21,226 research outputs found
Understanding quality from a user perspective
Patient articles in professional journals used to be seen
as an invasion of territory. Now patients are invited to
contribute. We need to share each othersâ space if we are
to understand one another.So writes Mitzi Blennerhassett, one of the contributors.
This is the first in a series of special issues of Quality
in Primary Care that we plan to publish as a regular
feature. As well as this issue on the âPatient Perspectives
on Quality in Primary Careâ we are also planning
an issue on âCommissioning for Quality Improvementâ
later this year and next year the âDevelopment of
Nursing Practice and Scopeâ, âProfessional Regulationâ
and finally âOrganisational and Educational Interventions
for Quality Improvementâ
Computers: the user perspective-2/e
Computers: The User Perspective, 2nd edition, is oriented toward future computer users, not future computer specialist. Users-also called end-users-treat the computer as a tool for working with reports, spreadsheets, databases, and the like. They are not the specialist who will write programs for computers or who will design computer system.
Too many introductory texts, we believe, try to please both users and specialist, and as a result fail both. They donât provideenough technical detail for the specialist but they offer too much detail and not enough practical, business-related information for the user
Adaptive User Perspective Rendering for Handheld Augmented Reality
Handheld Augmented Reality commonly implements some variant of magic lens
rendering, which turns only a fraction of the user's real environment into AR
while the rest of the environment remains unaffected. Since handheld AR devices
are commonly equipped with video see-through capabilities, AR magic lens
applications often suffer from spatial distortions, because the AR environment
is presented from the perspective of the camera of the mobile device. Recent
approaches counteract this distortion based on estimations of the user's head
position, rendering the scene from the user's perspective. To this end,
approaches usually apply face-tracking algorithms on the front camera of the
mobile device. However, this demands high computational resources and therefore
commonly affects the performance of the application beyond the already high
computational load of AR applications. In this paper, we present a method to
reduce the computational demands for user perspective rendering by applying
lightweight optical flow tracking and an estimation of the user's motion before
head tracking is started. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach for
computationally limited mobile devices and we compare it to device perspective
rendering, to head tracked user perspective rendering, as well as to fixed
point of view user perspective rendering
Recommended from our members
Perceptual multimedia quality: Implications of an empirical study
Copyright @ 2005 HCI InternationalIf commercial multimedia development continues to ignore the user-perspective in preference of other factors, i.e. user fascination (i.e. the latest gimmick), then companies ultimately risk alienating the customer. Moreover, by ignoring the user-perspective, future distributed multimedia systems risk ignoring accessibility issues, by excluding access for users with abnormal perceptual requirements. This paper presents an extensive examination of distributed multimedia quality. We define a model that considers multimedia quality from three distinct levels: the network, the media- and the content-levels; and two views: the technical- and the user-perspective. By manipulating both technical and user-perspective parameters, we examine the impact on quality perception at the three quality levels identified. Results show that: a significant reduction in frame rate does not proportionally reduce the user's understanding of the presentation, independent of technical parameters; the type of video clip significantly impacts user information assimilation, user level of enjoyment and user perception of quality; the display type impacts user information assimilation and user perception of quality. Finally, to ensure transfer of informational content, network parameter variation should be adapted; to maintain user enjoyment, video content variation should be adapted
Recommended from our members
Mediating between Services and Learning Activities â the User Perspective
We reflect upon the LADIE projectâs experience of migrating a concept of user requirements from the teaching practitioner community to the technical developer community in the light of literature on âmediating representationsâ and âmediating artefactsâ. We show that the practical operation of mediating representations is far more complex than previously acknowledged. We suggest that communities need to overlap, allowing reciprocal communication, to migrate concepts via a representation. If they do not, a chain of intermediate representations and communities may be necessary. Finally, we draw a tentative distinction between mediating representations and mediating artefacts, based not in the nature of the resources, but in their mode and context of use
A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce
This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factorsânetwork bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed
The Use of Hosted Enterprise Applications by SMEs: A User Perspective
This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in hosted enterprise applications (high complexity e-business applications) in the UK by investigating the relevance of organisational and technical factors through conducting interviews with SME users of hosted applications. The emergence and development of the application service provider (ASP) sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. Of particular interest in this paper is the emergence of service offerings targeted specifically at SMEs. The paper starts by considering information technology (IT) adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK. The empirical data collected from SME users of hosted enterprise applications is then analysed in order to produce the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems (hosted and resident) and service providers, iv) the attractiveness of the rental cost model and v) the intention to continue or extend their use of hosted applications within the enterprise. The early promise of the ASP sector appears not to have been generally realised for SMEs in the UK. This study explores the experience of early adopters of this new IT related innovation and identifies some significant business gains experienced by SME users. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take a deliberately SME user perspective and this paper make an important contribution in this emerging field
- âŠ