The CATS TCT is a military wargaming simulator used by the Swedish Armed Forces for education of position holders within battalion or company staffs. The CATS TCT was developed during the nineties and one of the challenges today is how the system can be modernized in order to meet the increased demands on usability. This master thesis is part of the work with modernizing the CATS TCT and a usability study has been conducted in order to identify issues and problems of the current system related to usability. This thesis is conducted at BAE Systems C-ITS in Linköping and the main focus of this study has been how to analyze and re-design the CATS TCT in order to enhance the usability of the system. Empirical data in this study has been collected through six semi-structured interviews, one observation and two focus group interviews and the result of this study has elicit several problem areas related to any of following usability aspects: effectiveness, efficiency or satisfaction. The conclusions from this investigation is that the CATS TCT simulator is an valuable and appreciated educational tool – especially from an effectiveness point of view. When it comes to efficiency, however, several problems areas has been identified and these areas are: information architecture, interface interaction, how orders are issued to units and how the simulation rules are implemented. When it comes to the users satisfaction of the system no unequivocal conclusion has been possible to present. As a complement to the identified issues and problems of the simulator this study has also presented examples on how prototypes could be used to solve some of the identified problems. More specifically, in this report re-design solutions related to how the users interact with the map, how orders are issued and how status overview is displayed has been presented.

Abstract Many software-intensive products and systems on the market today reveal a poor level of usability despite the availability of knowledge about how to develop good usability, namely user-centred design. Improving the status of user-centred design has proved to be a challenge in product development. An effective step to start out on the road to such improvements is to carry out a current state analysis. Our research problem was to learn how to perform an effective current state analysis, i.e. an assessment, of user-centred design processes to provide a basis for improvement action. As the main part of our research, we carried out five experimental assessments in industrial settings during the years 2000 and 2001. The main result of the research is a novel assessment approach. The objective of the approach is to provide a basis for improvement of the performance of user-centred design in individual product development projects. The particular features of the approach are a new user-centred design process model, a three-dimensional process performance model and implementation of the assessment in the form of a workshop with extensive participation by the project members. The user-centred design process model is method-independent, and consists of six processes that are defined through outcomes. The performance of processes is assessed from the viewpoints of quantity, quality, and integration. Our theoretical examinations show that different assessment categories can be identified depending on the different foci and purposes of an assessment. Moreover, it may even be appropriate to have different assessment approaches for different categories. In the category of our focus and purpose, i.e. 'assessment of user-centred design processes for performance improvement', the focus of an assessment should be in the substance rather than in the management of UCD processes. An assessment approach should be regarded as an artefact and it should be subject to ongoing refinement. An assessment should be an intervention that provides both an effective training session and a meaningful experience to the participants. Clarity in both the concepts and the results seems to take precedence over having standard reference models. In addition, we created a preliminary theory of usability capability. It identifies three dimensions of usability capability: user-centred design infrastructure, performance of user-centred design in product development projects and usability in business strategy. We also propose some new assessment artefacts for other assessment categories and contrast our research experience with established research frameworks.

Hairdressers’ exposure to work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) appears to be insufficiently described in the literature. Knowledge regarding musculoskeletal disorders in this group is also sparse. The purpose of the research was to investigate the status of work-related musculoskeletal disorder cases found in Taiwanese hairdressers and to develop user-centred, strategic solutions to prevent the accumulation of musculoskeletal disorders in this group, especially newcomers to the industry. The study involved a series of investigations into the status of WMSDs for hairdressers in Taiwan as a first step towards their prevention. A hairdresser-oriented, musculoskeletal questionnaire was used to discover the risk factors associated with WMSDs and a validated, on-line, rapid, upper-limb assessment tool was used to identify critical hairdressing working postures. Improvements to the main critical hairdressing working postures identified by the first stage of the research have been addressed by an ergonomics training programme. The effectiveness of this is validated using 3D-motion analysis based on a pre- and post-test evaluation of awkward movements. A scientific approach to 3D-motion analysis has been achieved specifically by the study of the awkward working postures of the upper extremity during hair-blow-waving and hair-straightening activities. The relationship between working postures and WMSDs in various body regions is discussed. In this regard, poor posture and movement can lead to local mechanical stress on the muscles, ligaments and joints, resulting in discomfort in the musculoskeletal system, particularly the neck, back, shoulder and wrist. This research has provided a WMSDs prevention framework as a strategic method of securing a continuous improvement in the awkward working postures adopted during various hairdressing activities. Topics for further studies are suggested.

