Experience requirements

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain. Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During preproduction, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort. During production, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates. We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of: a model for the elements that compose experience requirements, a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements. Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

A Systematic Literature Review of Requirements Engineering Education

Requirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or budget-overspending of software development projects. It is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. To this date, there exists no central concept of what RE education shall comprise. To lay a foundation, we report on a systematic literature review of the feld and provide a systematic map describing the current state of RE education. Doing so allows us to describe how the educational landscape has changed over the last decade. Results show that only a few established author collaborations exist and that RE education research is predominantly published in venues other than the top RE research venues (i.e., in venues other than the RE conference and journal). Key trends in RE instruction of the past decade include involvement of real or realistic stakeholders, teaching predominantly elicitation as an RE activity, and increasing student factors such as motivation or communication skills. Finally, we discuss open opportunities in RE education, such as training for security requirements and supply chain risk management, as well as developing a pedagogical foundation grounded in evidence of effective instructional approaches

Users' performance of accessible sound-only computer games

This work is conducted at two levels to meet the requirements of this research. The first objective is to develop a better understanding of how to design better sound-only games for a wide range of users. A new theoretical framework has been crafted to achieve this objective (Human Understanding Theory of Novel Games with Simplex, or the HUNGS theory). Such a theory aims to capture the current consensus about user requirements (as far as it is possible to do so) whilst understanding the principles and practices of interactive systems, namely the design of accessible sound-only games. The second objective is to understand better the psychology of intended users of such games. The importance of the present work is to test psychological concepts in the very different and very popular context of computer games. Implications found for users at work or working on serious tasks may not generalize to game players. To achieve the second requirement, a number of existing games were explored before a new game was designed (namely the Totally Lost game), using a range of methods. The Totally Lost game and different versions of the same game have been designed and evaluated based on user experiences

Moving sounds and sonic moves : exploring interaction quality of embodied music mediation technologies through a user-centered perspective

This research project deals with the user-experience related to embodied music mediation technologies. More specifically, adoption and policy problems surrounding new media (art) are considered, which arise from the usability issues that to date pervade new interfaces for musical expression. Since the emergence of new wireless mediators and control devices for musical expression, there is an explicit aspiration of the creative industries and various research centers to embed such technologies into different areas of the cultural industries. The number of applications and their uses have exponentially increased over the last decade. Conversely, many of the applications to date still suffer from severe usability problems, which not only hinder the adoption by the cultural sector, but also make culture participants take a rather cautious, hesitant, or even downright negative stance towards these technologies. Therefore, this thesis takes a vantage point that is in part sociological in nature, yet has a link to cultural studies as well. It combines this with a musicological frame of reference to which it introduces empirical user-oriented approaches, predominantly taken from the field of human-computer-interaction studies. This interdisciplinary strategy is adopted to cope with the complex nature of digital embodied music controlling technologies. Within the Flanders cultural (and creative) industries, opportunities of systems affiliated with embodied interaction are created and examined. This constitutes an epistemological jigsaw that looks into 1) “which stakeholders require what various levels of involvement, what interactive means and what artistic possibilities?”, 2) “the way in which artistic aspirations, cultural prerequisites and operational necessities of (prospective) users can be defined?”, 3) “how functional, artistic and aesthetic requirements can be accommodated?”, and 4) “how quality of use and quality of experience can be achieved, quantified, evaluated and, eventually, improved?”. Within this multi-facetted problem, the eventual aim is to assess the applicability of the foresaid technology, both from a theoretically and empirically sound basis, and to facilitate widening and enhancing the adoption of said technologies. Methodologically, this is achieved by 1) applied experimentation, 2) interview techniques, 3) self-reporting and survey research, 4) usability evaluation of existing devices, and 5) human-computer interaction methods applied – and attuned – to the specific case of embodied music mediation technologies. Within that scope, concepts related to usability, flow, presence, goal assessment and game enjoyment are scrutinized and applied, and both task- and experience-oriented heuristics and metrics are developed and tested. In the first part, covering three chapters, the general context of the thesis is given. In the first chapter, an introduction to the topic is offered and the current problems are enumerated. In the second chapter, a broader theoretical background is presented of the concepts that underpin the project, namely 1) the paradigm of embodiment and its connection to musicology, 2) a state of the arts concerning new interfaces for musical expression, 3) an introduction into HCI-usability and its application domain in systematic musicology, 4) an insight into user-centered digital design procedures, and 5) the challenges brought about by e-culture and digitization for the cultural-creative industries. In the third chapter, the state of the arts concerning the available methodologies related to the thesis’ endeavor is discussed, a set of literature-based design guidelines are enumerated and from this a conceptual model is deduced which is gradually presented throughout the thesis, and fully deployed in the “SoundField”-project (as described in Chapter 9). The following chapters, contained in the second part of the thesis, give a quasi-chronological overview of how methodological concepts have been applied throughout the empirical case studies, aimed specifically at the exploration of the various aspects of the complex status quaestionis. In the fourth chapter, a series of application-based tests, predominantly revolving around interface evaluation, illustrate the complex relation between gestural interfaces and meaningful musical expression, advocating a more user-centered development approach to be adopted. In the fifth chapter, a multi-purpose questionnaire dubbed “What Moves You” is discussed, which aimed at creating a survey of the (prospective) end-users of embodied music mediation technologies. Therefore, it primarily focused on cultural background, musical profile and preferences, views on embodied interaction, literacy of and attitudes towards new technology and participation in digital culture. In the sixth chapter, the ethnographical studies that accompanied the exhibition of two interactive art pieces, entitled "Heart as an Ocean" & "Lament", are discussed. In these studies, the use of interview and questionnaire methodologies together with the presentation and reception of interactive art pieces, are probed. In the seventh chapter, the development of the collaboratively controlled music-game “Sync-In-Team” is presented, in which interface evaluation, presence, game enjoyment and goal assessment are the pivotal topics. In the eighth chapter, two usability studies are considered, that were conducted on prototype systems/interfaces, namely a heuristic evaluation of the “Virtual String” and a usability metrics evaluation on the “Multi-Level Sonification Tool”. The findings of these two studies in conjunction with the exploratory studies performed in association with the interactive art pieces, finally gave rise to the “SoundField”-project, which is recounted in full throughout the ninth chapter. The integrated participatory design and evaluation method, presented in the conceptual model is fully applied over the course of the “SoundField”-project, in which technological opportunities and ecological validity and applicability are investigated through user-informed development of numerous use cases. The third and last part of the thesis renders the final conclusions of this research project. The tenth chapter sets out with an epilogue in which a brief overview is given on how the state of the arts has evolved since the end of the project (as the research ended in 2012, but the research field has obviously moved on), and attempts to consolidate the implications of the research studies with some of the realities of the Flemish cultural-creative industries. Chapter eleven continues by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the conceptual model throughout the various stages of the project. Also, it comprises the evaluation of the hypotheses, how the assumptions that were made held up, and how the research questions eventually could be assessed. Finally, the twelfth and last chapter concludes with the most important findings of the project. Also, it discusses some of the implications on cultural production, artistic research policy and offers an outlook on future research beyond the scope of the “SoundField” project

