Supporting social innovation through visualisations of community interactions

Online communities that form through the introduction of sociotechnical platforms require significant effort to cultivate and sustain. Providing open, transparent information on community behaviour can motivate participation from community members themselves, while also providing platform administrators with detailed interaction dynamics. However, challenges arise in both understanding what information is conducive to engagement and sustainability, and then how best to represent this information to platform stakeholders. Towards a better understanding of these challenges, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of simple visualisations integrated into a Collective Awareness Platform for Social Innovation platform titled commonfare.net. We discuss the promise and challenge of bringing social innovation into the digital age, in terms of supporting sustained platform use and collective action, and how the introduction of community visualisations has been directed towards achieving this goal

Investigating a learning analytics interface for automatically marked programming assessments

Student numbers at the University of Cape Town continue to grow, with an increasing number of students enrolling to study programming courses. With this increase in numbers, it becomes difficult for lecturers to provide individualised feedback on programming assessments submitted by students. To solve this, the university utilises an automatic marking tool for marking assignments and providing feedback. Students can submit assignments and receive instant feedback on marks allocated or errors in their submissions. This tool saves time as lecturers spend less time on marking and provides instant feedback on submitted code, hence providing the student with an opportunity to correct errors in their submitted code. However, most students have identified areas where improvements can be made on the interface between the automatic marker and the submitted programs. This study investigates the potential of creating a learning analytics inspired dashboard interface to improve the feedback provided to students on their submitted programs. A focus group consisting of computer science class representatives was organised, and feedback from this focus group was used to create dashboard mock-ups. These mock-ups were then used to develop high-fidelity learning analytics inspired dashboard prototypes that were tested by first-year computer science students to determine if the interfaces were useful and usable. The prototypes were designed using the Python programming language and Plotly Python library. User-centred design methods were employed by eliciting constant feedback from students during the prototyping and design of the learning analytics inspired interface. A usability study was employed where students were required to use the dashboard and then provide feedback on its use by completing a questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed using Nielsen's Usability Heuristics and AttrakDiff. These methods also assisted in the evaluation of the dashboard design. The research showed that students considered a learning analytics dashboard as an essential tool that could help them as they learn to program. Students found the dashboard useful and had an overall understanding of the specific features they would like to see implemented on a learning analytics inspired dashboard used by the automatic marking tool. Some of the specific features mentioned by students include overall performance, duly performed needed to qualify for exams, highest score, assignment due dates, class average score, and most common errors. This research hopes to provide insight on how automatically marked programming assessments could be displayed to students in a way that supports learning

Airline E-commerce user experience experiment: An investigation of Thai LCCs passengers' purchasing behaviour among different online platforms

Purpose: This study examines the current state of the airline’s e-commerce platforms and seek to identify their benefits and disadvantages in the aspect of user experience. Design/methodology/approach: The study commenced by first reviewing the literatures on actual sale figure from the studied Thai LCC, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). It then proceeded to gather the empirical evidences using questionnaires from 135 active air passengers who have online purchasing experience. The composite findings from literature review and surveys were then used to design and apply for the final phase which is a series of in-depth interviews of air passengers on their usability test sessions and experts from the related industries. Coding and clustering was utilised to analyse the qualitative data obtained. Findings: The study examines the differences in online ticket purchasing platforms including airline's website, mobile-site and mobile application. The results identified five areas of factors: physical, trust, willingness to learn, context of use and adjustment. With regard to these factors, there are no single platform that outperform others. Airlines need to ensure that UX/UI of all platforms meet the users’ requirements in all circumstances. Originality/value: The study reveals the customer thinking processes on online purchasing behaviour. It focuses on web-usability and user experience of different booking platforms. The findings allow the subjected LCC to improve customer experience and optimise its platforms. The paper could also benefit other entrepreneurs who are in the related industry or similar contexts. In addition, the study of user-experience in the context of airline industry, particularly in the emerging countries like Thailand is limited.Peer Reviewe

