Thesis (Masters) -- University of Canberra, 2008. / Includes bibliography (p. 130-135) Also available online.

Pre-deployment field testing in is the process of testing software to uncover unforeseen problems before it is released in the market. It is commonly conducted by recruiting users to experiment with the software in as natural setting as possible. Information regarding the software is then sent to the developers as logs. Log data helps developers fix bugs and better understand the user behaviors so they can refine functionality to user needs. More importantly, logs contain specific problems as well as call traces that can be used by developers to trace its origins. However, developers focus their analysis on post-deployment data such as bug reports and CVS data to resolve problems, which has the disadvantage of releasing software before it can be optimized. Therefore, more techniques are needed to harness field testing data to reduce post deployment problems. We propose techniques to process log data generated by users in order to resolve problems in the application before its deployment. We introduce a metric system to predict the user perceived quality in software if it were to be released into market in its current state. We also provide visualization techniques which can identify the state of problems and patterns of problem interaction with users that provide insight into solving the problems. The visualization techniques can also be extended to determine the point of origin of a problem, to resolve it more efficiently. Additionally, we devise a method to determine the priority of reported problems. The results generated from the case studies on mobile software applications. The metric results showed a strong ability predict the number of reported bugs in the software after its release. The visualization techniques uncovered problem patterns that provided insight to developers to the relationship between problems and users themselves. Our analysis on the characteristics of problems determined the highest priority problems and their distribution among users. / Thesis (Master, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-16 17:50:31.094

Denna explorativa studie analyserar gemensamma och differentiella mönster för kommunikation och beteende hos användare i Hjälpforum. Målet med studien är att kartlägga aktiva användartyper med syfte att ge SVT kunskap om Hjälpforumets användare. Om forumadministratörer har mer kunskap om användarna i Hjälpforum kan de anpassa sin kommunikation utifrån användarnas individuella behov och öka deras förmåga att bidra med mer kvalitativ återkoppling. Detta kan i sin tur bidra till en positivare inställning och ökat förtroende hos användare i Hjälpforum. I denna studie kunde fem användartyper kartläggas i Hjälpforum med stöd av egen empiri och tidigare forskning. Nybörjare utgör främsta användartypen i Hjälpforum och SVT bör därför tillgodose deras behov för att eventuellt minska antalet nya användarinlägg. Dessutom kunde denna studie med hjälp av lämpliga databearbetningsverktyg kartlägga, en för tillfället, okänd användartyp i Hjälpforum utifrån ovanliga mönster i beteende och kommunikation vilket kan vara intressant för vidare analys. Studien presenterar förslag på hur resultatet kan användas för att skapa riktlinjer för framtida kommunikation och utveckling av Hjälpforum och SVT:s webbplats. / This exploratory study analyzes the common and differential patterns of communication and behavior of users in Help Forum. The goal of the study is to map the active user types with the aim of providing SVT knowledge of the Help Forum users. If the forum administrators have more knowledge of the users in the forum, they can adapt their communication based on the individual needs and enhance their ability to contribute more qualitative feedback. This may in turn contribute to a more positive attitude and greater confidence among users in Help Forum. In this study, five types of users could be identified in the Forum with the support of its own empirical data and previous research. Beginners are primary user type in the forum and SVT should cater to their needs in order to possibly reduce the number of new user posts. Furthermore, this study using appropriate data processing tool map, one for the moment, unknown user type in the forum by unusual patterns of behavior and communication which may be of interest for further analysis. The study presents suggestions on how the results can be used to create guidelines for future communication and development of Help Forum and SVT's website.

During the spring semester of 2018 a product development project has been carried out at the University of Skövde by two Design Engineering Students, Pontus Rang-Roslun, and Guillermo Munguía Velazquez, in cooperation with the project group for Smart Textiles for Sustainable Work Life at the University of Skövde as they are now focusing to develop a web-based software for ergonomists and work leaders/coaches. The aim of the project is to design the interface for the software. The project carried out literature review focused on basic principles of usability, cognition, user interaction, human-computer interaction, user experience and ergonomic evaluation methods. In order to uncover user needs, interviews and observations were performed, and inputs and outputs of the management information were analyzed. Based on the gathered information, concepts were generated and evaluated through formative evaluation. The final iteration brought a flexible and usable interface for ergonomic evaluations / Smart Textiles for Sustainable Work Life