Improving STEM Undergraduate Education with Efficient Learning Design

The project investigates the potential of Learning Design for efficiently improving STEM undergraduate education with technology. In order to investigate this potential, the project consists of two main studies at Aarhus University: a study of the perspectives of the main stakeholders on Learning Design based on mixed methods, and a study of how to deliver Learning Design efficiently in four undergraduate STEM modules based on an action research methodology. The project revealed that all stakeholders at AU had a direct interest in the business, teaching, and/or learning affordances potentially provided by technology-enhanced learning based on Learning Design, and in particular students’ learning was of a high common interest. However, only the educators were directly interested in Learning Design and its support for design, reuse in their practice and to inform pedagogy. A holistic concept of Efficient Learning Design and its related assessment methodology is proposed in which efficiency is expressed as a vector sum of the weighted ratios of effort for and impact on the three main stakeholders: the institution, the educators, and the students, and assessed according to their stakes by means of four outcome scenarios: outperforming, underperforming, progressive, and regressive. The assessment of the four modules identified both outperforming and progressive interventions, a series of direct and indirect factors for Efficient Learning Design as well as an important temporal aspect of Learning Design uptake. The project concludes that it is possible to improve STEM undergraduate education with Learning Design for technology-enhanced learning efficiently and that Efficient Learning Design provides a useful concept for qualifying educational decisions

Consumer behaviour in the context of SMS-based marketing

YesGiven the potential benefits such as time and location-based advertisements, the scope of interactivity and customisation through one-to-one target marketing, SMS-based (Short Messaging Service) advertisement, is now being considered as an important alternative marketing channel. This has raised a real challenge for marketers to harness the potential of this alternative channel by overcoming several limiting issues such as security, privacy, authenticity, and irritation of unknown senders. The main objective of this study is to identify and review relevant research issues faced by wireless marketing (particularly via SMS-based advertisement) as an aide to identify potential research gaps and for developing future guiding principles. The review and analysis of literature suggest that there is scope of undertaking further research on issues related to different cultures reflecting ubiquitous traits of mobile phone, SMS advertisement, market segmentation, location and time sensitive delivery, content and context of advertisement, language and appropriate delivery