The typical traditional tool (i.e. pen and paper) for note-taking is simple and lightweight. Although the methods used by teachers, particularly at university level, have changed significantly from paper documentation to digital resources, most students still feel more comfortable recording class notes using pen and paper. In this paper I argue that digital advances have not been optimized for the once static environment of academic note-taking. The note-taking habits of students must be studied. New systems must be developed if students are to benefit fully from these advances. Lecture handouts given as digital documents should afford students an easier and more pleasant learning experience. Therefore, I investigate the note-taking behavior of students and propose one positive solution to enhance study efficiency in higher education. The solution is based on two perspectives to understand the requirements and design implications of future design in a smart way.

In this thesis an attempt is made to improve on the heuristic model presented by Desurvire and Wiberg from their paper published at the CHI 2008 conference (Desurvire & Wiberg, 2008).  The goal is to create a tool to help identify the types of problems that are found in the article on GAP (Desurvire & Wiberg, 2010).   The improvement that is presented in this work is a flowchart that uses material from GAP. This will simplify the identification of limitations in game designs, using the material collected by Desurvire and Wiberg (2010). The benefit that the implementation of a flowchart hopes to bring to the research and design society is to make the GAP tool more accessible to less informed users. The approach taken in this work, to strengthen the GAP tool was inspired by the solution presented by Barendregt, Bekker and Speerstra in Empirical evaluation of usability and fun in computer games for children (Barendregt, Bekker, & Speerstra, 2003), who made a flowchart to help identify the type of problem that could be found in connection to children playing computer games. The function of such a chart in comparison to a list is to make it more available to personal less experienced in game design and the rules of good game design (Malone, 1982). The flowchart was tested on an expert to verify the issues being used in it and on a usability test material. It was found that the Game Approachability Issue Definition (GAID) flowchart is able to identify, approachability issues, and thereby did improve on GAP as intended.

This thesis has created an image of the exchange of information among teachers in the Swedish upper secondary school. The study indicates that the exchange of information seems to be limited at all levels and the exchange that takes place outside the own teaching team occurs mainly through teachers personal networks. The study also shows barriers that may exist and the opportunities that an increased exchange may generate. From the picture that the empirical material provides and the theory that is presented a discussion is made around how IT can best support the organizational learning in schools. A concrete proposal is that at national level an IT platform should be created, which primarily focuses on materials that are created by its users and has an open architecture with a single login.

Webbutveckling är, i förhållande till traditionell systemutveckling, ett relativt ungt forskningsområde. En hel del forskning har dock gjorts inom området. Många studier har syftat till att utveckla metoder och tekniker som ska stödja arbetet i praktiken. Det har emellertid visat sig att dessa metoder och tekniker sällan används av webbyråer. Arbetssättet inom branschen beskrivs ofta som ostrukturerat och ibland kaotiskt. Denna studie inriktar sig på små webbyråer och vad som karaktäriserar deras utvecklingsprocesser samt vilka problem de ställs inför. Studien genomfördes med en explorativ ansats där anställda med olika befattningar intervjuades på tre små webbyråer. Utöver den empiriska studien genomfördes även en litteraturstudie, vars utfall ställdes mot intervjuresultatet. Utifrån denna sammanställning kunde kopplingar mellan teori och empiri identifieras. Sammanställningen visade också att det fanns luckor. Undersökningen fann att merparten av de identifierade problemen grundade sig i tidspress. Tidspressen ledde till att webbyråerna tog genvägar som i slutändan skapade andra problem. Litteraturstudiens utfall användes för att forma riktlinjer som skulle kunna användas för att undvika de problem som adresserats i uppsatsen.

In this paper we take a look at digital applications to help the user with public transportation. The main goal was to evaluate the problem a user can face when aiming to use the public transportation system, and to create a application for Apple Iphone that can enhance and help the user, no matter if he is familiar with the local public transportation system, or if he is less familiar with it. The aim was that the user wouldnt need any previous knowledge to be able to use our application. We combined Location-Based Services with Realtime-travelinformation and trip planning to examine if this combination could make both of the two different user-groups satisfied. To understand the problematics a user faces when approaching the public transportation-scene, Scenario-Based Design is evaluated as a method to grasp this problem. Technological Acceptance Model is used to evaluate the user-centered qualitative tests on the application, which fitted good, considering that there was no other system to compare our application with. Our results show that you can enhance the User experience in the context of public transport for the wide target audience of all bussriders, familiar or infamiliar with using the public transportation. 100% of the users in our tests claimed they wanted to use the system instead of the present solutions. Since the Location-Based Services made it possible to make a travel-search without typing in where you are travelling from, (the built-in GPS in Iphone looked up where your closest busstop is) the use of our application was fast and satisfying for both groups of users. Furthermore we noticed that erlier recommended buttonsize for Smartphones or PDA’s turn out faulty in our tests, but this could need further investigations.

