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The use of internet and other communication technology has become predominantly common in the life of normal sighted users. In order to have a fair level of equality in the society, blind people must also be able to use these facilities with equal ease and effectiveness Many governments decided to implement e-Government applications to enhance the delivery of information and services to its citizens, residents and businesses. These e-Government applications were carefully designed with the help of international standards to serve the whole group of population and especially people with disabilities. However, recent studies showed that the acceptance rate of these e Government applications among the community, especially between people with disability, is not up to the expectations. The aim of this research is to investigate the accessibility issues faced by blind people while interacting with online services like e-Government portals Owing to the nature of content and the importance of information which is to be delivered to the whole country, the accessibility standards of such portals are of paramount importance. It is this idea of evaluation of such websites for special category of blind people that has been the main focus of this thesis. The main aim of this doctoral research is to discover any accessibility problems that could be faced by people with blind users during online interaction and not covered in accessibility standards. A real example of online interaction is the e-Government portals. This research followed a rigours tri-staged evaluation process for a selected e-Government portal (Saudi Arabian portal) to analyse the accessibility issues faced by blind people. The aim of this evaluation process is to understand the cognition and perception of a blind user while interacting with a web-based environment. The first step of the evaluation process was to verify the level of adherence of the selected portal to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The second stage includes a detailed experimental exercise with a number of blind people following the task- oriented approach. The third step of the evaluation process was a detailed interview with web designers to analyse the problems faced by blind participants in the experimental exercise. Thereafter, cognitive-based solutions were proposed to improve the accessibility of online interaction for blind users and fill the gap in the accessibility standards. The introduction of navigational landmarks and the insertion of virtual map description improve the navigation and hence the performance of blind users. The proposed solution has been tested with a separate group of blind users to validate the research findings and to ensure the desired level of accessibility of the e-Government portals is achieved.

Teams consisting of only software developers will occasionally need to develop products that has to be easy to use. User Centered Design (UCD) is one approach to help increase the ease of use of a product and that can be incorporated into the teams’ traditional workflow when needed. The software developer team followed in this thesis had not tried to incorporate UCD into their current workflow when developing such products. So, this thesis looks at how a product designed with an agile/UCD approach differs from a product developed by the software development team’s traditional approach. The two products were designed to solve the same problem. The results show that the product developed with an agile/UCD-approach gave better usability rankings and better external appeal than the one created with the team’s traditional approach. On the other hand, traditional methods constitute a better choice for quick development of products for more technical user groups within the company for example.

This thesis explores the design of a website to communicate international activities undertaken by or associated with the University of Victoria. The research was seeded by and undertaken in collaboration with the University of Victoria’s office of Vice-President Academics and Provost, and the Office of International Affairs. The thesis introduces and implements a product design process to create a mapping application for the university to display all of its international connections. The thesis advanced the study of how to incorporate users into the design process of an online map. User-centered design is an established practice of studying users and collecting their feedback during all stages of design. This process has begun to be used for online mapping. A challenge with online mapping is that potential users can be an unwieldy community. In this case study the users could come from anywhere within the UVic community, but also the public. With such a large and diverse group, incorporating all the potential users into the design process is not possible. A challenge therefore is to capture feedback from a meaningful representative sample of potential users. This research describes a process of user-centered design in which a sample of users were surveyed at the beginning of the process to determine their requirements and preferences for a mapping application, and then interviewed to test the usability of the product. The thesis concludes with recommendations for design and layout of an online mapping application, including identification where further study or decisions are required. / Graduate

