Developing a Landing page and Analyzing Its Impact on Smart Campus Innovation Lab’ Project Registration

Millions of E-commerce websites are running in the hope of selling their services and products online and building relationship with their customers over the internet. At this stage, search engine optimization and e-marketing plays a vital role. This research does not focus on search engine optimization techniques but on a subject, which was designed to acquire leads and increase conversion rates to their website in order to sell their products and service i.e. landing pages. Search engine optimization also plays a very small role, as it will help this study to understand landing pages. The main purpose of performing this study is to provide evidence that via landing page it is easier and quicker for students to apply for open projects offered by Smart Campus Innovation Lab (SCIL) in comparison to the home page of their official website. Therefore, design process was followed in order to design, test and develop the landing page. It was tested iteratively, first, using guerrilla test on the mock-up of the landing page and then qualitative usability test was run on the landing page. It was found that participants of usability test were able to find information about Smart Campus Innovation Lab and its open projects much quicker and more easily with the landing page than with the home page. Although, the participants also suggested some features which can be improved in the user interface of the landing page such as the header section and contacts section

Weighing Ultralight, User interface evaluation of a mobile photo editing application

Ultralight is a photo and video editing application developed for iOS devices. The speciality of Ultralight is its intuitive user interface where the edited photo can float behind the editing controls to allow a full editing experience on a small mobile screen. In this Master’s thesis, I study the iterative design process and research practical and lightweight user testing methods to conduct an evaluation of Ultralight’s design. Based on the findings I design a new update to the Ultralight. Ultralight is an ongoing solo-project which is fully designed and developed by myself. In the core of the iterative design process is the aim to design, analyse and refine the work in small cycles to constantly learn how well the design functions in reality. This is especially important when working with interactive applications, where the digital platforms allow incremental design, continuous change and improvement. There are different ways to collect data to analyse the performance of digital products, but in this thesis, I focus on fast and efficient user testing methods to collect qualitative data of how the participants use and value Ultralight. I use the evaluation as a design tool to improve the current state of the user interface and analyse the iterative design process through concepts of user experience design, user-centered design, usability, lean and agile methods. Doing design work in iterations and user testing in-between helps to improve the understandability and quality of the design. Doing user testing is usually thought to be cumbersome and take a lot effort. However, there are many easy and fast methods to conduct user testing in practical manners. In this thesis, I formulate an efficient and easy method for user testing, which can be conducted remotely with the help of the new screen recording feature on the iOS 11 operating sys-tem. The iterative design process aims to improve the quality of the design but it is also a crucial tool for the designers to improve their skills by collecting real feedback from their own work.Ultralight on kuvien ja videoiden käsittelyyn kehitetty sovellus iOS-laitteille. Ultralightin erikoisuus on sen intuitiivinen käyttöliittymä. Käsiteltävä kuva voidaan suurentaa koko ruudun kokoiseksi niin, että käyttöliittymä jää kellumaan muokattavan kuvan päälle. Tämä mahdollistaa koko näytön hyödyntämisen pienellä puhelimen ruudulla. Tässä maisterityössä käsittelen iteratiivista suunnitteluprosessia ja tutkin käytännöllisiä sekä kevyitä tapoja tehdä käyttäjätestausta Ultralightin käyttöliittymän evaluointia varten. Tekemieni havaintojen pohjalta suunnittelen uuden päivityksen sovellukseen. Ultralight on täysin itseni suunnittelema ja kehittämä sovellus. Iteratiivisen suunnitteluprosessin keskiössä on tavoite suunnitella, analysoida ja parantaa suunniteltavaa työtä jatkuvasti pienissä osissa, sekä oppia miten sovellus vastaa käyttäjien tarpeeseen todellisuudessa. Tämä on erityisen tärkeää suunniteltaessa interaktiivisia sovelluksia, jotka ovat osa suurempaa digitaalista ekosysteemiä, jossa on mahdollista jatkuvasti päivittää ja parantaa sovelluksia. On erilaisia tapoja kerätä tietoja ja arvioida digitaalisten sovelluksen toimintaa.Tässä työssä käyn läpi yksinkertaisia tapoja kerätä kvalitatiivista tietoa käyttäjätestauksen avulla. Keskityn siihen miten osallistujat käyttävät ja arvioivat Ultralight-sovellusta. Käytän käyttäjätestausta työkaluna nykyisen käyttöliittymän ja käyttäjäkokemuksen parantamiseksi. Lisäksi käsittelen iteratiivisen suunnittelun eri keinoja ja käsitteitä. Iteratiivinen suunnittelu ja käyttäjätestaus auttavat parantamaan suunniteltavan työn ymmärrettävyyttä ja laatua. Usein käyttäjätestauksen ajatellaan olevan hankalaa ja aikaavievää, mutta on olemassa monia käytännöllisiä käyttäjätestauksen keinoja. Muodostan tehokkaan ja helpon tavan käyttäjätestaamiseen etänä uuden iOS 11 -versiossa esitellyn ruudun nauhoitustyökalun avulla. Iteratiivisen suunnitteluprosessin hallitseminen on tärkeää suunniteltavan työn ymmärrettävyyden varmistamiseksi, mutta myös suunnittelijoille itselleen. Oikean palautteen kerääminen on loistava tapa kehittää omia taitoja käyttäjäkokemusta suunniteltaessa

