Older adults present a special challenge to libraries offering computer training. Many of those seeking training have little, if any, prior experience with the concepts and skills necessary to use computers, yet their ability to learn those concepts and skills is hampered by the aging process. This article summarizes the factors in aging which most affect learning computer skills, and how those factors can be mitigated.

Task has been recognized as an influential factor in information seeking behavior. An increasing number of studies are concentrating on the specific characteristics of the task as independent variables to explain associated information-seeking activities. This paper examines the relationships between operational measures of information search behavior, subjectively perceived post-task difficulty and objective task complexity in the context of factual information-seeking tasks on the web. A questiondriven, web-based information-finding study was conducted in a controlled experimental setting. The study participants performed nine search tasks of varying complexity. Subjective task difficulty was found to be correlated with many measures that characterize the searcherâ s activities. Four of those measures, the number of the unique web pages visited, the time spent on each page, the degree of deviation from the optimal path and the degree of the navigation pathâ s linearity, were found to be good predictors of subjective task difficulty. Objective task complexity was found to affect the relative importance of those predictors and to affect subjective assessment of task difficulty.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Richardson, J., Dillon, A., and McKnight, C. (1989) The effect of window size on reading and manipulating electronic text. In E. Megaw (ed.) Contemporary Ergonomics 1989. London:Taylor and Francis, 474-479. Abstract: With the advent of hypertext the presentation of electronic text is becoming an increasingly important issue. However, most research to date has focused on simplistic measures of reading speed or navigation in highly controlled presentation formats, often using very constrained texts and task scenarios. The present paper attempts a more meaningful analysis of the effect of window size on reader comprehension and manipulation of real-world texts. Reading a journal article for comprehension and a software manual for specific information are both investigated. Results indicate that screen size is not a major factor in performance on either task but readers express a strong preference for larger screens.

The main purpose of this essay is to investigate professional artists experience of the need and use of information in their creative work. I have collected the material through qualitative interviews with four professional artist working with different materials and techniques. One of the results of the study is that the artists first of all used information as a source of inspiration in their creative work. They gathered their information from various scources, for example; pictures, exhibitions, visual arts, books and novells, depending on what project they are working with. Other important information scources were colleges, especially for the technical information need. The artists also searched for information in a wide range of subjects and showed interest in areas that are not considerable art-related.

Cultural heritage digital libraries have become an important and prominent tool within humanities scholarship, offering increased expressive power for representing complex networks of relationships and the ability to use computational tools and interactive environments to help researchers ask new questions. While digital libraries offer tremendous advantages for publishing the final products of scholarship, in the words of Bradley and Vetch, "as they currently are delivered, do not intersect terribly meaningfully with the process of scholarly research." In this work I investigate how scholars use visually complex source documents-materials where access to a visual representation of the original object is required and present a prototype system, CritSpace designed to facilitate scholarly engagement with digital resources. Rather than creating a one-size-fits-all application, CritSpace is a web-based framework for building interactive visual interfaces that support scholarly use of digital libraries. The theory and design behind CritSpace is based on a formative study of the work practices of scholars from different disciplines and prior research in field of spatial hypertext. To illustrate a concrete example of using CritSpace and to evaluate its usefulness, I conclude with a case study that walks through the process of deploying CritSpace to support work in a specific scholarly domain, textual criticism and presents a summative usability study of the tool. The results of this study show that CritSpace is effective at supporting textual criticism. More significantly, they also indicate that the innovations added in CritSpace promote the intensive analysis of visual material in addition to knowledge organization and structuring.