Many IT projects that have been developed in recent years are often considered to be unsuccessful. According to a study by Exido up to the 72% of all IT projects are considered to be failed. A failed IT projects means that the organizations that have ordered the new system may have higher costs or/and the system will not be ready in time. If costs are too high the new system might not be installed in the organization or if the system is not completed within the specified time frame the organization can become stagnant. In this paper we conduct an investigation of the failure of IT projects there we will examine where, in the systems development lifecycle four different phases, projects fail. We will conduct an empirical study of each phase, where we describe the key steps in the process; we will also investigate failed IT projects that are linked to the current phase. After every empirical study of the phases we perform an analysis in which we describe what we believe is important to consider in the current phase, and which items have an important role in the phase that will contribute to that project fails. We believe that the planning phase is the phase that is most important to carry out as detailed as possible when an IT project is developed. This is to ensure that the project will be successful. The phase structure of the whole project and important activities are carried out and they are affecting the other phases.

Every municipality in Sweden is responsible for offering its citizens adequate childcare. Parents hand in a preliminary schedule to the preschool for when their child needs to be in childcare, and based on this the preschool staff is scheduled. Some municipalities measure the actual time a child is in childcare. The essay idea comes from when I heard that one municipality was thinking of register the children's actual time in preschools. I started thinking on how to solve such a task. First I needed to get a feel for the context in a preschool. I therefore visited a preschool to interview the staff about their work. Do they have a computer in their workplace? Who is using it? I made five interviews with people whose job is related to childcare. In this essay I have also developed a software prototype to register time, it is intended to be run by the preschool staff on a cellphone. This essay can be a starting point for anyone who is interested in the subject of register time in preschools.

Current social interaction on Internet is continuously taking an important role ineveryday life. In Estimate every computer user will have their account or identity onat least one online social network service in the future. Despite that all this mannersoccur in the virtual world, is possible to bring these useful information from thevirtual space into physical space? This paper presents a design-oriented research ona way to bring available people connection, profile and published personalinformation on virtual space into interactive physical space by enriching the context.Observation was made with focus on how the virtual community influences the socialbehavior. Concerning tangible computing this design more foucs on full-bodyinteraction and manipulation with face recognition or voice command.

Design researchers and design practitioners differ regarding their notion of thenature of design complexity, and how design practitioners should approach it in arational way. By describing three ways of viewing design rationality, differentapproaches of what it means to design and be a designer is presented. This paperargues that design complexity is ‘wicked’, with no definite conditions or limits todesign problems. This means that the designer acts as a ‘bricoleur’; someone whoshares the notion of ‘wicked’ design complexity, and who understands that thecomponents in the design space is interrelated and interdependent. A ‘bricoleur’,engages in the design space with systems thinking, in a dialectic process ofinterpretation and meaning-making, where judgment and imagination are the coredesign skills. I describe this process in terms of the design of a composition, guided bya parti (an early vision of the design) with the aim to create a strong format (agestalt) with desired emergent qualities. In this process I have pinpointed the‘embodiment of a format’ as the key activity if the designer wishes to create a designwith components in harmony and desired emergent qualities. When the designerembodies a format, the designer becomes aware of the different roles that componentsin a design have in the whole design, and as a consequence, this creates awareness ofthe qualities that emerges before the design is implemented. This paper also discussesthe support for this activity in the tools used by interaction design practitioners, andthat sketching is the tool that is mostly used in the activity of ‘format embodiment’.The conclusion is that there is a lack of support for ‘format embodiment’ in the toolsthat are promoted by mainstream HCI-research. Design researchers should view thedesigner as a ‘bricoleur’ to be able to address the need for tools for formatembodiment.

While Swedish public schools are increasingly using social media to communicate with students,there are also concerns about social media being a distraction—especially in the context of one laptop per child class rooms. To further the understanding of this apparent conflict between the benefits and risks of social media use in schools, this paper studies how two Swedish publicschools use blogs for teacher–student communication. We conduct an inductive content analysis of research literature, and find that previous work suggests seven uses of blogs in teacher–student communication: 1) Informing and Instructing; 2) Posting supplemental material; 3) Prompting; 4) Blogging as assignment; 5) Communitybuilding; 6) Discussion/Collaboration; and 7) Interacting with external readers/commenters. By using these concepts as a matrix for a deductive content analysis of posts and comments tofour class blogs during the fall of 2011, we show that while the studied schools use their blogsfor informing and instructing, mainly in the form of recaps and previews of previous and cominglessons, and for posting supplemental material, we find few instances of discussion/collaboration and blogging as assignment, and no instances of interacting with external readers or community building. Further, we find that schools also use blogs to increase transparency of examinations and to strengthen the student–teacher relationship through what we term social posts. These results indicate that blogs are, in the schools we studied, used in a fairly narrow way, and that the schools’ use of blogs could benefit from deliberate strategies for encouraging discussion and by engaging external readers, so as to build and further strengthen blog-based communities.