Recommender systems are without a doubt a staple of the modern internet. Services like Amazon, Netflix, YouTube and Spotify rely on them. What makes them so engaging that millions of users spent billions of hours on them every day? User engagement is widely accept as a core concept of user experience but we still don’t know what role the user interface plays into it. This thesis investigates the effect of explanations in recommender systems on the users engagement with a case study on BMW Financial Services Thailand’s recommender system. An experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turks with the User Engagement Scale and A/B testing with Google Analytics proved a significant influence of explanations on the users engagement.

This thesis explores the role of interactivity in interfaces for visual artwork display, and the promotion of user engagement. In contrast to most previous work, which has been based on digitally recreating the physical properties of traditional exhibition spaces, this research explores the advantages that interactive digital displays offer to user engagement by investigating different methods and techniques for presenting images of visual artworks in a virtual environment. Throughout this research, various interactive virtual presentation designs, including four interactivity modes, have been developed and tested in lab, field and online studies; data gathering and analysis have used both qualitative and quantitative methods. Further, event parameters have been introduced, the aid of which has allowed the separate phases of user engagement to be examined. The experiments on a broader scale in the final stage of this research are targeted towards demonstrating the potential of the proposed approach and will foster the application of advanced technologies for presentation of visual artworks. This thesis makes a number of contributions in the fields of digital art presentation and methods for measuring user engagement and its different phases. The conceptual framework for describing user engagement is generalised and ex- tended by additional elements. The relation between four designed interactivity modes and the extended phases of user engagement has been investigated, analysed and examined through the application of a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative techniques. Finally, the findings from this thesis about the design interactivity modes and evaluation of user engagement can be adopted by and applied in further research.

Online Health Communities (OHCs) have become an important source of sharing and receiving information and support for people with health-related concerns. These communities provide important benefits to users including enhanced medical knowledge, emotional comfort, personal empowerment and the ability to create offline social connections. High levels of user engagement are beneficial to both users and the OHC, so it is important to understand what motivate users’ participation, encourage them to contribute and influence their churning behaviors. This thesis covers why, when, and how users are actively engaged within an OHC. It is based on descriptive and predictive analytics of OHC users’ online interactions with text mining techniques. I built explanatory models to reveal how users’ motivations and roles evolve over time, the types of social support activities that encourage users’ continuous participation, and the forms of social capital that drive users’ continued contributions to the community. In addition, I developed predictive models to help an OHC forecast whether and when a user will churn. The findings of this study have implications for managing and sustaining successful OHCs, and can provide OHC managers with suggestions on how to motivate user contributions and retain users through interventions.

abstract: For the past decade, mobile health applications are seeing greater acceptance due to their potential to remotely monitor and increase patient engagement, particularly for chronic disease. Sickle Cell Disease is an inherited chronic disorder of red blood cells requiring careful pain management. A significant number of mHealth applications have been developed in the market to help clinicians collect and monitor information of SCD patients. Surveys are the most common way to self-report patient conditions. These are non-engaging and suffer from poor compliance. The quality of data gathered from survey instruments while using technology can be questioned as patients may be motivated to complete a task but not motivated to do it well. A compromise in quality and quantity of the collected patient data hinders the clinicians' effort to be able to monitor patient's health on a regular basis and derive effective treatment measures. This research study has two goals. The first is to monitor user compliance and data quality in mHealth apps with long and repetitive surveys delivered. The second is to identify possible motivational interventions to help improve compliance and data quality. As a form of intervention, will introduce intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors within the application and test it on a small target population. I will validate the impact of these motivational factors by performing a comparative analysis on the test results to determine improvements in user performance. This study is relevant, as it will help analyze user behavior in long and repetitive self-reporting tasks and derive measures to improve user performance. The results will assist software engineers working with doctors in designing and developing improved self-reporting mHealth applications for collecting better quality data and enhance user compliance. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2017

Public areas are more and more equipped with digital screens that are used to inform or promote a particular product. This is a way to communicate with the people on that area. The idea is to get people's attention, make them read and take in information and possibly buy the product that is marketed. This type of digital display is called digital signage and can also be used as an information channel of a company where information directed to employees and visitors is displayed. CGI Östersund has a screen placed in their office that works as such an information channel. This thesis is about investigating and analyzing the current presentation and creating a new solution with a custom interface that will be more effective and engage more people. The new solution is interactive and clickable with the help of a mouse. A user study has been done using a Kinect sensor to see how many people are watching the screen, how long they look at the screen and from what distance. This data was also supplemented by a survey sent to the employees at CGI Östersund. The result of the user study shows that there was no significant difference between the previous solution and the new one. This may be due to two main reasons: the lack of time in which the experiment was performed and the location of the digital screen that is not currently optimal.