The levels of income and employment rates of people with disabilities are often lower than those without them. An effective way to free disabled people from these circumstances would be to design proper job accommodation for them. Ordinarily, physical conditions severely restrict their ability to carry out their work efficiently unless they have are provided with appropriately designed assistive technology (AT). However, due to the physical conditions unique to each disabled person, understanding the requirements of a disabled person is often a challenge to an AT designer. The aims of this research were to develop a design model for an empathy tool that would assist in the process of designing AT for job accommodation, and to explore the relationship between the use of empathy tools and the improvement of design elements in job accommodation AT. The design models employed were developed by analysing interviews with AT users and examining the results of observations and a literature review. The model was then used to build an empathy tool to be used in designing job accommodation AT for a selected subject; the empathy tools were used in a series of assessments of designer users. The results show that, when compared with tools used in traditional design briefs, empathy tools can successfully help designers to improve design elements in terms, respectively, of their understanding of users' physical abilities (22 per cent), work requirements (26.6 per cent), ergonomic requirements (22.8 per cent), and environment characteristics (21.4 per cent). Meanwhile, it is difficult for the tool to improve upon other design elements, about which one must learn by gaining design experience.

The domestic sector currently accounts for approximately a third of the UK s energy use and so energy demand reduction in the domestic sector is a key part of the UK s strategy for carbon reduction. However, energy demand reduction has typically been addressed from an engineering perspective, with little consideration of the requirements of users. This PhD submission aims to identify how qualitative information about users experiences, values and practices relating to UK domestic energy demand reduction can be collected and presented effectively to an engineering audience and incorporated into engineering-focused energy research. User centred design is presented as a viable approach to understanding the context of energy use in UK homes and specifying requirements of the householders; as a way of ensuring user needs are included in this socio-technical problem space. This requires presentation of information about human behaviour in a form that is timely and appropriate to the engineering audience, who take a positivist view, preferring facts and figures to descriptions and anecdotes. A collection of nine publications, mostly peer-reviewed journal papers, by the thesis author and her co-authors is presented. Publications spanning from 2006 to 2014 illustrate a range of approaches to providing user centred information, from literature review to complex householder studies, which can provide information to enhance the engineering data and so provide additional insight and understanding. The research findings within the individual papers add to the body of knowledge on domestic energy use. In addition, the research identifies a number of roles where user centred design contributes to understanding of home energy use. From providing background and raising awareness of the presence of users within a system, to contextual understanding and the specification of user requirements, through to more sophisticated user characterisation, it is argued that user centred design can offer a significant contribution to the field. Future application of user information into engineering models, together with large scale, longitudinal studies of home energy use are proposed, building on the contributions of this thesis.

By far the biggest injury risk faced by people with late onset dementia is a serious fall. Commercial fall detectors are available which automatically alert a call centre or carer if they detect a fall. They use accelerometers to look for the kinematics of a fall but this method is unreliable and the frequent false alarms must be cancelled by the wearer. This is inappropriate for someone with dementia. This thesis examines how a wrist-worn fall detector better suited to someone with dementia might be built. It reviews what other sensors could be used alongside accelerometers, and whether looking for the physiological effects of falling might be beneficial. It concludes that the pulse provides a source of data and describes three empirical trials to examine whether the body pose can be determined from the pulse waveform. A small convenience sample proved the viability of the concept, followed by a larger study to investigate it further, and finally a trial in people of the same age group as late onset dementia sufferers. Producing a technically better device is not sufficient, as it must also be usable by the people it is intended for. The thesis describes two qualitative studies which use carers to define, and then evaluate, a conceptual fall detector suitable for people with moderate or severe dementia which fits underneath a wrist watch. The thesis argues that wearable fall detectors should utilise physiological data to complement kinematic data. It demonstrates the practicality of a novel technique for determining body position using the pulse waveform, and finally concludes that it would be possible to build the conceptual fall detector utilising this technique.

Unsurprisingly the National Health Service (NHS) has harnessed the prolific growth in Internet access to alleviate the increasing burden incurred due to rising healthcare costs. Healthcare interventions focus on the promotion of good behaviours; prevention of bad behaviours; provision of support for shared decision making; increasing knowledge and improving monitoring. Healthcare researchers typically rely on professional software developers in the creation of Internet interventions. Although varying in nomenclature Internet interventions typically consist of the same underlying components, such as navigation, logic and response capture. The LifeGuide Authoring Tool provides a potential solution to reduce this reliance of researchers on software developers in the creation of interventions. However the logic creation command line interface provided by LifeGuide is identified as a potential barrier for adoption, by nonprogrammers, due to their lack of experience with the strict programming style syntax it requires. Through the adoption of user-centred design techniques; early and continuous user involvement; rapid prototyping and interface design principles, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed, with the potential to lower this barrier for researchers with no previous programming experience. A jigsaw metaphor was adopted in the design of the interface, utilising templates and pre-populated fields, with the aim of reducing errors and lowering the cognitive load experienced by users. A task-based evaluation compared the existing LifeGuide interface, with the new GUI, in the creation of commonly used logic. Higher results were reported over the five main usability measures: effectiveness; engagement; efficiency; ease of learning and error tolerability in favour of the GUI, in the creation of intervention logic. Continuing requests to the author to develop healthcare Internet Interventions supports the research, that there is still a heavy reliance of researchers on software developers. A further application for this approach was identified in the development of a tool to support healthcare researchers in the creation of mobile phone messaging interventions.