This thesis reports results of a research study into the information behaviour of Kuwaiti legal professionals. The main aims of the research were to investigate the information behaviour and the information needs of Kuwaiti legal professionals, and examine whether the existing legal information sources and services meet their needs. The theoretical framework for this research was derived from the investigation of information behaviour in general, and studies of legal professionals in particular. Wilson's (1996) model of information behaviour was also used to develop the conceptual framework of this research. This model takes into account four types of information seeking behaviour: active search, passive search, passive attention and ongoing search. This model helped in formulating research questions and hypotheses and the design of data collections methods. It was used also as a tool for organising the interpretation and discussion of the research findings. The research methods were designed from a user-centred perspective, including using data collection methods that are supportive of user-centred research. Triangulation was used in data collection by the use of questionnaires, interviews and critical incidents technique. The participants of the research included legal academics, legal practitioners such as state lawyers, prosecutors and private lawyers, law librarians, legal publishers and legal database producers in Kuwait. The results showed that a personal collection is the source used most by Kuwaiti legal professionals. The majority did not use electronic sources such as databases and the Internet. A large percentage also did not use law libraries. The majority of academics sought information themselves, whereas the majority of practitioners relied on the assistance of others. The majority of respondents had no training on the use of information sources. The majority also relied on internal communication as a channel for information exchange more than external communication. The majority of respondents scanned between one or two journals, although journals should be among the major information sources for legal professionals. On the other hand, newspapers ranked first for serendipity for both academics and practitioners. New books were ranked as a first source by practitioners for updating information, whereas journals were ranked first for academics. These results showed the information seeking problems of the legal professionals. This led to the development of the interface requirement for the design of a prototype Kuwaiti Legal Information System (KLIS) interface. The aim of the system was to provide relevant and up-to-date information, and links to other information sources and services in order to improve communication channels at both national and international level. The system also sought to be cost-effective. Finally, a heuristic usability evaluation was undertaken by consulting a number of experts on the system's usability and contents. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations for further research and to stakeholders are made.

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.

This essay reflects a final thesis work of exploring future opportunities of temporary storing in future car interiors. The work is based from user studies and supported by designers of the automotive industry. The exploratorypart focuses on contextual video interviews studying the use of the interior storage space. Categories are created from the studies to investigate several possibilities parallel throughout the work. A category of exible space is chosen to being developed into a nal design proposal. The result is a concept called LVL - A exible surface that o ers di erent use of the same space.

Seleção é uma das quatro formas fundamentais de interação em mundos virtuais. É a habilidade de especificar objectos em ambientes virtuais para ações posteriores. A literatura é rica em técnicas de seleção imediata; no entanto, esta classe de técnicas está exposta a problemas de precisão, ambiguidade e complexidade de seleção. Os problemas mencionados podem ser abordados com técnicas de seleção por: refinamento prograssivo, que consiste na redução da quantia de objetos selecionáveis através de etapas de refinamento, até que o objeto desejado seja selecionado; ou níveis de precisão, que consiste em aumentar a precisão de apontamento através da manipulação de parametros do mapeamento controle para display, assim como na combinação de abordagens de apontamentio. Níveis de precisão é uma classe de técnicas de seleção que estamos propondo neste dissertação. Neste documento também apresentamos uma pesquisa com literatura relacionada a estas duas classes de técnicas de seleção. Adicionalmente, propomos as técnicas de seleção LOP-cursor e tela de desambiguação. A primeira conta com múltiplos níveis de precisão para proporcionar maior controle sobre a posição do cursor, enquanto a segunda usa a alta resolução de entrada proporcionada pela tela sensível ao toque de disposiiticos móveis para rapidamente desambiguar a seleção de um alvo entre centenas de outros objetos. Por fim, apresentamos a metáfora de um cursor com duas pernas, uma nova abordagem para apontar duas posições distintas simultaneamente. O cursor de duas pernas é projetado para rapidamente realizar tarefas compostas, como arrastar e soltar em uma área de trabalho. Avaliações com usuários mostram que nossas abordagens são promissoras, e que o espaço de design de técnicas utilizado dispoitivos móveis pode produzir inúmeras possibilidades. Os usuários foram capazes de selecionar alvos com 0:1 de tamanho angular visual com o LOP-cursor. Em um dos experimentos, a tela de desambiguação obteve a proporção de erro < 0:01 por tentativa de seleção. Por fim, ambas as técnicas foram mais rápidas que o tradicional ray-casting para seleção de objetos pequenos, sendo sempre preferidas pelos usuários. / Selection is one of the four fundamental forms of interaction in a virtual world. It is the ability of the user to specify objects in the virtual environment for subsequent actions. The literature is rich in immediate selection techniques; however, this class of technique is exposed to problems of selection accuracy, ambiguity and complexity. These issues can be addressed using techniques of selection by: progressive refinement, which consists of reducing the amount of selectable objects through refinement steps until the desired object is selected; or levels of precision, which consists of increasing accuracy of pointing by manipulating the control-to-display parameters as well as by the combination of pointing approaches. Levels of precision is a class of selection techniques we are proposing in this dissertation. We also present a survey that comprehends literature on these two classes of selection techniques. Furthermore, we propose the LOP-cursor and the disambiguation canvas selection techniques. The first rely on multiple levels of precision to achieve very high control over the cursor position, while the second uses the high resolution of input provided by a mobile device touchscreen to quickly disambiguate a selection among hundreds of objects. Finally, we present the two-legged cursor metaphor, a novel approach for simultaneously pointing of two distinct locations. The two-legged cursor is intended to be used to quickly perform composite tasks, such as drag and drop. User evaluation shows that our approaches are promising, and that the design space of techniques using mobile devices can lead to numerous possibilities. Users were able to select targets as little as 0:1 of visual angular size with LOP-cursor. In one of its evaluations, disambiguation canvas achieved an error rate < 0:01 per selection trial. Finally, Both techniques performed faster than ray-casting for small targets, and overall they were preferred by users.

