This thesis investigates how principles of game design can be applied to a PC game settings menudesign to make the interaction fun and enhance the user satisfaction of interaction and navigation.Through exploring the question “How can principles of game design be applied to UI design inorder to enhance the user satisfaction of interacting with an interface?” it might be possible to addto the experience of using UI without removing any of the usability goals that is customary today.This is determined through user testing of a common design pattern of game settings menusrecognized in World of Warcraft (2004) Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) Stardew Valley (2016)and a game settings menu designed through game design principles where the respondentsevaluated their experience in an SUS form (Brooke, 1996) and a form created for this study basedon Swink’s (2009) Game Feel. The results revealed that the common menu design generatedhigher scores in usability than the interface designed through game design principles but therewas no significant difference in game feel between the prototypes. However, when dividing gamefeel into questions regarding usability and aesthetics a clear difference between the twoprototypes could be determined where the prototype designed through game design principlesdisplays a trend to score higher in aesthetics than the traditional UI. This could be strengthenedthrough optional comments from the participants where 6 used the word “fun” to describe thegame design prototype while the traditional UI design were described with words such as“functional” “intuitive” “straightforward” “easy to use” and “felt more like a chore”.

The aim of this field study is to examine the following problem: To what extent has education operated on a limited and narrow perception of design principles and if so how could the implementation of the missing principles be achieved. The field study is composed of an analysis and an educational model incorporating three levels of education. In the analysis the aesthetic principles of design are investigated in relation to natural design to find out what constitutes good design. Then these design principles are used to reflect on modern social values and socio-economic behaviour. The insights gained from the socio-economic sphere are then used for analysis of education curriculum planning to see whether the principles presently used can be improved upon. Finally the Educational model using aesthetics as its central value is expressed as a possible answer to the problem.

<p>The purpose of this study was to: obtain and review guidelines for designing on a small screen </p><p>from several theoretic sources and to purpose own guidelines for this context. There was </p><p>chosen for the development of 3 different prototypes meant for the use on 3 different mobile </p><p>devices. Those mobile devices had a different screen size and were: an e-reader, PDA and </p><p>mobile phone. The prototypes provided the user with a future e-newspaper service (a TV </p><p>schedule). </p><p> </p><p>First design principles for good usability on small screens were abstracted from literature. </p><p>With this knowledge the three prototypes were developed. The development started with </p><p>writing down the functional and user requirements for the prototypes. After that the </p><p>developing process had two stages. The first stage was a low-fidelity prototype, this were </p><p>sketches of the graphical user interface that was commented by users. The second stage was </p><p>a high-fidelity prototype, this stage consisted of three fully functional prototypes. The three </p><p>different prototypes were used in a user evaluation. After the evaluation interviews with the </p><p>users took place to obtain additional information. </p><p> </p><p>In this research the main question was: “What are the challenges for designing the </p><p>(graphical) user interface, as a part of an e-newspaper service which is aimed at use on </p><p>multiple devices with heterogeneous screen sizes, to be recognized as the same service?”. </p><p> </p><p>The results from this research are three challenges in designing the (graphical) user interface </p><p>for devices with small screens. These challenges are: how to make the user recognize the </p><p>service in the software (recognition of service), how to develop one service on multiple </p><p>devices (use on multiple devices) and how to develop software that it is useful and pleasant </p><p>to use (usable software). In total fifteen guidelines derived from theory were found, this </p><p>research shows that thirteen of them are applicable when designing for small screens. Three </p><p>of those thirteen are reformulated in this study to make them fit better in the context. Next to </p><p>this, seven additional guidelines were proposed in this study. Examples of the purposed </p><p>guidelines are: reconstruct the layout from the non-digital service in the interface as much as </p><p>possible, explore the targeted user group, built further on their mental model and pay </p><p>attention to possible disabilities of the group, implement extra’s that give users a good reason </p><p>to use the service and make it easy for the user to select the sought information.</p>