A human-centered design methodology to enhance the usability, human factors, and user experience of connected health systems: a three-phase methodology.

peer-reviewedDesign processes such as human-centered design, which involve the end user throughout the product development and testing process, can be crucial in ensuring that the product meets the needs and capabilities of the user, particularly in terms of safety and user experience. The structured and iterative nature of human-centered design can often present a challenge when design teams are faced with the necessary, rapid, product development life cycles associated with the competitive connected health industry. We wanted to derive a structured methodology that followed the principles of human-centered design that would allow designers and developers to ensure that the needs of the user are taken into account throughout the design process, while maintaining a rapid pace of development. In this paper, we present the methodology and its rationale before outlining how it was applied to assess and enhance the usability, human factors, and user experience of a connected health system known as the Wireless Insole for Independent and Safe Elderly Living (WIISEL) system, a system designed to continuously assess fall risk by measuring gait and balance parameters associated with fall risk. We derived a three-phase methodology. In Phase 1 we emphasized the construction of a use case document. This document can be used to detail the context of use of the system by utilizing storyboarding, paper prototypes, and mock-ups in conjunction with user interviews to gather insightful user feedback on different proposed concepts. In Phase 2 we emphasized the use of expert usability inspections such as heuristic evaluations and cognitive walkthroughs with small multidisciplinary groups to review the prototypes born out of the Phase 1 feedback. Finally, in Phase 3 we emphasized classical user testing with target end users, using various metrics to measure the user experience and improve the final prototypes. We report a successful implementation of the methodology for the design and development of a system for detecting and predicting falls in older adults. We describe in detail what testing and evaluation activities we carried out to effectively test the system and overcome usability and human factors problems. We feel this methodology can be applied to a wide variety of connected health devices and systems. We consider this a methodology that can be scaled to different-sized projects accordingly.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe

Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked, we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users, and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference

Guerrilla Open Access

In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures in capitalist globalization. This antagonism has led to epochal copyrights, where free software and piracy kept the promise of radical commoning alive. Free software, as Christopher Kelty writes in this pamphlet, provided a model ‘of a shared, collective, process of making software, hardware and infrastructures that cannot be appropriated by others’. Well into the 2000s, it served as an inspiration for global free culture and open access movements who were speculating that distributed infrastructures of knowledge production could be built, as the Internet was, on top of free software. For a moment, the hybrid world of advanced Internet giants—sharing code, advocating open standards and interoperability—and users empowered by these services, convinced almost everyone that a new reading/writing culture was possible. Not long after the crash of 2008, these disruptors, now wary monopolists, began to ingest smaller disruptors and close off their platforms. There was still free software somewhere underneath, but without the ‘original sense of shared, collective, process’. So, as Kelty suggests, it was hard to imagine that for-profit academic publishers wouldn't try the same with open access