In a time where child obesity is reaching an alarming level it is important to provide tools for weight loss that are accessible to many children. Furthermore, it is important for these tools to be easy and fun to use to keep the users engaged in the tool over a long period of time, since losing weight is nothing that can be done in a day. By designing and implementing a mobile application for logging food intake and the incorporation of gamification elements, this study seeks to address the problem of users losing interest in the tool and rebounding to unhealthy eating. Gamification is a concept of making applications that traditionally has nothing to do with games into a more game-like experience to enhance user engagement. After the development of the application was complete, the participants of the study used the application as a part of their daily routine to log all the food they consumed. When interviewing the participants after testing the application the overall response for the gamification elements was positive. However, the general design and implementation of the application seemed to affect the user engagement more than the additional gamification elements.

Usability plays an important role in user-experience design and when designing for usability it is necessary that a suitable design process is planned and executed. A question designers may have experienced is "what is the best design process for this project?" when in reality, the best design process is a combination of several design processes. This thesis combines competitive, parallel and iterative design processes when designing for usability and user engagement. The three design processes segues into each other as they aid in the process of identifying current problems with the design, find solutions that are both tested and untested, and then iteratively improves these solutions to a point of satisfactory result. The result shows, however, that combining three design processes can be expensive in terms of resources and that instead of having a set number of design processes with then resources divided between the processes, resources should determine the numbers of design processes to combine. / Användbarhet spelar en viktig roll i design av användarupplevelser och vid design för användbarhet är det nödvändigt att en lämplig designprocess planeras och genomförs. En fråga som designers kan ha upplevt är "vilken är den bästa designprocessen för detta projekt?" när i verkligheten är den bästa designprocessen en kombination av flera designprocesser. Denna avhandling kombinerar konkurrens, parallell och iterativ designprocesser vid design för användbarhet och användarengagemang. De tre designprocesserna går in i varandra när de hjälper till att identifiera aktuella problem med designen, hitta lösningar som är både testade och oprövade och sedan iterativt förbättrar dessa lösningar till ett tillfredsställande resultat. Resultatet visar dock att att kombinera tre designprocesser kan vara dyrt resursmässigt och att istället för att ha ett visst antal designprocesser med sedan resurser uppdelade mellan processerna bör resurserna bestämma antalet designprocesser som ska kombineras.

Electronic Commerce (EC) companies are faced with a highly competitive environment today. Strengthening user engagement in digital ecosystems is a promising approach to increasing value co-creation. However, enterprise-oriented user engagement strategies examined in previous studies are relatively inadequate to meet today’s expectations. This paper looks to answer the question, “how to effectively strengthen user engagement to acquire a sustainable value co-creation system in EC.” A plausible user engagement strategy was revealed by analyzing a single case study in the music sector based on details of a digital ecosystem. Semi-structured interviews performed with company Xiami along with their users, show that the recognition of user-oriented needs and the expansion of user-driven demands are two key aspects for EC companies to maintain a sustainable growth of value co-creation.

Att en publik upplever en berättelse i reklamfilmen olika är en självklarhet och i dagens transmediala medievärld där så pass mycket reklamfilm publiceras på många olika plattformar blir det en labyrint för ingen mindre än medieproducenten. Vilket format man ska välja, och hur det förstärker eller förminskar berättelsen är en ständigt pågående diskussion. Syftet med denna studie var därför att undersöka vad som hände med handlingen när formatet ändrades till 1:1 och hur publiken uppfattade berättelsen då, när bilden beskurits från det bredare bildformatet till ett kvadratiskt bildformat. Studien undersöker bildformatets förhållande till plattformen Instagram, hur en publik upplever bildformatet och handlingen samt om de upplever någon skillnad på formatet 16:9 jämfört med 1:1. Studien har genomförts genom kvalitativa semi-strukturerade intervjuer med åtta deltagande informanter. Undersökningens resultat visade att den breda versionen i 16:9 uppfattades som mer professionell och cinematisk samt väckte intresse i flödet, medan det kvadratiska formatet 1:1 versionen snarare uppfattades som amatör-lik. Sammanfattningsvis resulterade analysen i att bildformatet 16:9 var bättre lämpad för storytelling-reklamfilm på Instagram

Modern handheld devices such as smart phones and tablets have become popular for capturing and viewing panoramic images, but navigation in these devices is a challenging task due to small screen size. In this thesis work, investigation is done for similarities and differences between two user interaction techniques of one-dimensional cubical panorama images. This work is carried out on a fourth generation Apple iPod Touch. The first user interaction technique swipe (drag-based panning) is developed using touch-gestures, while the second technique look-around (device-orientation panning) is developed using motion-sensors such as gyroscope and accelerometer for device-orientation. Both these techniques were implemented for touch-screen devices for an angle of 360 degrees.     In the swipe technique, the navigation is done by using finger movements on the screen, while in the look-around based panning technique the navigation is done by moving the device direction physically in space through an angle of 360 degrees. The experiments were conducted on 20 participants for the two panning techniques. The results have shown that the look-around based panning technique offers a better user interaction compared to swipe based panning technique. Look-around based panning technique is natural and more free to move physically in space. Swipe based panning technique is easy to use in some situations and it does not require any physical space to move around the system.