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:05:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2997.pdf: 4158163 bytes, checksum: 540ba66fcb2c536c7a72d8add391f0b3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-05-12 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / The software reengineering becomes important because of the need that organizations have in adjusting to new trends, technologies and user requirements. The term organization should be understood like universities or companies that develop software for use by a large number of people. Thinking about the adequacy of users requirements, is presented in this work the reengineering process of a software called Cognitor, which is a tool designed to support teachers in the process of creating electronic teaching materials. The need to reengineer Cognitor was perceived through a case study where several changes were pointed by users. Some of these changes are: text editor improvement, preview of the images that are inserted in the content pages, feedback to the users, among others. During the reengineering of this software, it was formalized a software reengineering process model, user-centered, for the conversion of desktop applications in RIAs (Rich Internet Application), called UC-RIA (User Centered Rich Internet Application). The process model was named as UC-RIA due to the participation of the potential users during the application s reengineering process, because they were involved in prototyping and in validation of the graphical interfaces of the new version. The results of this study show the capability of the proposed software reengineering model to be used as a support in organizations for the reengineering of their software, mainly because it inserts the users in the reengineering process during the application s Prototyping phase, bringing software to users real needs. / A reengenharia de software se faz importante devido à necessidade que as organizações têm em se adequar às novas tendências, tecnologias e exigências dos usuários. Inclui-se ao termo organizações , empresas ou universidades que desenvolvem softwares para serem utilizados por um grande número de pessoas. Pensando na adequação das exigências dos usuários, este trabalho apresenta a reengenharia de um software chamado Cognitor, que é uma ferramenta criada para apoiar os educadores no processo de criação de material didático eletrônico. A percepção da necessidade da reengenharia do Cognitor se deu através de um estudo de caso onde foram relatadas várias alterações que o software deveria sofrer, tais como: melhoria no editor de texto, pré-visualização das imagens que são inseridas nas páginas de conteúdo, feedback ao usuário, entre outras. Durante a reengenharia desse software, consequentemente, foi formalizado um modelo de processo de reengenharia de software, centrado no usuário, para a conversão de aplicações desktop em RIAs (Rich Internet Application), denominado UC-RIA (User Centered Rich Internet Application). Foi dado o nome de UC-RIA ao modelo de processo devido à participação dos potenciais usuários da aplicação durante o processo de reengenharia, pois estes estiveram envolvidos tanto na prototipação, quanto na validação das interfaces gráficas da nova versão. Os resultados obtidos neste trabalho mostram a potencialidade do modelo de reengenharia de software UC-RIA em ser utilizado como apoio às organizações durante a reengenharia de seus softwares, principalmente por inserir os usuários no processo de reengenharia durante a fase de Prototipação da aplicação, aproximando os softwares às reais necessidades dos usuários.

In response to climate change, there is a growing need for the UK to reduce carbon emissions in the domestic sector. As a majority of energy consumed within the domestic sector is as a result of space and water heating, research in the field focuses on thermal comfort. The literature on thermal comfort is dominated by an examination of the physiological aspects, and although the influences of psychological and socio-cultural aspects are often recognised, their relationship to the physiological aspects is not fully understood. Additionally, the literature typically studies various elements of comfort (e.g. thermal, acoustic, lighting, etc.) in isolation to each other rather than taking a holistic approach which would mirror how they are experienced in the real world and identify potential associations. As a result, this thesis explores the multi-dimensions of comfort in the domestic environment. This research begins by taking a user-centred approach to exploring UK householders perspectives of comfort in the home. Through interviewing householders, the findings revealed householders attributed a wide scope of factors to their own experience of comfort, from aesthetics to feeling secure in their home; the findings highlighted the significance of psychological factors to householders comfort. The following stage involved a focused and in-depth exploration of the psychological dimensions of domestic comfort through photo elicitation interviews. The findings supported the presence of four intertwined psychological dimensions and further established the multidimensional nature of comfort. The final study was conducted to establish when comfort and unwinding takes place in householders everyday lives. Through the use of two self-reporting ethnographic tools, namely SenseCams and diaries, householders were observed in their homes. The findings captured householders engaging in various comfort making activities and also demonstrated the value of using self-reporting tools in the home context. In the final stage, a classification of domestic comfort was generated which presents an accumulation of the findings from this research to produce a holistic and multi-dimensional notion of domestic comfort.

