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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In recent years, 3D graphics has become more available for web development with low-level access to graphics hardware and increased power of web browsers. With core browsing tasks for users being to quickly scan a website and find what they are looking for, can 3D graphics – or depth cues – be used to facilitate these tasks? Therefore, the main focus of this work was to examine user performance on websites in terms of visual attention. Previous research on the use of 3D graphics in web design and other graphical interfaces has yielded mixed results, but some suggest depth cues might be used to segment a visual scene and improve visual attention. In this work, the main question asked was:  How do depth cues affect visual search in a web-based environment? To examine the question, a user study was conducted where participants performed a visual search task on four different web-based prototypes with varying depth cues. The findings suggest depth cues might have a negative effect by increasing reaction time, but certain cues can improve task completion (hit rate) in text-rich web environments. It is further elaborated that it might be useful to look at the problem from a more holistic perspective, also emphasizing other factors such as visual complexity and prototypicality of websites.

This report is an evaluation of if it is good or bad to use a metaphor in order to display the results of an academic search engine in a web interface. In order to evaluate this we are describing our work with developing two different web interfaces for an academic search engine by the name Silverfish. This project has been a co-operation between Indian Institute of Information Technol- ogy in Bangalore, India and Malmˆ University K3, Sweden. To start our report we describe how we see our context we are to work within. We define our stakeholders as being academics worldwide and also define that we are working within a web 2.0 context. To strengthen our choices regarding the design process of the two different interfaces as well as in order to give more validity to our discussion surrounding metaphors we continue with presenting different studies and facts that give more weight to the above mentioned parts. To make it possible to create the interfaces we have made use of several methods. We give a short definition of how these methods are to be used and later describe in the design process how we have made use of them. To describe how we have made use of the methods as well as to describe how we have developed our prototypes we continue our report with describing the design process, regarding which deci- sions we have made and why we have made them. To summarize our report we come to a con- clusion regarding our thesis question; communicating related key phrases through web interface metaphors; good or bad? Regarding our question we have found that the orientational metaphor we are using does not work as it is supposed to. We believe that further studies are required in order to get a deeper un- derstanding of how the user understands the orientational metaphor we are using. This informa- tion could help us come to an understanding of how we could make better use of our orienta- tional metaphor, or help us find out of a metaphor that would be better to use than our orienta- tional metaphor.

Inom människa-datorinteraktion har det länge spekulerats huruvida inkonsekvent design påverkar användarupplevelsen. Att definiera och kategorisera olika typer av konsekvens har visat sig svårt. Flera studier på området har kategoriserat typer av inkonsekvens med blandade perspektiv av såväl systemet, dess utvecklare samt dess användare. Denna uppsats sätter användarens perspektiv i fokus och kategoriserar typer av inkonsekvens i perceptuell, semantisk och procedurell konsekvens. 21 personer, med måttlig erfarenhet av att bruka nätet, deltog i ett experiment utformat att utforska effekterna av inkonsekvent design på användbarhet. För att pröva såväl huvud- som interaktionseffekter baserades experimentet på en fullständig 2 × 2 × 2 faktordesign för upprepade mätningar. Deltagarnas uppgift var att använda åtta prototyper av en webbutik där en dropdownmeny för ämnesval utsattes för experimentell manipulation. En trevägs variansanalys med kovariat visade att perceptuellt och procedurellt inkonsekvent design påverkade användarupplevelsen negativt. Resultaten pekade också på att hämmande interaktionseffekter uppstod mellan vissa av de tre inkonsekvenserna. Resultaten ger viktiga implikationer för webbutvecklare när de skall utveckla användbara applikationer. Genom ett användarperspektiv kan utvecklare hjälpa användare att undvika felaktiga handlingar. / Within Human-Computer Interaction, it has long been speculated that inconsistency impedes the user experience. However, defining and categorising consistency has been shown to be a challenging task. Several studies on the subject have categorised consistency with mixed perspectives of the system, its developer, and its user. The present thesis considers only the user perspective, and categorises consistency into Perceptual, Semantic, and Procedural consistency. 21 subjects, with moderate experience in using the web, participated in an experiment designed to explore the effect inconsistency might have on usability. In order to test both main and interaction effects between the three proposed consistencies, the experiment was based on a full 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design for repeated measures. The participants’ task was to use eight partly different versions of a mock-up web shop in which a subject selection drop-down menu was experimentally manipulated. Multiple Analysis of Covariance revealed that Perceptual and Procedural inconsistency affected user performance negatively. It also indicated that inhibitory interaction effects occurred between some of the (in)consistencies. The results have important implications for web developers in designing usable applications. By adapting a user perspective, they can aid users to avoid performing faulty actions.

This study explored the design and development of an electronic performance enhancement tool that can assist a person with limited programming skills to create a variety of simple customized information management websites. In particular, this study was modeled after needs within an Instruction Technology department in which individuals were able to create pre-functional web pages with various elements such as textboxes and dropdown menus but lacked the programming skills necessary to add functionality to these web forms. Skilled programmers could add functionality to these pre-functioning web forms or create customized information management websites from scratch. However, programmers are not always available when needed. At the time of this study, there was no readily available way for persons to create customized information management websites without the services of a programmer or without needing to learn programming skills themselves. This study sought to determine what functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be included in an electronic performance enhancement tool to assist non-programmers to create simple customized information management websites and how a tool with such functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be designed and developed. A prototype version of such tool (named the Form And DataBase Interaction Tool or "FADBIT") was designed and developed in this study. This tool asks users who have created simple pre-functional web forms to answer a series of questions related to those webforms. Given the user's responses to these questions, this tool is able to form a metalanguage representation of the user's intentions for the web form and can translate this representation into useful programming code to add the desired functionality. The tool was successfully designed and developed using a generalized modular framework, and a Create-Adapt-Generalize model, with each module addressing one or more patterns common to web programming. The prototype tool successfully allowed non-programmers to create functional information websites for two structured evaluation projects, and achieved some level of success and encountered some difficulties with an unstructured project. Proposed modifications and extensions to the tool to address the difficulties encountered are presented. / Ph. D.

I och med lanseringen av nya och mobila plattformar, såsom smarttelefoner och surfplattor, uppstår svårigheter med att anpassa webbsidor för samtliga typer av enheter. Tidigare har mobila applikationer (appar) och mobila sidor använts för att överkomma dessa problem. Responsive Web Design (RWD) är en ung designprincip som uppkom 2010 och har anammats av många webbutvecklare. Designprincipen medför att en webbsidas presentation förändras beroende på skärmstorleken som används för att visa sidan. I en studie har fem företag intervjuats för att få deras tankar och åsikter om RWD i jämförelse med utveckling av mobila sidor och appar. Detta för att besvara huruvida RWD kan ersätta denna plattformsspecifika utveckling. Majoriteten av företagen har helt gått över till att utveckla responsiva webbsidor istället för andra mobilanpassningar men appar utvecklas fortfarande. Skiftet från mobila sidor beror främst på att denna typ av lösning kräver dubbelt arbete med innehållet då olika innehåll visas på olika enheter. Med RWD används istället samma innehåll över samtliga olika skärmtyper. Undersökningen visar på att RWD kan ersätta plattformsspecfik utveckling av informationssidor och e-tjänster. Däremot kommer det inte kunna ersätta appar då dessa i grunden fyller olika syften. Vid större krav på funktionalitet är dessvärre RWD inte alltid lämpligt att använda.