ClockIt: Monitoring and Visualizing Student Software Development Profiles

Monitoring software development practices can result in improved estimation abilities and increased software quality. A common drawback associated with many monitoring schemes is the manual overhead needed to make the monitoring effective. This overhead results in users abandoning the monitoring scheme shortly after it is adopted or poor quality in the data produced. Alternatives have been introduced that automate part, or all of the monitoring. ClockIt is a fully automated extension for the pedagogical integrated development environment (IDE) BlueJ, and focuses on aspects of the development practices seen in introductory level students. By automatically monitoring introductory student development behavior, instructors and students gain insight about development practices. In addition to the ClockIt extension, Visualization tools are provided to assist students or instructors in exploring the data. Data collected via ClockIt for four semesters confirm previous independent findings. And, new insights about how compilation error frequency changes in introductory students and the relationships between pairs of compilations have been discovered

Design and implementation of a web interface for Axis global testing Live Sites

Designing and developing a software product is a difficult process. The product must be usable and solve the correct problem. At the same time, the underlying code must be well written. Many projects fail to deliver or exceed their budget. This thesis explores a practical approach to software design and development that tries to adhere to both user centered design and agile development. The process follows Google Ventures’ design sprint model and also takes inspiration from Jacob Nielsen's discount usability methods. This approach is applied to a real project at Axis Communications. The goal of the project was to design and implement a web application for monitoring and analyzing data from Axis global weather testing ``Live Sites''. The data was collected and analyzed manually which was a very time consuming process. It was difficult to interact with the data in order to see correlations between the weather and the camera images. We were able design a solution to this and implement it during four iterations. Each iteration consisted of a design sprint, an implementation sprint and an evaluation phase. The design sprints were fast and effective, which meant we could spend more time on building the actual product while still being confident that we were building something that would actually work. Through continuous usability evaluation and regular stakeholder meetings we were able to validate our design. The project resulted in a web application consisting of a number of interactive dashboards. Our conclusion is that the resulting interface solves the problem of interacting with the ``Live Site'' data and should provide a good foundation to build upon. We also conclude that Google Ventures' design sprint is a powerful and effective model which could be of great benefit to software development projects.Is it possible to create usable software quickly and effectively? To find out, we combined practices of good usability design and fast software development in a project at Axis Communications. Developing usable software is no simple task. The software must be well designed and solve a real problem for its users. At the same time the software’s inner workings must be engineered in a good way. Preferably, the process of producing this software should be fast and cost effective. Many software projects fail, either by delivering an unusable product or by going over budget. In our master thesis we explored a practical approach to software design and coding that tries to solve these issues. We applied this approach to a software project at Axis Communications. Our task was to develop a website for Axis global testing live sites. These live sites are physical sites located around the world in different climate zones. Each site consists of a number of Axis cameras and a weather station connected to a local server. The cameras are left there so that the physical impact of the environment can be monitored and studied. By doing this Axis makes sure that their cameras are able to handle harsh weather conditions in the real world, not just in controlled test chambers. Our approach was to divide the project into four repetitions, each consisting of a design phase, a coding phase, and a usability evaluation phase. During the design phase, which lasted for five days, we tried to solve design issues. We conducted interviews with the users and had observations sessions on day one. Solutions to the discovered problems were explored in day two. On day three we combined our ideas into a single solution. During day four we made a prototype of this solution. The usability of this prototype was tested on real users at Axis on the fifth and final day. The coding phase lasted two to three weeks and took us from a design prototype to a working website. The usability of the website was evaluated and we brought the newly discovered problems with us to the next repetition. Throughout our project we used this approach to solve design problems at an astonishing pace. By incorporating the design phase into a repetitive process we were able to produce a working product very quickly, which we could continuously add and improve upon. The process resulted in a usable product, but we were sadly not able to fully implement our envisioned solution. We do however believe that by following our process model we were able to not only produce good design, but also well written code. Hopefully this means that the product can be built upon and eventually fully realized. The process model turned out to be a powerful and effective tool. Despite the fact that we couldn’t completely evade the problem of going over budget, we think it could be of great benefit to the software engineering process

