accumulated brand knowledge and experiences through long-term OBC use. Therefore, from a socialisation aspect, this study adopts organisational socialisation theory as the theoretical lens to explain how and why the members evolve from novice members as tourist to devoted members in OBC contexts. Socialisation theories argue that there are usually three sequential stages for a member to gain full membership in a community: pre-entry, accommodation, and affiliation. In addition, this study adopts IS implementation theory to understand OBC user behaviours from an IS use behaviour perspective: acceptance in the pre-entry stage and routinisation in the accommodation stage and infusion in the affiliation stage. By reviewing socialisation theory and IS implementation theory, this study finds four significant motivations, those of information quality, trust, sense of belonging, and brand loyalty for intention of OBC use from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. To integrate the socialisation perspective with the IS use perspective, this study adopts a technology acceptance model (TAM) as a theoretical framework to link to motivators in different OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stages. As a result, this study proposes a conceptual framework to explain the OBC members’ transition process from acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation). The aim of this study is to predict and explain the transition of motivators for OBC use from pre-entry to affiliation and how to improve members’ intention of OBC use from a long-term perspective ultimately to foster ‘devoted members’. This study adopts an online survey targeting 518 participants who belong to 17 OBCs in South Korea and the conceptual framework is validated. The results show that all factors (i.e. information quality, trust, sense of belonging, brand loyalty) are significant determinants to increase intention to use OBCs and the factors have a causal relationship with each other to form a transition process from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. This study also reveals that brand loyalty has a significant role to explain the transition process and directly influence user intention to use OBCs. The sense of belonging also directly affects members’ intention to use OBCs but has less impact than brand loyalty. In addition, the results indicate that TAM is an appropriate model to predict user behaviours in a long-term perspective to explain the change of OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stage and confirms that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have significant impact on the intention to use OBCs as in other IS studies. Understanding the transition process within OBCs has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it will extend our understanding of how IS end users transit from acceptance behaviour to continued use and extended use of information systems in virtual community contexts. For managers, this study will provide them with insight on how to retain potential consumers in OBCs and facilitate their activities to gain consumer feedback on existing and new products.

Relevance assessing is an important part of information retrieval (IR) evaluation in addition to being something that all users of IR systems must do as part of their search for relevant documents. In this thesis, we present a user study conducted to understand the relevance judging behaviour of assessors when the prevalence of relevant documents in a set of documents to be judged is varied. In our user study, we collected judgements of participants on document sets of three different prevalence levels. The prevalence levels that we used were low (0.1), balanced (0.5) and high (0.9). We found that participants who judged documents at the 0.9 level made the most mistakes, and participants who judged documents at the 0.5 level made the least mistakes. We did not find a statistically significant difference in judging quality between 0.1 and 0.5 prevalence levels.

Relevance assessing is an important part of information retrieval (IR) evaluation in addition to being something that all users of IR systems must do as part of their search for relevant documents. In this thesis, we present a user study conducted to understand the relevance judging behaviour of assessors when the prevalence of relevant documents in a set of documents to be judged is varied. In our user study, we collected judgements of participants on document sets of three different prevalence levels. The prevalence levels that we used were low (0.1), balanced (0.5) and high (0.9). We found that participants who judged documents at the 0.9 level made the most mistakes, and participants who judged documents at the 0.5 level made the least mistakes. We did not find a statistically significant difference in judging quality between 0.1 and 0.5 prevalence levels.

Thermal improvement of traditional and historic buildings is going to play a crucial role in the achievement of established carbon emission targets. The suitable retrofit options for traditional buildings are, however, very limited and their long term performance is still uncertain. Evaluation of risks, prior to any alteration of building physics, is critical to avoid future damage to the fabric or occupants’ health. Moisture dynamics in building envelopes are affected by the enclosure’s geometry, materials properties and external and internal boundary conditions. Since the internal boundary is heavily influenced by users, understanding their behaviour is essential to predict the outcome of energy retrofit measures more accurately. The effect of user behaviour on energy demand has been extensively investigated; however, its impact on the hygrothermal performance of the envelopes has barely been explored. This research approached the connection between users and buildings from a new angle looking at the effect that user behaviour has on moisture dynamics of buildings’ envelopes after the retrofit. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to develop a holistic evaluation of the question. Firstly, factors influencing the adoption of energy efficiency measures in traditional buildings were explored by means of semi-structured interviews with private owners and project managers. Subsequently, a multi-case study including interviews with occupants and monitoring of environmental conditions was conducted. Data collected at this stage was used to explore users’ daily practices of comfort and to characterise the internal climate of traditional dwellings. Lastly, users’ impact was quantified using Heat, Air and Moisture (HAM) numerical simulation. This allowed for the evaluation of the hygrothermal performance of walls under different internal climate scenarios. Combined results of interviews, environmental monitoring and simulation showed that internal climate can compromise envelope performance after the retrofit and highlighted the need to consider users in the decision making process. Ultimately, the results of this research will help to increase awareness about the potential impact of user behaviour and provide recommendations to decision makers involved in the energy retrofit of traditional structures.

In order to find information before an e-commerce purchase, Swedish young adults almost exclusively uses the Google search engine. Previous research contains quantitative data, which showcases how the users utilize search engines as online tools. However, qualitative data regarding the user behaviour on generic search engines were lacking and a gap in the literature was found. In order to collect empirical data to try to fill the gap, six participants were interviewed about their behaviour when using Google. The interviews aimed to discover how the user chooses one result over another at the search engine result page and why. The empirical data showed that the users used the search engine in order to obtain quick and accurate information, in the most convenient process possible. Two major factors were shown to highly contribute to the choice of a user’s perception of the search engine result page. Previous experience and the trustworthiness of a result, strongly affected if a user would choose to click on that result. As a support to both these factors, the user used the technical components: title, URL and snippet. We believe that our findings will contribute to a deeper understanding within search engine user behaviour. / För att hitta information inför ett köp av produkter över Internet, används sökmotorn Google av merparten av svenska unga vuxna. Tidigare forskning inom området innehåller uteslutande ett kvantitativt undersökningsperspektiv, som belyser hur användarna utnyttjar sökmotorerna som ett verktyg. Dock saknas det kvalitativ forskning som utförligt beskriver användarbeteendet. Med målet att hitta empirisk data för att fylla tomrummet, intervjuades sex deltagare om deras beteende och användning av sökmotorn Google. Intervjuerna syftade till att undersöka hur och varför användaren väljer ett resultat framför ett annat. Den empiriska undersökningen visade att användarna nyttjade sökmotorn för att få snabb och korrekt information, på ett så bekvämt sätt som möjligt. Framförallt två faktorer visade sig vara starkt bidragande till varför användarna väljer ett resultat på sökresultat sidan. Tidigare erfarenhet och tillförlitligheten av ett resultat, var båda starkt bidragande orsaker till om användaren skulle välja ett specifikt resultat. Som ett stöd till båda dessa faktorer, använde sig användaren av tekniska funktioner såsom resultats titel, URL och beskrivningen, för att bilda sig en egen uppfattning. Vi tror att vårt resultat kommer att bidra till en djupare förståelse för användarbeteendet inom sökmotorer.