Abstract Usability methodology has matured into a well-defined, industrially relevant field with its own findings, theories, and tools, with roots in applying information technology to user interfaces ranging from control rooms to computers, and more recently to mobile communications devices. The purpose is regularly to find out the users’ goals and to test whether a design fulfils the usability criteria. Properly applied, usability methods provide reliable and repeatable results, and are excellent tools in fine-tuning existing solutions The challenges of usability methodologies are in finding new concepts and predicting their characteristics before testing, especially when it comes to the relatively young field of mobile user interfaces. Current usability methods concentrate on utilising available user-interface technologies. They do not provide means to clearly identify, e.g., the potential of auditory or haptic output, or gestural input. Consequently, these new interaction techniques are rarely used, and the long-envisioned useful multimodal user interfaces are yet to appear, despite their assumed and existing potential in mobile devices. Even the most advocated and well-known multimodal interaction concepts, such as combined manual pointing and natural language processing, have not materialised in applications. An apparent problem is the lack of a way to utilise a usage environment analysis in finding out user requirements that could be met with multimodal user interfaces. To harness the full potential of multimodality, tools to identify both little or unused and overloaded modalities in current usage contexts are needed. Such tools would also help in putting possibly existing novel interaction paradigms in context and pointing out possible deficiencies in them. In this thesis, a novel framework for analysing the usage environment from a user-centric perspective is presented. Based on the findings, a designer can decide between offering a set of multiple devices utilising various user-interface modalities, or a single device that offers relevant modalities, perhaps by adapting to the usage environment. Furthermore, new techniques for creating mobile user interfaces utilising various modalities are proposed. The framework has evolved from the experiences gathered from the designs of experimental and actual product-level uni- and multimodal user interface solutions for mobile devices. It has generated novel multimodal interaction and interface techniques that can be used as building blocks in system designs.

User studies play a vital role in data visualization research because they help measure the strengths and weaknesses of different visualization techniques quantitatively. In addition, they provide insight into what makes one technique more effective than another; and they are used to validate research contributions in the field of information visualization. For example, a new algorithm, visual encoding, or interaction technique is not considered a contribution unless it has been validated to be better than the state of the art and its competing alternatives or has been validated to be useful to intended users. However, conducting user studies is challenging, time consuming, and expensive. User studies generally requires careful experimental designs, iterative refinement, recruitment of study participants, careful management of participants during the run of the studies, accurately collecting user responses, and expertise in statistical analysis of study results. There are several variables that are taken into consideration which can impact user study outcome if not carefully managed. Hence the process of conducting user studies successfully can take several weeks to months. In this dissertation, we investigated how to design an online framework that can reduce the overhead involved in conducting controlled user studies involving web-based visualizations. Our main goal in this research was to lower the overhead of evaluating data visualizations quantitatively through user studies. To this end, we leveraged current research opportunities to provide a framework design that reduces the overhead involved in designing and running controlled user studies of data visualizations. Specifically, we explored the design and implementation of an open-source framework and an online service (VisUnit) that allows visualization designers to easily configure user studies for their web-based data visualizations, deploy user studies online, collect user responses, and analyze incoming results automatically. This allows evaluations to be done more easily, cheaply, and frequently to rapidly test hypotheses about visualization designs. We evaluated the effectiveness of our framework (VisUnit) by showing that it can be used to replicate 84% of 101 controlled user studies published in IEEE Information Visualization conferences between 1995 and 2015. We evaluated the efficiency of VisUnit by showing that graduate students can use it to design sample user studies in less than an hour. Our contributions are two-fold: first, we contribute a flexible design and implementation that facilitates the creation of a wide range of user studies with limited effort; second, we provide an evaluation of our design that shows that it can be used to replicate a wide range of user studies, can be used to reduce the time evaluators spend on user studies, and can be used to support new research.

