699 research outputs found

    Designing for reintermediation in the brick-and-mortar world: Towards the travel agency of the future

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    The Internet and electronic marketplaces have profoundly transformed the travel services industry and challenged the traditional value proposition of travel agencies: What is the reason for their existence if information is abundantly available and transactions can be flexibly conducted in direct buyer-seller interactions on the Internet? Traditional travel agencies are struggling to develop new value propositions which differentiate them against the Internet competition, largely based on expanding their reach through online subsidiaries. We present a reintermediation approach based on a novel way of IT-enabled travel advisory which integrates the advantages of interactive technologies and Internet channels with the advantages of direct customer interaction in the physical agency setting. In particular, we propose a reintermediation framework based on the integration of kernel theories from information seeking behavior, interactive value creation, relationship marketing and the design of hedonic information systems. We argue that physically collocated travel advisory services can create a significant added value, if they succeed in uncovering customers' hidden needs, heightening trust and relationship building in the advisory process and creating a better user experience. Following the design science methodology we validate the proposed framework through the design, implementation and evaluation of a proof-of-concept prototype in a field experiment in a real-world travel agenc

    Designing the Sakai Open Academic Environment: A distributed cognition account of the design of a large scale software system

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    Social accounts of technological change make the flexibility and openness of interpretations the starting point of an argument against technological determinism. They suggest that technological change unfolds in the semantic domain, but they focus on the social processes around the interpretations of new technologies, and do not address the conceptual processes of change in interpretations. The dissertation presents an empirically grounded case study of the design process of an open-source online software platform based on the framework of distributed cognition to argue that the cognitive perspective is needed for understanding innovation in software, because it allows us to describe the reflexive and expansive contribution of conceptual processes to new software and the significance of professional epistemic practices in framing the direction of innovation. The framework of distributed cognition brings the social and cognitive perspectives together on account of its understanding of conceptual processes as distributed over time, among people, and between humans and artifacts. The dissertation argues that an evolving open-source software landscape became translated into the open-ended local design space of a new software project in a process of infrastructural implosion, and the design space prompted participants to outline and pursue epistemic strategies of sense-making and learning about the contexts of use. The result was a process of conceptual modeling, which resulted in a conceptually novel user interface. Prototyping professional practices of user-centered design lent directionality to this conceptual process in terms of a focus on individual activities with the user interface. Social approaches to software design under the broad umbrella of human-centered computing have been seeking to inform the design on the basis of empirical contributions about a social context. The analysis has shown that empirical engagement with the contexts of use followed from conceptual modeling, and concern about real world contexts was aligned with the user-centered direction that design was taking. I also point out a social-technical gap in the design process in connection with the repeated performance challenges that the platform was facing, and describe the possibility of a social-technical imagination.Ph.D

    Content arrangement on large high-resolution displays: a PDF-reader

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    The advent of Large High Resolution Displays (LHRDs) enables new visualisation methods for data analysis. This allows users to replace virtual navigation with spatial navigation which leads to further challenges in arranging the content appropriately. Conventional applications are developed without considering these novel issues; thus they may have deficiencies to be used on LHRDs efficiently. For this purpose, we conduct this thesis with a focus on the content arrangement of PDF documents. The aim of this thesis is to design, implement and evaluate an interface for viewing PDF documents on LHRDs. After an extensive literature review, we conducted design workshops to elicit design concepts and received various inspiring suggestions. The most promising design ideas were implemented as a working prototype by using an existing open source PDF renderer. Finally, we evaluated our implementation in a collaborative sensemaking user study in terms of usability and performance. We examine the result of the evaluation study and present key influencing factors which might be useful for future applications on LHRDs
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