The continuous growth of the gaming industry develops a highly competitive environment, which provides an incubator of innovation. These conditions lead to the emergence of new business models. Free to play as one of those newly and still developing models is currently trending among the game developing and publishing companies. Delivering skyrocketing profits, the full potential of the model is yet to be revealed. At first sight, the model has a simplistic structure on the business side, however, on the user side it is unclear what motivates players to become customers through the purchase of digital items in the games. This research uses an exploratory and qualitative approach to collect data and identify purchasing behaviour stimuli. It also proposes an option of connecting personality theories as a possible explanation to the purchasing behaviour of players. As a focus for this study, the currently most successful free to play game, League of Legends, was selected and twelve interviews with League of Legends players were conducted. The interviews consisted of two parts, one semi-structured and the other one structured. The semi-structured interview aimed at identifying purchasing behaviour and finding reasons for the purchase of digital items in League of Legends. The second was a personality assessment test, Keirsey Temperament Sorter2. A conventional content analysis of the interviews identified the theme “personal satisfaction” as the main motivation for purchasing digital items. The investigation regarding the proposed connection to personality theory, the research’s results fail to show any connection. However, answering research question number one unveils the importance of the personality factor remains valid and a subject of future research. The research discusses possibilities and direction for future research in the face of testing other than the applied Keirsey personality theory.

Truck drivers often have a tight time schedule and therefore need to carry out several in-vehicle tasks while driving, such as making phone calls, writing down information and navigating to new places. Performing these tasks using a visual-manual interface can impose visual distraction which has been shown to lead to safety-critical events on the roads. Instead of using a visual-manual interface, a speech interface could be a safer alternative if designed properly. However, the cognitive load demanded by speech interfaces and the connection between cognitive load and driving behaviour is not fully understood. In this study, a speech interface and its visual-manual counterpart were evaluated and compared in terms of visual distraction, cognitive load and user efficiency and perceived acceptance. Eye tracking was used to measure visual distraction. The measurements used for cognitive load were the Tactile Detection Response task (TDRT) and the Driving Activity Load Index (DALI). Perceived acceptance and efficiency were measured using the System Usability Scale (SUS), the Subjective Assessment of Speech Systems (SASSI) and semi-structured interviews. The conclusions were that (1) the speech interface was less visually distracting than the visual-manual counterpart, (2) the speech interface was less cognitively demanding than the visual-manual interface, especially in the navigation task, (3) the speech interface was safer to use while driving compared to the visual-manual interface and (4) the speech interface had higher user acceptance and perceived efficiency than the visual-manual interface. Further research should investigate the connection between cognitive load and driving behaviour, such as lane keeping and brake response time, by employing a variety of speech tasks with various complexity as well as including speech interfaces entirely free from visual demand. The focus should be on the difference between baseline driving and speech interaction, as opposed to speech interaction and visual-manual interaction.

Agile software development has emerged as a response to the rapidly changing software environment and the need to anticipate late change of requirements. An important tool for many agile methods is a projec tmanagement application with a task board to keep track of the progress. However, it can be difficult to find a project management applicationthat is suited for a workplace where development teams use different methods. The aim of this master thesis was to develop a prototype of a project management application adapted to Codemill AB where development teams use different agile methods. To achieve this, the work process of development teams were investigated, as well as existing project management applications, and the most important functionality and features from a user available point of view were identified. Two design concepts were developed based on the users’ needs. Both concepts were tested and compared by end users in order to develop a refined prototype with the best parts from both concepts. The results indicate that the development process in a workplace can vary a lot between different development teams even though their methods are inspired by the same framework. A project management application for agile software development must be flexible enough to handle these differences without becoming too complex and difficult to use. None of the investigated applications achieved this balance. This work aimed to develop a prototype of an application that fills this gap, with the users' needs in focus. The findings in this thesis are based on Codemill’s needs, however, they could also be considered by others with similar needs.

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This thesis investigates the two gaming platforms PC and Console and how the interfaces of games on these platforms could be designed more efficiently making it easier to release games on multiple platforms. In other words, how could the Multiple Platform First method look. Little previous work exist on this problem so this thesis work gathers information from other industries and also research on user interfaces in games in general. By looking at games running on both platforms different best practises and common solutions were discovered. A study was conducted testing different in-game components on users. The components were selected to test if the users would accept non-traditional components since users detect when playing on an interface not intended for the platform. This makes the study very complicated since the "best" solution might not work if the users does not accept it for the intended platform. Concepts were designed to combine the testing of solutions with the users opinion of the solutions. The chosen concepts were researched both in literature and by looking at present implementations in games. To be able to user test the solutions they were iterated from low fidelity prototypes on paper to high fidelity prototypes that were playable in Unity. The prototypes were tested on users and data gathered through Think Aloud comments and questionnaire answers. This study presents a first draft of how a multiple platform approach can be achieved.