Med informationssystemens ökande närvaro i dagens samhälle blir det allt viktigare att systemen anpassas efter användare och uppfyller deras behov. Därför uppmuntras användare i allt större omfattning att delta i systemutvecklingsprocessen. Trots detta är felaktiga krav en stor anledning till att projekt bedömts som misslyckade. Under tidigare studier har flera olika faktorer analyserats för att undersöka hur dessa påverkar användartillfredsställelse och hur uppfattningen av tillfredsställelse kan skilja sig mellan olika grupper av användare, baserat på dess kontext. Det har även tidigare visats att hög grad av användartillfredsställelse uppstått vid en låg grad av medverkan och vice versa. Uppsatsen ämnar belysa vilka faktorer som påverkar användares tillfredsställelse vid medverkan i systemutvecklingsprojekt. För detta har en intervjustudie med en kvalitativ ansats utformats där totalt sju intervjuer genomförts. Därefter har en kvalitativ analys genomförts för att behandla insamlade data. Studien visar att faktorerna grad och nivå av användarmedverkan och involvering, effektivitet av användarmedverkan och involvering, kommunikation mellan användare och utvecklare, användarrepresentation, stöd av ledningen samt åsikters beaktning påverkar användartillfredsställelse. Dessa faktorer stöds av teorin, medan faktorn planering inte stöds då avsaknaden av detaljerad planering inte visat någon större inverkan på tillfredsställelsen eller effektiviteten av medverkan. Slutligen har kommunikation mellan användare och utvecklare samt åsikters beaktning påvisats som faktorer med mest inflytande på användartillfredsställelse. / With the increasing presence of information systems in todays society, it can be percieved as important that the systems are adjusted based on the users needs. This could be an encouragement to let users participate in the system development process to a higher degree. Despite this, inaccurate requirement gathering is a prominent cause among projects deemed as failures. Previous studies have analyzed different factors to see how they affect user satisfaction and have also shown that the perception of user satisfaction can vary between groups of users, depending on the context. Research have shown that a high degree of user satisfaction can be achieved with a low degree of user participation, and vice versa. The aim of this thesis was to examine what factors affected users satisfaction with their participation in the system development process. To answer this, a qualitative study has been conducted through seven interviews. Further on, a qualitative method of analysis have been used to analyze the collected data. The study shows the factors degree and level of user participation and involvement, effectiveness of user participation and involvement, communication between users and developers, user representation, support of management and consideration of opinions does affect user satisfaction. These factors are supported by previous studies, while the factor planning is not supported since the absence of detailed planning does not show any significant influence on user satisfaction or the effectivity of participation. Finally, communication between users and developers and consideration of opinions has been shown to have the strongest influence on user satisfaction

Having a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is seen as increasingly important if an organisation wants to compete in today’s business environment. The implementation of a new ERP system can result in added automatization and the replacement and/or coupling of legacy systems. The replacement and coupling of legacy systems can help an organisation increase data integrity and accessibility by lowering data fragmentation. Previous research on the topic of ERP implementations has emphasized user participation as an important factor when aiming to succeed with an implementation. The research is however inconsistent with its use of participation and involvement where involvement is often used synonymously with participation, but sometimes it signifies that the implementation is of personal importance to the user. This study defines user participation as the user partaking in activities relating to the implementation, and user involvement is defined as the user perceiving the project or system as important. This study also introduces a new term: user inclusion, which encompasses both user participation, and if a user is on the receiving end of one-way communication, for example when receiving a newsletter. This study argues that symbolic adoption, the belief that implementing the system is a good idea, is an important part of system success and uses a combination of factors from the UTAUT model and the I/S success model as antecedents to the dimensions of symbolic adoption that has been presented in previous research. The purpose of this study is to examine how users are included in ERP implementation processes, and how their inclusion in the process affects users’ symbolic adoption. To address this purpose, a qualitative multi-case study that included two cases was conducted. In order to answer how users are included, this study divides how into three sub-questions; who; when and in what way users were included throughout the implementation. ​This study concludes that users’ inclusion increases over time throughout the implementation process, both in terms of influence, and in number of participating users. This study also shows that users included in project initiatives can affect the antecedents to symbolic adoption in various ways, both their own symbolic adoption, and that of their non-participating colleagues. An example of this is how intended users’ expectations can be managed through communication and when they get first-hand experience of the system, their expectations correct themselves so that they are closer to the actual performance and effort required. The antecedents, performance and effort expectancy, are in turn linked to the symbolic adoption dimension effort worthiness.

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.

Biometric systems have become increasingly popular for user authentication andidentification across various domains, including smartphones, laptops, financial services,healthcare, and security. These systems offer enhanced security and quickaccess to data, aiming to address the challenges associated with passwords and pins.However, achieving a method that provides a 100% guarantee in all fields and for alldevices remains a challenge. To explore user perceptions on the acceptance of biometricsystems, an online survey was conducted with 99 participants from diversebackgrounds, education levels, ages, and countries. The survey focused on understandingusers’ acceptance of biometric systems based on their experiences and perspectives.Additionally, it aimed to investigate whether demographic factors, suchas age, education, and background, influence user acceptance. The study also comparedthe preferred authentication technique among users with findings from previousstudies. The survey results supported previous research, showing that fingerprinttechnology is the most recommended and preferred method for user authentication,followed by facial recognition. This study sheds light on the growing adoption ofbiometric systems to overcome password-related issues and provides valuable insightsinto user preferences for authentication and identification methods.