Engineering design methods focus on developing products that are innovative, robust, and multi-functional. In this context, the term robust refers to a product's ability to accomplish successfully its predetermined functions. Owing to the abundance of optimized and robust biological systems, engineering designers are now looking to nature for inspiration. Researchers believe that biomimetic or bio-inspired engineering systems can leverage the principles, mechanisms, processes, strategies, and/or morphologies of nature's successful designs. Unfortunately, two important problems associated with biomimetic design are a designer's limited knowledge of biology and the difference in biological and engineering terminologies. This research developed a new design tool that addresses these problems and proposes to help engineering designers develop candidate bio-inspired products or solutions. A methodology that helps users infer or extract biomimetic design principles from a given natural system or biomimetic product pair is described in this thesis. The method incorporates and integrates five existing design tools and theories to comprehensively investigate a given natural system or biomimetic product. Subsequently, this method is used to extract biomimetic design principles from 23 biomimetic products and natural systems. It is proposed that these principles have the potential to inspire ideas for candidate biomimetic products that are novel, innovative, and robust. The principle extraction methodology and the identified principles are validated using two separate case studies and a detailed analysis using the validation square framework. In the first case study, two students and the author use the principle extraction methodology to extract characteristics from a natural system and a biomimetic product pair. Results from this case study showed that the methodology effectively and repeatedly identifies system characteristics that exemplify inherent biomimetic design principles. In the second case study, the developed biomimetic design principles are used to inspire a solution for an engineering design problem. The resulting solution and its evaluation show that the design's achieved usefulness is linked to applying the biomimetic design principles. Similar to the TRIZ principles, the biomimetic design principles can inspire ideas for solutions to a given problem. The key difference is that designers using TRIZ leverage the solution strategies of engineering patents, while designers using the biomimetic design principles leverage nature’s solution strategies. The biomimetic design principles are compared to TRIZ and the BioTRIZ matrix.

The purpose of this study was to: obtain and review guidelines for designing on a small screen from several theoretic sources and to purpose own guidelines for this context. There was chosen for the development of 3 different prototypes meant for the use on 3 different mobile devices. Those mobile devices had a different screen size and were: an e-reader, PDA and mobile phone. The prototypes provided the user with a future e-newspaper service (a TV schedule). First design principles for good usability on small screens were abstracted from literature. With this knowledge the three prototypes were developed. The development started with writing down the functional and user requirements for the prototypes. After that the developing process had two stages. The first stage was a low-fidelity prototype, this were sketches of the graphical user interface that was commented by users. The second stage was a high-fidelity prototype, this stage consisted of three fully functional prototypes. The three different prototypes were used in a user evaluation. After the evaluation interviews with the users took place to obtain additional information. In this research the main question was: “What are the challenges for designing the (graphical) user interface, as a part of an e-newspaper service which is aimed at use on multiple devices with heterogeneous screen sizes, to be recognized as the same service?”. The results from this research are three challenges in designing the (graphical) user interface for devices with small screens. These challenges are: how to make the user recognize the service in the software (recognition of service), how to develop one service on multiple devices (use on multiple devices) and how to develop software that it is useful and pleasant to use (usable software). In total fifteen guidelines derived from theory were found, this research shows that thirteen of them are applicable when designing for small screens. Three of those thirteen are reformulated in this study to make them fit better in the context. Next to this, seven additional guidelines were proposed in this study. Examples of the purposed guidelines are: reconstruct the layout from the non-digital service in the interface as much as possible, explore the targeted user group, built further on their mental model and pay attention to possible disabilities of the group, implement extra’s that give users a good reason to use the service and make it easy for the user to select the sought information.

This Master thesis is about applying creative production methods and principles of design (from applied- and fine arts) to a music production process. The aim is to analyse and describe a musical process where instead of music theory-based principles and thinking; principles and aesthetics of design were converted to musical ideas through cross-disciplinary thinking and analysis. This thesis is mostly delving on the editing and mixing aspects of creative music production: how a change of perspective and principles influenced the musical results. / <p>Bilaga: 1 audio-CD och 1 data-CD</p>

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Governance is essentially the process whereby organisations or networks of organisations exercise their authority. It describes how a body with authority makes or does not make decisions, and how it implements - or does not implement - those decisions. 'Good' groundwater governance can then be defined by how fair the decision-making process is, and how effective the implementation process is. Groundwater governance in South Africa is increasingly being categorized as ineffective. The purpose of this thesis is to explore ways to improve groundwater governance in South Africa. Initial reviews of international studies of groundwater governance did not find any processes that could be directly imported into the South African governance landscape for testing. The global consensus was that there were no blueprints for improving groundwater governance, and that each case should be treated as unique. Therefore the thesis had to change from its initial aim of finding firm rules that could be tested in the South African context, to a revised aim of formulating tentative heuristics, rules, strategies and hypotheses that might be useful for further work in the South African context.An exploratory, inductive-based, loosely structured methodology was therefore employed rather than a more formal, deductive-based testing of hypotheses. In short, the objective of this thesis was concerned with formulating hypotheses rather than testing them.The novel, general, contribution made by this thesis is to synthesize global groundwater governance literature with the specific aim of improving groundwater governance in a specific country. While reviews of global literature do exist, they have thus far only been used to make generic recommendations, and have not been specifically applied to a country. Conversely, while attempts to improve groundwater governance for specific regions and countries do exist, these attempts have largely done so without synthesizing existing global knowledge. Indeed, the emphasis on national, regional and local studies has principally been to understand the factors at work affecting groundwater governance, rather than to improve governance.