Formal approaches to software development require that we correctly describe (or specify) systems in order to prove properties about our proposed solution prior to building it. We must then follow a rigorous process to transform our specification into an implementation to ensure that the properties we have proved are retained. When we design and build the user interfaces of our systems we are similarly keen to ensure that they have certain properties before we build them. For example, do they satisfy the requirements of the user? Are they designed with known good design principles and usability considerations in mind? User-centred design approaches, which incorporate many different techniques which we may consider as informal, seek to consider these issues so that the UIs we build are designed around the needs and capabilities of real users. Both formal methods and user-centred design are important and beneficial in the development of underlying system functionality and user interfaces respectively. Given this we would like to be able to use both approaches in one integrated software development process. Their differences, however, make this a challenging objective. In this thesis we present a solution this problem by describing models and techniques which provide a bridge between the existing work of user-centred design practitioners and formal methods practitioners enabling us to incorporate (representations of) informal design artefacts into a formal software development process. We then use these models as the basis for a refinement theory for user interfaces which allows interface designers to retain their informal design methods whilst providing an underlying theory grounded in the trace refinement theory of the Microcharts language.

For over two decades user-centric methods and techniques have been proposed to assist the production of usable, useful, and desirable software products. Despite these approaches, usability problems are still identified in finished software products creating problems at systems acceptance, rework and impacting end user experience. Part of the reason for these continuing problems is that user-centric approaches are not part of the traditional software engineering process. The literature review shows that software engineering and human-computer interaction are largely different communities. The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether the incorporation of user modelling and usability modelling into software requirements specifications would improve design quality and usability of software products. This research study used a Design Science dominant mixed research methodology consisting of case study and action research for creating, analysing and evaluating artefacts for improving the effectiveness of user-centred design and usability of software artefacts. Using the functional specification of an existing system in a government agency, ten designers created screen and interaction designs. The specification was then enhanced with usability specifications and the designers redeveloped their designs in the light of the enhanced specification. Both designs were subject to pre-defined usability tests and designers described their design experience as they worked. The results of the research demonstrated that enhancing traditional software requirements specifications with additional specifications of user modelling and usability modelling made a positive difference to both designer perception as well as design quality of user interface artefacts. The theoretical and practical values of these findings are explored.

This thesis focuses on the different aspects of role-play as an approach for user-centred design of mobile information technology (IT). This is done through development of a sequence of workshops and reflecting on the outcome. The motivation for the thesis has been to develop an understanding of the important conditions for involving end-users in the process of understanding user needs and exploring requirements for mobile IT. The need for new methods to understand mobile IT and the focus on user involvement in the traditions of participatory design and user-centred design established the background for the work. Most of the workshops were carried out in a hospital context. The overall research approach has been to work iteratively by carrying out a set of smaller studies, so-called workshops. The research design was flexible, characterized by a design that evolves, develops and unfolds, as the research proceeds. The current state of the knowledge on role-play called for a qualitative approach with a focus on understanding important issues concerning user role-plays. The overall research subject of this thesis is: Develop understanding of key premises for using role-play with low-fidelity prototyping to involve end-users in exploring user needs and requirements for mobile IT. This research subject was further divided into three specific research questions: What are the important issues related to planning and running of role-play design workshops with end-users? What do system developers perceive as the strengths and limitations of such role-play workshops as a system development method? What is the role of the workshop facilitators in such role-play work­shops? Five categories of issues of importance for planning and running of role-play workshops with end-users were identified: practicalities, user role-playing, idea generation, workshop resources and roles in the workshop. The system developers regarded the approach as useful for several reasons including enhancing user involvement, helping developers understand the context of use, and creating a focus in a project. The developers also called attentions to limitations of using role-play; such as a narrow user view on the system that does not take system development premises into account. One of the issues that emerged as a particularly important factor in the workshops was the role-play facilitator’s skills in leading the role-play part and the idea generation process. A framework developed by Yardley-Matwiejcsuk proved useful for understanding how to develop and rehearse these kinds of role-play. The thesis contributes with an understanding of different aspects regarding role-play workshops with end users in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.