Is adaptation of e-advertising the way forward?

E-advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that has shown exponential growth in the last few years. However, although the number of users accessing the Internet increases, users don’t respond positively to adverts. Adaptive e-advertising may be the key to ensuring effectiveness of the ads reaching their target. Moreover, social networks are good sources of user information and can be used to extract user behaviour and characteristics for presentation of personalized advertising. Here we present a two-sided study based on two questionnaires, one directed to Internet users and the other to businesses. Our study shows that businesses agree that personalized advertising is the best way for the future, to maximize effectiveness and profit. In addition, our results indicate that most Internet users would prefer adaptive advertisements. From this study, we can propose a new design for a system that meets both Internet users’ and businesses’ requirements

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

How to Incorporate Accessibility to Design Principles for IS Artefacts?

Design principles are used to specify design knowledge and describe the aim of artefact instantiation. Accessibility research aims to create artefacts that can be used by all users. However, schemes for design principles lack the tools to define accessibility explicitly. This study proposes extensions to scheme design principles for accessibility-related design science research. We draw accessibility domain-specific characteristics from the literature to include accessibility in design principles for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) instantiations. We extended the components of design principles with the following attributes: HCI Artefact Features; Contextual factors; Computer Input Modalities; Computer Output Media; Human Sensory Perception; Human Cognition; Human Functional Operations. We devised a checklist for researchers to follow the variations in accessibility. The extensions are intended to foster researchers to incorporate accessibility in producing a more accurate formulation of design principles.© authors, Welzer Družovec, Hölbl, Nemec Zlatolas, Kuhar, 2023. Published by University of Maribor, University Press.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Developing an Inclusive Education Game Using a Design Science Research Gestalt Method

As business firms seek a diverse talent pool to attain a competitive advantage, the need for inclusive education has become even more apparent across academic domains. An essential way to impart inclusive education today includes digital tools such as educational games. In this study, we apply the design science research (DSR) Gestalt methodology to develop an inclusive educational game that would advance learning for both male and female engineering students. We also assess the game’s efficacy in achieving performance improvements using a survey-based experimental design. Results demonstrate that the game resulted in greater student performance compared to traditional round-table discussions. Additionally, the game had a greater positive impact on female students’ performance compared to male students. The study shows that one can apply the DSR gestalt method to develop gender-inclusive educational games

Evaluating Digital Libraries: A Longitudinal and Multifaceted View

published or submitted for publicatio

Visualization of analytic provenance for sensemaking

Sensemaking is an iterative and dynamic process, in which people collect data relevant to their tasks, analyze the collected information to produce new knowledge, and possibly inform further actions. During the sensemaking process, it is difficult for the human’s working memory to keep track of the progress and to synthesize a large number of individual findings and derived hypotheses, thus limits the performance. Analytic provenance captures both the data exploration process and and its accompanied reasoning, potentially addresses these information overload and disorientation problems. Visualization can help recall, revisit and reproduce the sensemaking process through visual representations of provenance data. More interesting and challenging, analytic provenance has the potential to facilitate the ongoing sensemaking process rather than providing only post hoc support. This thesis addresses the challenge of how to design interactive visualizations of analytic provenance data to support such an iterative and dynamic sensemaking. Its original contribution includes four visualizations that help users explore complex temporal and reasoning relationships hidden in the sensemaking problems, using both automatically and manually captured provenance. First SchemaLine, a timeline visualization, enables users to construct and refine narratives from their annotations. Second, TimeSets extends SchemaLine to explore more complex relationships by visualizing both temporal and categorical information simultaneously. Third, SensePath captures and visualizes user actions to enable analysts to gain a deep understanding of the user’s sensemaking process. Fourth, SenseMap visualization prevents users from getting lost, synthesizes new relationship from captured information, and consolidates their understanding of the sensemaking problem. All of these four visualizations are developed using a user-centered design approach and evaluated empirically to explore how they help target users make sense of their real tasks. In summary, this thesis contributes novel and validated interactive visualizations of analytic provenance data that enable users to perform effective sensemaking

The Impact of Visual Design on Web Persuasiveness

Many commentators of web persuasion have suggested that content is the key factor responsible for creating credible (and therefore persuasive) websites. Research in a variety of fields has been devoted to identifying accurate methods of determining a website\u27s trustworthiness in order to help organizations promote credibility and teach users to critically analyze it. By focusing on the credibility of content, however, researchers are promoting an unbalanced perspective of web persuasiveness that privileges textual content over visual design. This thesis hypothesizes that visual design significantly impacts web persuasiveness. First, exploration of current theories of web persuasiveness reveals the importance of persuasion in measuring a website\u27s success and the need to expand consideration of persuasive factors beyond the credibility of content. Next, Chapter 2 demonstrates the impact of visual design through explanation of the perceptual process and the theory of halo effect. Then, design principles from theorists such as Tufte, Kress and Van Leeuwen, Mullet and Sano, and Kostelnick and Roberts are suggested as a means for determining whether or not a visual design is \u27attractive.\u27 To study the effects of these design principles (or their absence) on web persuasiveness, I conducted a pilot study where one group of participants used an \u27attractive\u27 website while another group used an \u27unattractive\u27 version of the same website. Results from this study suggest that visual design does have a positive impact on web persuasion

The 'physics of diagrams' : revealing the scientific basis of graphical representation design

Data is omnipresent in the modern, digital world and a significant number of people need to make sense of data as part of their everyday social and professional life. Therefore, together with the rise of data, the design of graphical representations has gained importance and attention. Yet, although a large body of procedural knowledge about effective visualization exists, the quality of representations is often reported to be poor, proposedly because these guidelines are scattered, unstructured and sometimes perceived as contradictive. Therefore, this paper describes a literature research addressing these problems. The research resulted in the collection and structuring of 81 guidelines and 34 underlying propositions, as well as in the derivation of 7 foundational principles about graphical representation design, called the "Physics of Diagrams", which are illustrated with concrete, practical examples throughout the paper

Multi-agent system for Knowledge-based recommendation of Learning Objects

Learning Object (LO) is a content unit being used within virtual learning environments, which -once found and retrieved- may assist students in the teaching - learning process. Such LO search and retrieval are recently supported and enhanced by data mining techniques. In this sense, clustering can be used to find groups holding similar LOs so that from obtained groups, knowledge-based recommender systems (KRS) can recommend more adapted and relevant LOs. In particular, prior knowledge come from LOs previously selected, liked and ranked by the student to whom the recommendation will be performed. In this paper, we present a KRS for LOs, which uses a conventional clustering technique, namely K-means, aimed at finding similar LOs and delivering resources adapted to a specific student. Obtained promising results show that proposed KRS is able to both retrieve relevant LO and improve the recommendation precision