Despite advances made in modern electronic devices, their use by older people is significantly lower than for younger people. They experience difficulties using devices due to a combination of physical, cognitive and ‘generational’ differences. Many studies try to adapt devices to make them more usable, but they do not consider how older people feel in terms of attitudes towards technology or their existing habits. Seven participants were interviewed about their current use of technology, as well as their attitudes to modern technology, and a personal inventory was created for each participant. The interviews generated themes relating to how participants feel that technology is not made for them, barriers to their use, and generational differences as well as arguments against modern technology use and perceived negative aspects of technology. Some design considerations were created and illustrated using features from the most commonly used devices that suited the interviewees’ attitudes, behaviours and opinions.

Denna studie fokuserar på den mänskliga faktorn av informationssäkerhet. Människan tenderar att vara en svag länk i en organisations försvar mot hot till informationssäkerheten. Angripare utnyttjar denna svaghet genom att manipulera de anställda att utföra åtgärder som gynnar angriparen.  Genom en studie av etablerade ramverk, standarder och modern litteratur har denna studie presenterat vilka säkerhetsrisker som existerar samt rekommendationer hur en organisation kan skydda dess användare mot dessa kritiska säkerhetsrisker. De kritiska säkerhetsrisker som har presenterats i denna studie är aktuella risker som påverkar alla moderna organisationer. Studiens resultat visar att den mänskliga faktorn spelar en viktig roll inom informationssäkerheten och bör behandlas därefter. Studien fann att det finns en mängd aktuella risker inom informationssäkerheten som relaterar till den mänskliga faktorn och varierar i allt från dataintrång till riktade attacker.

The HCI community is well aware of the gap between research and practice in the field. The issue is often discussed in terms of the applicability and adaption of theories and methods to the real world, but both categories seem insufficient for explaining how practitioners navigate the complexity of the problems they work on. This study takes a more fundamental perspective, inspired by theories of reflective practice and design. As a consequence, the attention is shifted to the framing of a problem that happens prior—or in parallel—to the use of theories and methods. Six case studies were collected through semi-structured interviews to investigate this position. The findings point towards a rather small set of techniques which are used for supporting the (re-)framing of a problem in an often pragmatic and informal way. A model locating the methods in their respective stages is proposed; and the methods are related to other research to suggest additional possibilities not mentioned by the participants of this study. What most clearly distinguished HCI practitioners from designers in other professions was their distrust in their own intuition, and the key role they attached to the user in response.

Software Engineering is a rapidly changing area, especially in terms of its technological foundation. The computer and information technology changes both the kind of systems to be built and the methods and tools available with which to build them. To be able to stay competitive there is no doubt that managing knowledge is very important to the corporate learning process. But even when companies are superior to their competitors technologically, they often find it hard to handle knowledge within the company. Knowledge is to know, to be aware of something. Knowledge that have been gained by action, by exercise of a profession, is the most valuable knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be expressed by words and numbers, while tacit knowledge is not easily expressed and thus hard to formalize and write down. This licentiate’s dissertation presents the results from efforts in communicating, measuring and preserving knowledge. Approaches for communicating knowledge to individuals with no or little knowledge within the software development domain are presented. Furthermore, experiences regarding knowledge management at team level (small group) are presented. Our study show that knowledge is hard to measure, and thus difficult to preserve in text or number format. Instead, we propose that you should build social networks and rely more on oral communication.