Designing software components for future reuse has been an important area in software engineering. A software system developed with reusable components follows a "with" reuse process while a component designed to be reused in other systems follows a "for" reuse process. This dissertation explores the factors affecting design for reuse and design with reusable components through empirical studies. The studies involve Java components implementing a particular algorithm, a stemming algorithm that is widely used in the conflation domain. The method and empirical approach are general and independent of the programming language. Such studies may be extended to other types of components, for example, components implementing data structures such as stacks, queues etc. Design for reuse: In this thesis, the first study was conducted analyzing one-use and equivalent reusable components for the overhead in terms of component size, effort required, number of parameters, and productivity. Reusable components were significantly larger than their equivalent one-use components and had significantly more parameters. The effort required for the reusable components was higher than for one-use components. The productivity of the developers was significantly lower for the reusable components compared to the one-use components. Also, during the development of reusable components, the subjects spent more time on writing code than designing the components, but not significantly so.  A ranking of the design principles by frequency of use is also reported. A content analysis performed on the feedback is also reported and the reasons for using and not using the reuse design principles are identified. A correlation analysis showed that the reuse design principles were, in general, used independently of each other. Design with reuse: Through another empirical study, the effect of the size of a component and the reuse design principles used in building the component on the ease of reuse were analyzed. It was observed that the higher the complexity the lower the ease of reuse, but the correlation is not significant. When considered independently, four of the reuse design principles: well-defined interface, clarity and understandability, generality, and separate concepts from content significantly increased the ease of reuse while commonality and variability analysis significantly decreased the ease of reuse, and documentation did not have a significant impact on the ease of reuse. Experience in the programming language had no significant relationship with the reusability of components. Experience in software engineering and software reuse showed a relationship with reusability but the effect size was small. Testing components before integrating them into a system was found to have no relationship with the reusability of components. A content analysis of the feedback is presented identifying the challenges of components that were not easy to reuse. Features that make a component easily reusable were also identified. The Mahalanobis-Taguchi Strategy (MTS) was employed to develop a model based on Mahalanobis Distance  to identify the factors that can detect if a component is easy to reuse or not. The identified factors within the model are: size of a component, a set of reuse design principles (well-defined interface, clarity and understandability, commonality and variability analysis, and generality), and component testing. / Ph. D.

Successful product design focuses on design principles that are relevant to a target market. Consequently, the better these principles are understood and used, the higher the likelihood that resulting products will be well-received in that market. This thesis presents a method for extracting market-specific design principles for any market. The method employs user/designer-described characteristics of products within a market to extract the design principles specific to that market. The method generalizes the product characteristics, seeks to discover design decisions that could have resulted in those characteristics, and then extracts the underlying design principles. To demonstrate the ability of the method to extract such principles, the method is applied to two disparate markets; (i) best-selling products in the US, and (ii) products created for the developing world. The two sets of resulting principles are compared and shown to be market-specific. The author conclude that the method indeed results in market-specific principles that can be used to guide design activities.

Instructional video is a common staple for delivering content in online courses. However, if the included videos are not properly created, many students will skip the video and its content. Improving instructional video has been the topic of many research projects, and we can learn from these studies how to create effective and engaging instructional videos--this is the topic of my dissertation. The first paper is an extended literature review that examines which key instructional design principles are supported in the literature. This helps developers to know which principles to focus on when designing video. The second paper is a practitioner's guide for redesigning instructional video. It details the lessons learned during an evaluation and redesign project completed on an online course. It categorizes the various videos, based on the evaluation data, into three different levels depending on the amount of work required to redesign each. This explains how developers can realize some improvement with a minimum amount of effort and which practices to use when a full reshoot is required. The final paper is a quantitative research paper that looks at the impact of adding bookmarks to the videos of an online course. Analytic data was collected on a semester of students before and after the bookmarks were added and using this data we graphed the number of times each video was watched, re-watched, and abandoned before being completed. We also compared the video usage to how often the reading was done for each lesson. This data will help video designers determine if this improvement helped make the videos more valuable to the students.