SCOPE FOR USABILITY TESTS IN IS DEVELOPMENT

Despite being a common, established concept in wide usage, usability tests can vary greatly in goals, techniques and results. A usability test purchased and performed for a specific software product, may result in either minor user interface improvements or radical U-turns in the development. Such variation has been discussed as a problem of the scientific reliability and validity of the testing method. In practice it is more important what ‘kind of data’ one can expect of the selected method than whether it is reliably always the same data. This expectation of information content or ‘scope’ is of importance for evaluators, who select and conduct usability tests for a specific purpose. However, the scope is not explicitly stated or even discussed: Too often the premise is that, because a usability test involves users, it brings the (necessary) user-centeredness to the design i.e. takes socio-technical fundamentals as inherently given. Through a literature review of testing practices and analytical considerations, we search for the scope of a usability test, which could deliberately approach the socio-technical tradition and equally develop both the system and the user organization. A case example represents a possible realization of the extended scope of usability test

Propuesta metodológica para determinar los niveles de madurez tecnológica TRL 4 a TRL 7 para aplicaciones móviles

Las industrias dentro de sus estrategias de transformación para la mejora, pueden apoyarse en el uso de aplicaciones móviles (Apps), cuya calidad, es fundamental para la disminución de errores en producción, garantizar mayor cobertura y optimización de costos y tiempos; aspectos importantes para la generación de confianza en los involucrados; a partir de esta necesidad, surgen modelos de evaluación de la madurez, como, por ejemplo, Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), que ha sido acogido por entidades como el Ministerio de Ciencias, Tecnología e Innovación en Colombia, con el fin de identificar el alcance de las actividades asociadas a la investigación, el desarrollo tecnológico y la Innovación (I+D+i) de los proyectos que le son presentados. Cada desarrollo tecnológico tiene sus particularidades y las aplicaciones móviles no son la excepción, razón por la cual es deseable, contar con elementos que permitan la evaluación de madurez de las Apps, basadas en el modelo TRL. Por esta razón se plantea la construcción de una metodología que busca facilitar la determinación de la madurez de una App, mediante el mapeo en los Niveles de Madurez Tecnológica (TRL4 al TRL7). Para lograr esta meta, se realizó una revisión sistemática de la adopción de TRL a los productos de software incluyendo las aplicaciones móviles, encontrando algunas investigaciones que se tomaron de base, pero reafirmando la ausencia de una  metodología, que abordara de forma amplia el uso de aplicaciones móviles; una vez se contó con estos insumos, se procedió a revisar los diferentes métodos, técnicas y herramientas usadas en la evaluación tecnológica de software aplicables a móviles, seleccionando las más apropiadas, para luego diseñar una serie de actividades y artefactos que componen la herramienta que se validó a través de la evaluación de un  producto tecnológico dentro de un proyecto de convocatoria de Minciencias, dando como resultado el poder realizar la valoración de la madurez tecnológica en los niveles del 4 al 7 dentro del modelo TRL, y presentando a la comunidad académica y científica un producto replicable, aplicable y adaptable a productos tecnológicos similares. Finalmente se puede concluir que es muy importante contar con herramientas como la presentada aquí, para apoyar los procesos de investigación e innovación, asegurando la calidad de los productos tecnológicos y cumplir lo planteado en el modelo TR

Towards a Critical Turn in Library UX

In the past decade, cataloguing and classification and information literacy have experienced a critical turn, acknowledging the political, economic, and social forces that shape complex information environments. Library user experience (UX) has yet to undergo such a transformation, however; instead, it continues to be seen as a toolkit of value-neutral approaches for evaluating and improving library services and spaces to enhance user satisfaction and engagement. Library UX draws upon ethnography but is also informed by the principles and values of usability and design. Little attention has been paid to the origins or epistemological underpinnings of UX as a construct, the ways these inform UX practice, and ultimately, how they impact what academic libraries are and what they do, however. With the exception of a 2016 article by Lanclos and Asher, the relationship between corporatism, UX, and the mission and values of academic libraries has yet to be acknowledged or examined. This paper seeks to address this gap. While a handful of library UX practitioners have started to promote a more thoughtful study of individuals\u27 activities and needs, in the main, library UX remains a theoretically weak practice, one that sets out to solve complex problems with practical “solutions.” The failure to interrogate UX as a construct and a practice necessarily forecloses the user-centered problems we address, the tools and strategies we use, and the solutions we propose. We contend that UX would benefit from a deeper engagement with user-centered theories emerging from Library and Information Science (LIS) and critical and feminist perspectives on practice, embodiment, and power or risk perpetuating oppressive, hegemonic ideas about the academic library as a white space and its users as able-bodied