Web Accessibility emerged as problem when disabled and elder people started interaction with web contents soon after the inception of World Wide Web. When web based GIS applications appeared on the scene of web and users of these kinds of applications increased, these applications faced the similar problem of accessibility. The intensity of web accessibility problems in GIS based applications has increased rapidly during recent years due to extensive interaction of user with maps. Web Accessibility problems faced by users of GIS applications are identified by content evaluation and user interaction. Users are involved in identification of accessibility problems because guidelines and automated tools are not sufficient for that purpose. User Centered Approach is used to include users in the development process and this has also helped in identification of accessibility problems of the users at early stages. The thesis report identify the accessibility issues in Web based GIS application by content evaluation and user interaction evaluation. MapQuest, a web based GIS application, is taken as a case study to identify the web accessibility problems in GIS applications. This thesis report has also studied that how accessibility of the web based GIS applications can be enhanced by using UCD approach in development process of GIS applications. / Webbtillgänglighet fram som problem när funktionshindrade och äldre människor började interaktion med webb-innehåll strax efter starten av World Wide Web. När webbaserade GIS-applikationer på scenen av webb och användare av dessa typer av tillämpningar ökat, dessa tillämpningar mötte liknande problem med tillgängligheten. Intensiteten av problem webbtillgänglighet i GIS-baserade applikationer har ökat snabbt under senare år på grund av omfattande interaktion med användaren med kartor. Webbtillgänglighet problem som användare av GIS-applikationer är identifierade med innehåll utvärdering och interaktion med användaren. Användare delta i identifieringen av tillgänglighetsproblem eftersom riktlinjer och automatiserade verktyg är inte tillräckliga för detta ändamål. Användarcentrerad metoden används för att inkludera användarna i utvecklingsprocessen och detta har också bidragit till en kartläggning av tillgängligheten problem för användarna i ett tidigt skede. Avhandlingen rapport identifiera tillgänglighetsfrågor i Webbaserade GIS-applikation av innehåll utvärdering och användarinteraktion utvärdering. MapQuest, en webbaserad GIS-applikation, tas som en fallstudie för att identifiera problemen webbtillgänglighet i GIS-applikationer. Denna uppsats Rapporten har också studerat hur att tillgängligheten av webbaserade GIS-applikationer kan förbättras med hjälp UCD strategi i processen för utveckling av GIS-applikationer.

This thesis explores the digital opportunities at a mobile workplace in elderly home care by analyzing the existing information and communication flow that happens between and during shifts in everyday practice using a user-centric approach. The fieldwork analysis reveals that a combination of media, both verbal, digital and paper-based is used throughout the shift to pick up and pass on information. With an ageing population that requires care from home, to sustain and improve the quality of care, my research indicates an evident need of supporting home care workers whilst being out of office.The research question is: “How might we decrease the amount of information lost between and during night shifts through implementing a digital alarm register?” which evolved from one out of four design opportunities.The main participants and focus throughout this study are the end-users, night shift home care workers at two different locations in the Malmö municipality. By involving the users early in the process, having a rich fieldwork process and putting emphasis on “support” rather than “replacement” resulted in a mobile application tool presenting relevant patient information, current alarms and alarm history.

Att uppleva distraktioner under studerandet är ett hinder mot både koncentrationen och inlärningsprocessen. Med insikt från målgruppen (Med hjälp av intervjuer och en observation) har projektets problemställning riktat sig till att fokusera på distraktioner som orsakas av andra människor vilket kan ske både visuellt och auditivt. Genom ett användarcentrerat designperspektiv har frågeställningen ‘’Hur kan man genom design underlätta fokus genom att hindra distraktioner för universitetsstudenter under generella egenstudier?’’ undersökts. I designprocessen har även målgruppens åsikter och medverkan utformat slutkonceptet och resultatet av studien är designförslaget ‘’Studietältet’’. Studiens kunskapsbidrag ligger i arbetsprocessen: hur man hanterar olika åsikter och preferenser inom användarcentrerade metoder. / Experiencing distractions while studying is an obstacle to the concentration and the learning process. With insight from the target group (students) through interviews and observation, the project’s aim has been focusing primarily on distractions caused by other people, which can occur both visually and auditorily. Through an user-centered design perspective, the research question “How can design facilitate focus by preventing distractions for university students during general self-study?” Has been investigated. In the design process, the target group’s opinions and participation have also been shaping the final concept and the result of the study is a design proposal “The study tent”. The study’s knowledge contribution lies in the work process: how to handle different opinions and preferences within the field of user-centered design methods.