From being a fictional element in sci-fi movies, voice user interaction has become reality with intelligent personal assistants like Apple’s Sir iand Google’s Assistant. The development opens up for new exciting user experiences and challenges when designing for these experiences. This thesis has aimed to investigate the user experience of different ways of onboarding new users to intelligent personalassistants. The process has included interviews with experienced users, a test of a Google Home for three months and a wizard of oz (WOZ) test. The interviews and the long term test was done in correlation with a literature study to determine how users interact with an intelligent personal assistant (IPA) their flaws, benefits, what added value they have etc. The goal of the WOZ test was to compare two different teaching methods during the onboarding of a new user. The methods were a voice tutorial by the IPA and a visual interaction on a mobile device. The outcome was to see if the users memory retention was different between the two methods for features learned during the test as well as the users opinions of the two different methods. The results from the interviews show that the benefits of using an IPA is in situations where it reduces friction, e.g when both hands are occupied. They also showed that there are still issues with IPAs and there is a long way to go before they can a accomplish a more human-to-human like conversation. In the WOZ test the results showed that there were no significant difference in user remembrance of learnt features between the two teaching methods. However the user insights showed that the majority of users would like to have a multimodal interaction, a combination of voice and visual interaction when being taught to use an IPA.

Smartphones and applications are becoming more and more popular. Although, the user knowledge varies. Onboarding has been described in other previous studies as a tool for costumers to get a better understanding of applications. This thesis aims to develop guidelines for onboarding by investigating previous studies and by comparing different applications. By investigating to what extent onboarding is beneficial for an application, the question of if it is worth the time and effort for a company to develop an onboarding is discussed. A hi- fi onboarding prototype will be developed to be able to test the guidelines. Simplicity, knowledge of the user, smooth navigation and user satisfaction are a few things that were kept in mind from previous studies when developing the guidelines. To be able to develop guidelines, questions regarding mobile devices, application developing, user behaviour and manuals have also been studied. Interviews combined with observations allowed for an analysis of the guidelines by conducting an A/B test. One group of test subjects received an application with onboarding, and the other group received the same application without onboarding. The result of the A/B test showed that onboarding helped the user to find functions that could be considered difficult to locate. The test also showed that many people often skip onboarding, but people that complete the onboarding process gets a better understanding of the application faster. Guidelines for an efficient development of an onboarding are presented. In conclusion, onboarding is a tool that should be utilized if the developer aims to allow as many users as possible to understand the full potential of the application as fast as possible.

This thesis represents a development from start to a proof of concept for an automobile configurator with 3D visualization. This proof of concept must be independent from other products and should only need a web browser to use. To be able to develop this type of product certain methods must be researched, these include; methods for developing a web based user interface for interaction with a 3D model, different methods for reducing data size of CAD models as well as visualizing the model. As there were two designers working alongside to develop this proof of concept, there was a good opportunity to try different approaches in terms of interface and test them on probable future users. A more conventional approach was preferred by the users and therefore chosen to be developed into a final design that would be for the website. When developing, certain features had to remain unimplemented due to time and resource restraints but the test users were still enthusiastic about such a product if the different aspects were to be polished.

In only two hours, the earth receives sunlight containing the amount of energy equivalent to one year’s electricity consumption of the entire population. Yet only 0.09 percent of the electricity production in Sweden 2016 came from solar energy. To increase that amount, the energy and communications company Umeå Energi offers solar panels to their customers. While doing that, they have identified a desire for their customers to monitor their electricity consumption and production at the same place – something that the service lacks today. This thesis investigates the actual needs behind why the solar customers want to know the electricity consumption and production information, in what contexts it will be accessed, and how that can be visualized to meet their needs. Starting with a literature study to understand the area, the work continues by meeting and interviewing customers to collect insights. These insights are then used as a foundation when creating and testing prototypes repeatedly together with the customers. It was found that being self-sufficient is one of the most important reasons for their solar panel customers for producing their own electricity. The prototypes that were created aimed to address that self-sufficiency need, together with visual representations of their electricity production and consumption – both historically as well as with live data.

Testing a software is important to maintain the quality of the application. There are many ways of testing functionality of an application but not so many for testing the interface. When reusing CSS is a common approach, one change in the CSS can cause many visual changes on the interface. Not testing these changes, visual errors might occur which can decrease the quality of the application. Also, not knowing where the change is affecting, fear-driven development, i.e. the developers feels fear when changing code, can arise for the developers. In this thesis, a pre-study was made to investigate if any current feardriven development existed among developers. Then a visual regression testing tool was created, using a rapid prototyping process, to help the developers testing the interface during the evolving process of the application. The tool’s primary purpose is to show images of the visual changes that have occurred for the developers and as a result, the fear-driven development can decrease for the developers and the quality can be improved. The tool was implemented using AngularJS, NodeJS and ResembleJS and was tested on UI developers. The developers got a case where they had made CSS changes and then wanted to see how the changes affected the site they were working on. All of the developers felt, often or sometimes, fear when changing code. After using the tool, their feelings of fear-driven development was decreased and they all saw the tool as helpful when finding visual errors that might occur when CSS or web components are changed.