Mobile handheld devices have become friends in people’s daily lives. Frequent usage of available applications, especially video streaming, causes exponential growth in mobile IP traffic. Service providers and application developers need to know the tradeoff between the end-to-end (e2e) performance and cost since, not fully met expectations of customers from those applications cause reduced usage of services, revenue, and growth in the churn rate. The user-centric approach, which involves users into the assessment of the performance of a particular service or application, has become important within the inter-disciplinary research field Quality of Experience (QoE). The ultimate goal is to obtain simplified QoE models on particular applications based on the underlying network-based performance metrics as well as other non-technical metrics related to the end-user. Android smartphones that use open-source code and well-documented Application Programming Interfaces (API), facilitate researchers to do low-level and network-based performance analysis on end-user mobile devices while considering user feedback. In this thesis, the influential factors for Android smartphone-based QoE are studied. The relation between the quantified user-perceived QoE metric, i.e., Mean Opinion Score (MOS), and the artifacts in real-time video streaming such as blockiness and jerkiness caused by network-level metrics, e.g., Packet Delay Variation (PDV), Maximal Burst Size (MBS), and video bit rate are identified. Challenges in assessing the user-perceived QoE of video with the focus on memory effects are discussed. The relation between the objective metric of user reaction time and the user-perceived QoE is presented. Furthermore, different methods to assess end-user-perceived QoE such as Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), Experience Sampling Method (ESM), and preliminary online survey are described. Further influential factors, e.g., context, user routines, user lifestyle, and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as Round Trip Time (RTT) and Server Response Time (SRT), are studied. The thesis is concluded with preliminary findings that relate the instantaneous total power consumption to the jerkiness of a real-time video stream with evidences such as stalling events.

Emotions are thought to be a key factor that critically influences human decision-making. Emotion regulation can help to mitigate emotion related decision biases and eventually lead to a better decision performance. Serious games emerged as a new angle introducing technological methods to learning emotion regulation, where meaningful biofeedback information displays player's emotional state. This thesis investigates emotions and the effect of emotion regulation on decision performance. Furthermore, it explores design and evaluation methods for creating serious games where emotion regulation can be learned and practiced. The scope of this thesis was limited to serious games for emotion regulation training using psychophysiological methods to communicate user's affective information. Using the psychophysiological methods, emotions and their underlying neural mechanism have been explored. Through design and evaluation of serious games using those methods, effects of emotion regulation have been investigated where decision performance has been measured and analyzed. The proposed metrics for designing and evaluating such affective serious games have been exhaustively evaluated. The research methods used in this thesis were based on both quantitative and qualitative aspects, with true experiment and evaluation research, respectively. Serious games approach to emotion regulation was investigated. The results suggested that two different emotion regulation strategies, suppression and cognitive reappraisal, are optimal for different decision tasks contexts. With careful design methods, valid serious games for training those different strategies could be produced. Moreover, using psychophysiological methods, underlying emotion neural mechanism could be mapped to provide optimal level of arousal for a certain task. The results suggest that it is possible to design and develop serious game applications that provide helpful learning environment where decision makers could practice emotion regulation and subsequently improve their decision making.

I takt med att behovet av organ ökar utförs det fler organtransplantationer varje år. För att kunna få ett nytt organ innebär det för många att någon annan avlider under de omständigheterna så att organen kan doneras, och framförallt att viljan att donera sina organ finns från den avlidne eller dess anhöriga. Ett beslut som kan ge flera andra livet tillbaka. Transplantationsprocessen är lång och slutar inte när det nya organet är transplanterat, förutom livslång medicinering kan många tankar och frågor uppstå. Syftet med studien var att beskriva patienters upplevelser att leva med ett organ från en avliden donator. Studien genomfördes som en allmän litteraturstudie där tio resultatartiklar som svarade till studiens syfte granskades och sammanställdes, vilket resulterade i fem teman; Upplevelser av tacksamhet, Upplevelser av ansvar inför donator, Upplevelser av ett förändrat själv, Upplevelser av skuld samt Upplevelser av sorg. Huvudfynden i resultatet var att mottagarna upplevde en förändring av sig själva efter transplantationen samt upplevelser av tacksamhet över att ha fått en andra chans i livet. För att hantera förändringen krävs det hjälp och förståelse från sjukvården. Större förståelse kring mottagares upplevelser efter transplantationen med organ från en avliden donator behövs för att bättre kunna bemöta deras behov. / The need for organ transplants has risen considerably, that is why there are more organ transplants carried out each year. To acquire a new organ means for many that somebody has to die during circumstances that an organ can be donated and the donor or their relatives must have a will to donate their organ. The transplant process is long and doesn't end when the new organ is transplanted, in addition to lifelong medication there can be many thoughts and questions that can arise. The purpose of this study was to describe the patients experience to live with an organ from a deceased donor. The study was carried out like a general literature study. The ten resulting articles were assessed, compiled and resulted in the following five themes: Experience of gratefulness, Experience of responsibility to the donator, Experience of a changed self, Experience of guilt and Experience of grief. The main findings from the study is that the recipient experiences a change in their self and experience of gratefulness. A wider understanding around the recipient experiences after a transplant with an organ from a deceased donor, where personal treatment is needed to support the requirements.