Tahapan Pengembangan Digital Dashboard Sebagai Tools Enterprise Performance Monitoring

Paper ini membahas tahapan pengembangan model digital dashboard (DD) sebagai tools enterprise performance management (EPM). Bertujuan untuk mengetahui sejauh mana model DD dikembangkan untuk mempermudah pengaksesan informasi strategis, melaksanakan monitoring, evaluasi, dan pengukuran kinerja enterprise. Penelitian juga bermaksud untuk mengidenfikasi apakah komponen critical suscess factor (CSFs), business process (BP), business activity monitoring (BAM), key performance indicator (KPI), mapping BAM ke dalam KPI telah dilakukan dalam pengembangan digital dashboard. Penelitian dilakukan dengan cara mengidenfikasi tahapan membangun EPM-DD, bentuk EPM-DD, komponen EPM-DD, cakupan EPM-DD, membuat tabel komparasi, dan menganalisanya. Hasil penelitian menyatakan bahwa tahapan pengembangan digital dashboard tediri dari: menentukan metodologi, mendefinisikan data layer, presentation layer, visualization layer, menentukan komponen, dan cakupan data dan user. Diketahui pula bahwa komponen BP, BAM, KPI telah diperhatikan pada beberapa pengembangan. Sementara komponen CSFs sama sekali belum menjadi perhatikan. Telah dibuat pula sebuah rekomendasi tahapan pengembangan digital dashboard sebagai tools EPM yang memiliki 6 tahapan

Affective graphs: the visual appeal of linked data

The essence and value of Linked Data lies in the ability of humans and machines to query, access and reason upon highly structured and formalised data. Ontology structures provide an unambiguous description of the structure and content of data. While a multitude of software applications and visualization systems have been developed over the past years for Linked Data, there is still a significant gap that exists between applications that consume Linked Data and interfaces that have been designed with significant focus on aesthetics. Though the importance of aesthetics in affecting the usability, effectiveness and acceptability of user interfaces have long been recognised, little or no explicit attention has been paid to the aesthetics of Linked Data applications. In this paper, we introduce a formalised approach to developing aesthetically pleasing semantic web interfaces by following aesthetic principles and guidelines identified from literature. We apply such principles to design and develop a generic approach of using visualizations to support exploration of Linked Data, in an interface that is pleasing to users. This provides users with means to browse ontology structures, enriched with statistics of the underlying data, facilitating exploratory activities and enabling visual query for highly precise information needs. We evaluated our approach in three ways: an initial objective evaluation comparing our approach with other well-known interfaces for the semantic web and two user evaluations with semantic web researchers

Evaluating secondary input devices to support an automotive touchscreen HMI: a cross-cultural simulator study conducted in the UK and China

Touchscreen Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are a well-established and popular choice to provide the primary control interface between driver and vehicle, yet inherently demand some visual attention. Employing a secondary device with the touchscreen may reduce the demand but there is some debate about which device is most suitable, with current manufacturers favouring different solutions and applying these internationally. We present an empirical driving simulator study, conducted in the UK and China, in which 48 participants undertook typical in-vehicle tasks utilising either a touchscreen, rotary-controller, steering-wheel-controls or touchpad. In both the UK and China, the touchscreen was the most preferred/least demanding to use, and the touchpad least preferred/most demanding, whereas the rotary-controller was generally favoured by UK drivers and steering-wheel-controls were more popular in China. Chinese drivers were more excited by the novelty of the technology, and spent more time attending to the devices while driving, leading to an increase in off-road glance time and a corresponding detriment to vehicle control. Even so, Chinese drivers rated devices as easier-to-use while driving, and felt that they interfered less with their driving performance, compared to their UK counterparts. Results suggest that the most effective solution (to maximise performance/acceptance, while minimising visual demand) is to maintain the touchscreen as the primary control interface (e.g. for top-level tasks), and supplement this with a secondary device that is only enabled for certain actions; moreover, different devices may be employed in different cultural markets. Further work is required to explore these recommendations in greater depth (e.g. during extended or real-world testing), and to validate the findings and approach in other cultural contexts