Introduction : user studies for digital library development

Introductory chapter to the edited collection on user studies in digital library development. Contains a general introduction to the topic and biographical sketches of the contributors.peer-reviewe

Understanding the user - why, what and how?

Explains the need, importance, purposes and scope of user studies, discusses procedure for conducting sound user studies together with associated problems of research like selection of problem, formulation of hypothesis, design of study, sampling strategy, data collection methods, scaling techniques, pilot study, processing and analysis of data, testing of hypothesis, interpretation, drawing inferences, communication and dissemination of results and finally concludes by highlighting methodological flaws and gaps in user studies

Regulating Highly Automated Robot Ecologies: Insights from Three User Studies

Highly automated robot ecologies (HARE), or societies of independent autonomous robots or agents, are rapidly becoming an important part of much of the world's critical infrastructure. As with human societies, regulation, wherein a governing body designs rules and processes for the society, plays an important role in ensuring that HARE meet societal objectives. However, to date, a careful study of interactions between a regulator and HARE is lacking. In this paper, we report on three user studies which give insights into how to design systems that allow people, acting as the regulatory authority, to effectively interact with HARE. As in the study of political systems in which governments regulate human societies, our studies analyze how interactions between HARE and regulators are impacted by regulatory power and individual (robot or agent) autonomy. Our results show that regulator power, decision support, and adaptive autonomy can each diminish the social welfare of HARE, and hint at how these seemingly desirable mechanisms can be designed so that they become part of successful HARE.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to appear in the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction (HAI-2017), Bielefeld, German

What User Studies Tell Us

Valid conclusions about user behavior should only be made within the research method used by each study. For example, if a researcher interviews academic faculty to determine if they prefer print or electronic sources, the conclusions should only state what faculty prefer, not what faculty actually use

User Studies for Digital Library Development

As the information environment becomes increasingly electronic, digital libraries have proliferated, but the focus has often been on innovations in technology and not the user. Research and analysis of users is essential to fine-tune the content and approach of digital libraries to the diverging requirements and expectations of incredibly varied communities and to ensure libraries are effective, accessible and sustainable in the long term. This book provides a clear overview of the user studies domain and user issues in digital libraries

Effective user studies in computer graphics

User studies are a useful tool for researchers, allowing them to collect data on how users perceive, interact with and process different types of sensory information. If planned in advance, user experiments can be leveraged in every stage of a research project, from early design, prototyping and feature exploration to applied proofs of concept, passing through validation and data collection for model training. User studies can provide the researcher with different types of information depending on the chosen methodology: user performance metrics, surveys and interviews, field studies, physiological data, etc. Considering human perception and other cognitive processes is particularly important in computer graphics, where most research produces outputs whose ultimate purpose is to be seen or perceived by a human. Being able to measure in an objective and systematic way how the information we generate is integrated into the representational space humans create to situate themselves in the world means that researchers will have more information to implement optimal algorithms, tools and techniques. In this tutorial we will give an overview of good practices for user studies in computer graphics with a particular focus on virtual reality use cases. We will cover the basics on how to design, carry out and analyze good user studies, as well as different particularities to be taken into account in immersive environments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Supportive Resources: Mastering the Art of Making Sense

This paper questions the nature of qualitative user studies as currently applied in the context of experience-centered design. We suggest that conceiving knowledge as if it were an entity that can be captured in some form and transferred unchanged oversimplifies the situation in the case of design, and, for the purpose of opening a dialogue on the topic is problematic. We put forward an alternative perspective, that of supportive resources, which go beyond social science-based approaches, such as user studies, to focus on the forming of knowledge by designers. Supportive resources are intended to inspire, but equally they are intended to help frame, guide and support the design process in a non-prescriptive way. Designers can apply them as needed to support existing approaches. In order to better describe supportive resources and their role in design, the authors present four examples from projects currently being undertaken by the authors; storytelling, language and touch, material knowledge, and video