User centered design is a process which aims to understand user needs and desires by using different tools and methods. This is challenging in the industry as companies have different goals compared to the academic discipline of user centered design. As companies have different goals, common UCD methods which are used in the academic field are often not used. Therefore, there is a gap in how UCD is done in practice compared to theory. Designers and user experience specialists must use the tools which are available, capitalize on the opportunity to use existing resources in the organization in order to understand users and their needs. Insights explain the why and the motivation of the consumer or user, and they are less apparent and intangible, hidden truths that result from continuous digging. Insights can be draw from several different sources, from data and qualitative sources. This thesis investigates from what available sources in an organization can insights be generated from in order to understand users and design better experiences, specifically from the organizations perspective. The purpose is not only to understand users but to drive the organization’s objectives and goals. This thesis uses an innovative collaborative workshop methodology, working with digital designers, to answer the research questions and as a result presents an insights generation model. The research has been specifically conducted for an organization, and from their available sources, but the methodology and model creation has the potential to be used in similar settings, domains or projects.

This study has investigated factors that contribute to the rise of accidents in the Swedish Armed Forces. Through investigation of six accident reports human factors have been identified, classi-fied and compiled. The aim has been to seek answers to the question: Which human factors cause accidents in the Swedish Armed Forces' activities at sea? In the context of a case study the content of six accident reports, which were linked to the Swedish Armed Forces, was analysed. Documentary research was used to collect data. The analysis of collected accident reports was carried out with content analysis. A total of 134 human factors were identified in this study, compiled from 31 unique human factors. The results drawn from studying the survey concluded that human factors which appear most frequently in the accident reports are routine deviation, judgment, knowledge, sudden event development and communica-tion/information. The results also show that of all the 31 units of human factors identified, no single factor is represented in all accident reports. However, the human factors routine deviation, judgment, communication/information, education, job description and safeguard were repre-sented in five of six reports.

I dagens samhälle används Informations- och Kommunikationsteknik (IKT) på olika sätt och fritidshemmet ska följa med i utvecklingen av omvärlden. Fritidshemmet ska även utgå från elevernas behov och intressen. Syftet med denna studie är att skapa kunskap om hur pedagoger inom fritidshem använder IKT som verktyg för elevers meningsskapande, välbefinnande och utveckling i fritidshemmets verksamhet. Följande forskningsfrågor fokuseras: Hur beskriver pedagogerna vad elever gör med de digitala verktygen? Vilka faktorer beskriver pedagogerna som viktiga om IKT ska användas på fritidshem? Hur beskriver pedagogerna sin kompetens i att arbeta med IKT på fritidshem? Studiens teoretiska utgångspunkt är det sociokulturella perspektivet som har sitt ursprung i Lev Vygotskijs teorier gällande utveckling, språk och lärande. En etnografisk ansats samt en kvalitativ metod har valts och empirin är således inhämtad med hjälp av observation samt semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultaten redovisas utefter våra tre forskningsfrågor. Resultaten grundar sig i empirin vilket samlades in genom observation och genom de semistrukturerade intervjuerna. Resultaten visar att pedagogernas intresse och tillgång till tid och digitala verktyg styr hur mycket de arbetar med IKT i verksamheten. Det framkommer även att surfplattan har fått en stor roll i dagens fritidshem eftersom den är smidig och lätt att bära med sig för att dokumentera och användandet har ökat markant de sista åren.