Seleção é uma das quatro formas fundamentais de interação em mundos virtuais. É a habilidade de especificar objectos em ambientes virtuais para ações posteriores. A literatura é rica em técnicas de seleção imediata; no entanto, esta classe de técnicas está exposta a problemas de precisão, ambiguidade e complexidade de seleção. Os problemas mencionados podem ser abordados com técnicas de seleção por: refinamento prograssivo, que consiste na redução da quantia de objetos selecionáveis através de etapas de refinamento, até que o objeto desejado seja selecionado; ou níveis de precisão, que consiste em aumentar a precisão de apontamento através da manipulação de parametros do mapeamento controle para display, assim como na combinação de abordagens de apontamentio. Níveis de precisão é uma classe de técnicas de seleção que estamos propondo neste dissertação. Neste documento também apresentamos uma pesquisa com literatura relacionada a estas duas classes de técnicas de seleção. Adicionalmente, propomos as técnicas de seleção LOP-cursor e tela de desambiguação. A primeira conta com múltiplos níveis de precisão para proporcionar maior controle sobre a posição do cursor, enquanto a segunda usa a alta resolução de entrada proporcionada pela tela sensível ao toque de disposiiticos móveis para rapidamente desambiguar a seleção de um alvo entre centenas de outros objetos. Por fim, apresentamos a metáfora de um cursor com duas pernas, uma nova abordagem para apontar duas posições distintas simultaneamente. O cursor de duas pernas é projetado para rapidamente realizar tarefas compostas, como arrastar e soltar em uma área de trabalho. Avaliações com usuários mostram que nossas abordagens são promissoras, e que o espaço de design de técnicas utilizado dispoitivos móveis pode produzir inúmeras possibilidades. Os usuários foram capazes de selecionar alvos com 0:1 de tamanho angular visual com o LOP-cursor. Em um dos experimentos, a tela de desambiguação obteve a proporção de erro < 0:01 por tentativa de seleção. Por fim, ambas as técnicas foram mais rápidas que o tradicional ray-casting para seleção de objetos pequenos, sendo sempre preferidas pelos usuários. / Selection is one of the four fundamental forms of interaction in a virtual world. It is the ability of the user to specify objects in the virtual environment for subsequent actions. The literature is rich in immediate selection techniques; however, this class of technique is exposed to problems of selection accuracy, ambiguity and complexity. These issues can be addressed using techniques of selection by: progressive refinement, which consists of reducing the amount of selectable objects through refinement steps until the desired object is selected; or levels of precision, which consists of increasing accuracy of pointing by manipulating the control-to-display parameters as well as by the combination of pointing approaches. Levels of precision is a class of selection techniques we are proposing in this dissertation. We also present a survey that comprehends literature on these two classes of selection techniques. Furthermore, we propose the LOP-cursor and the disambiguation canvas selection techniques. The first rely on multiple levels of precision to achieve very high control over the cursor position, while the second uses the high resolution of input provided by a mobile device touchscreen to quickly disambiguate a selection among hundreds of objects. Finally, we present the two-legged cursor metaphor, a novel approach for simultaneously pointing of two distinct locations. The two-legged cursor is intended to be used to quickly perform composite tasks, such as drag and drop. User evaluation shows that our approaches are promising, and that the design space of techniques using mobile devices can lead to numerous possibilities. Users were able to select targets as little as 0:1 of visual angular size with LOP-cursor. In one of its evaluations, disambiguation canvas achieved an error rate < 0:01 per selection trial. Finally, Both techniques performed faster than ray-casting for small targets, and overall they were preferred by users.