User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Challenging the Need for Transparency, Controllability, and Consistency in Usable Adaptation Design

Adaptive applications constitute the basis for many ubiquitous computing scenarios as they can dynamically adapt to changing contexts. The usability design principles transparency, controllability, and consistency have been recommended for the design of adaptive interfaces. However, designing self-adaptive applications that may act completely autonomous is still a challenging task because there is no set of usability design guidelines. Applying the three principles in the design of the five different adaptations of the mobile adaptive application Meet-U revealed as difficult. Based on an analysis of the design problem space, we elaborate an approach for the design of usable adaptations. Our approach is based on a notification design concept which calculates the attention costs and utility benefits of notified adaptations by varying the design aspects transparency and controllability. We present several designs for the adaptations of Meet‑U. The results of a user study shows that the notification design approach is beneficial for the design of adaptations. Varying transparency and controllability is necessary to adjust an adaptation’s design to the particular context of use. This leads to a partially inconsistent design for adaptations within an application

An approach to evaluating the user experience of serious games

The use of serious games to support learning continues to expand across a range of educational and training settings. Hence, a need exists to understand more fully how users experience such games. This study seeks to describe and assess an approach to the evaluation of user-experience applied within the context of a specific serious game developed to address the training needs of people working in social enterprises. Drawing on an extensive literature review, the development of a survey instrument to capture the multi-dimensional nature of user-experience is explained as is the evaluation process employed. Findings from surveys of individuals working in social enterprises are analysed and discussed. The results demonstrate the value of the proposed method of user-experience evaluation. Recommendations for practice and further research are outlined, identifying in particular the importance of qualitative insights in the evaluation process and the need for greater understanding of the inter-relationships between the various dimensions and attributes of user-experience in serious games

Four dimensional presentations as a new representation method: a proposal for the use of interactive multimedia presentation in landscape architecture

Few studies on presentation methods in the profession of landscape architecture have been done in the past, because evaluating presentations raises primarily subjective issues. Today, interactive multimedia presentations offer an excellent opportunity to investigate the presentation methods employed by landscape architects, gCan new communication technologies help to enhance the communication between the presenter and his audience?h This is the fundamental question addressed in this thesis. It explores interactive multimedia presentations to see their potentials, and considers ways to integrate various multimedia as presentation methods for future landscape architectural presentations. The main terms, interactivity and multimedia, are explained to understand the features of interactive multimedia presentations. Conventions of traditional presentations and historical aspects are overviewed to deepen the meanings of presentation methods. An interactive multimedia presentation is actually produced to explore how multimedia can be effective tools and to document how the interactive multimedia presentations are produced. It used to be very difficult to represent the transitions between spaces in traditional paper board presentations; however, interactive multimedia presentations make it possible to visualize the transitions and relationship between the designed spaces three-dimensionally. Landscape architects today should make the most use of various media and utilize the new computer communication technologies to enhance their presentations. 3D modeling process greatly helps designers check and reevaluate their proposed designs as well. In fact, interactive multimedia presentations are useful not only for the presentations but also for total professional communication and educational purposes

Browsing Large Image Datasets through Voronoi Diagrams

Conventional browsing of image collections use mechanisms such as thumbnails arranged on a regular grid or on a line, often mounted over a scrollable panel. However, this approach does not scale well with the size of the datasets (number of images). In this paper, we propose a new thumbnail-based interface to browse large collections of images. Our approach is based on weighted centroidal anisotropic Voronoi diagrams. A dynamically changing subset of images is represented by thumbnails and shown on the screen. Thumbnails are shaped like general polygons, to better cover screen space, while still reflecting the original aspect ratios or orientation of the represented images. During the browsing process, thumbnails are dynamically rearranged, reshaped and rescaled. The objective is to devote more screen space (more numerous and larger thumbnails) to the parts of the dataset closer to the current region of interest, and progressively lesser away from it, while still making the dataset visible as a whole. During the entire process, temporal coherence is always maintained. GPU implementation easily guarantees the frame rates needed for fully smooth interactivity

Conception and Realisation of Mobile Serious Games for learning support in biochemistry with the Android operating system

Productive learning is a difficult task as there are numerous factors, which can lead to a lack of efficiency or effectiveness. A not uncommon problem is to learn the wrong learning content. This effects not only a massive lack in effectiveness, but also causes frustration of the learner. The students of biochemistry at the university of Ulm have struggled increasingly with this problem. Their studies include three main exams, where each of them tests a certain part of a set of above five thousand questions. But the identification of the right set causes uncertainties. As a result, students have increasingly learned the whole set of questions to ensure having learned all relevant content. This bachelor thesis has the goal to develop an android application which helps the students to learn the right questions, by providing only the relevant ones for the pending exam. Furthermore, the students shall be motivated through gamification elements as achievements and experience points in combination with reminders, to learn in a more constant manner. To achieve this goal, necessary question filters have been used, to fix the issue of selecting the right questions. The usage of four different test types allow the user to create individual tests which supports targeted learning and, therefore the creation of the best possible substitute for other learning methods. In addition to this, the integration of questions about basic knowledge has been implemented, to support a deeper understanding of the content. Progress overviews and experience points, have been chosen to achieve the goal of enabling the user to track his progress of preparation at any time. This allows a more anticipatory learning manner. Training goals in combination with rewards for keeping on track and reminders are used to ensure constant practicing. The integration of achievements complete the range of gamification motivators by adding additional incentives to learn. In case of success, this project will increase both, effectiveness and efficacy of the preparation for the exams and therefore enhance their results