Design, deployment and assessment of a movie archive system in a film studies context

This thesis describe our work in developing a movie archive system for students of Film Studies in Dublin City University. In particular, our system uses several recent multimedia technologies to automatically process digital video content but at the same time we use the usability engineering process to relate to the real tasks of real users in their real environments. We investigate how real users take advantage of technologies in a movie browsing system. By designing, building, deploying and assessing the usage of a technology in a user-focused way, the overall impact of a movie browsing system can be determined holistically. The application domain we work in is film studies where students need to study movie contents and analyse movie sequences. Our work began by identification of user needs through observations, focus groups and usability testing, followed by sketching and prototyping a web-based system. We then deployed the system to film study classes over a semester, monitored usage and gathered quantitative as well as qualitative data. Focused experiments were carried out to assess students’ performance and satisfaction levels. Our findings show expected patterns of usage of a real-user setting outside the lab, but at the same time highlighted issues that need to be further investigated. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies. Findings from the experiment shows better performance in the essay assessments and higher satisfaction levels. An interesting finding shows students are more engaged with the newly-introduced software application and take longer time to complete the same task than without the advanced features of the application. This phenomenon was rationalized from established learning theory from the psychology domain. In a technologically-oriented multimedia field today, we attempted to bring in a user-centred approach of end-user interactions throughout a 3-year development process, and we identified benefits and challenges in trying to align the technical perspectives of novel multimedia features to real-world setting

Exploring the usage of a video application tool: Experiences in film studies

This paper explores our experiences in deploying a video application tool in film studies, and its evaluation in terms of realistic contextual end-users who have real tasks to perform in a real environment. We demonstrate our experiences and core lesson learnt in deploying our novel movie browser application with undergraduate and graduate students completing a Film Studies course in Dublin City University over a semester. We developed a system called MOVIEBROWSER2 that has two types of browsing modes: Advanced and Basic. In general, students found that the features we provided were beneficial for their studies. Some issues or mismatches arose during the trial. A ‘wish-list’ was drawn up that might be useful for the future system developer. The contribution and achievements reported in this article are on the demonstration and exploration of how advances in technology can be deployed, and media can be accessed in the context of a real user community. Exploring the usage indicates a positive acceptance among students, besides lessons learned that are important for further investigation

Evaluation of students' acceptance of the leap motion hand gesture application in teaching biochemistry

This paper presents an early stage of the Leap Motion controller regarding user acceptance in the teaching and learning process. The Leap Motion is a new device for a hand-gesture-controlled user interface. For appropriate evaluation, a novel experiment and questionnaire were created utilizing 35 Biochemistry undergraduate students in Enzymology from the Universiti Putra Malaysia. The subjects participated in the user experiment and performed several tasks, such as rotating, translating and zooming in and out on the molecules. The tasks were performed using the Molecules application on an Airspace platform. The research compared the performance of Leap Motion with mouse interaction. As a result, 79.2% of the respondents gave a positive opinion about the Leap Motion because of its ease of use, acceptance, effectiveness and accuracy. These students were excited and looked forward to implementing the Leap Motion in class. Thus, the Leap Motion controller can potentially be used as a teaching tool for a better learning experience of the biomolecule

Designing an interface for a digital movie browsing system in the film studies domain

This article explains our work in designing an interface for a digital movie browsing system in the specific application context of film studies. The development of MOVIEBROWSER2 follows some general design guidelines based on an earlier user study with film studies students at Dublin City University. These design guidelines have been used as an input to the MOVIEBROWSER2 system design. The rationale for the interface design decisions has been elaborated. An experiment has been carried out among film studies student, together with a one-semester trial deployment. The results show positive feedback and a better performance in the students’ essay outcome with higher perceived satisfaction level

Using socio-ecological model to inform the design of persuasive applications

Diverse persuasive applications that aim for behavioural changes have been developed. However, the method in which particular persuasive design principles are chosen over others remains unclear. Meanwhile, the use of socio-ecological model has been widely utilized in clinical research, as a basis to understand the factors in the entire ecological system that influences behavioural patterns. Because persuasive technology aims to change the behaviour and attitudes of users, we believe that the use of socio- ecological model would be beneficial to inform the design of persuasive applications. Accordingly, in this paper, we attempt to demonstrate the mapping of the socio-ecological factors and persuasive design principles by conducting interviews and expert reviews. Based on our approach, 12 socio-ecological factors that influence physical activity behaviour, and corresponding relevant persuasive design principles to deal with these factors, are identified

Developing, deploying and assessing usage of a movie archive system among students of film studies

This paper describes our work in developing a movie browser application for students of Film Studies at our University. The aim of our work is to address the issues that arise when applying conventional user-centered design techniques from the usability engineering field to build a usable application when the system incorporates novel multimedia tools that could be potentially useful to the end-users but have not yet been practiced or deployed. We developed a web-based system that incorporates features as identified from the students and those features from our novel video analysis tools, including scene detection and classification. We deployed the system, monitored usage and gathered quantitative and qualitative data. Our findings show those expected patterns and highlighted issues that need to be further investigated in a novel application development. A mismatch between the users’ wishes at the interviews and their actual usage was noted. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies

Smartphone application for physical activity enhancement at workplace: would office workers actually use It?

The proliferation of smartphone into daily life could potentially become an effective medium for the delivery of workplace-based physical activity intervention. Based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model (UTAUT), this study investigates factors influencing office workers’ intention to use smartphone application to enhance their physical activity at workplace. A total of 195 valid surveys were collected and subsequently analyzed using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) approach. The outcome demonstrated that both Performance Expectancy (PE) and Social Influence (SI) have significant positive effect on Behavioural Intention. Effort Expectancy (EE) in contrast has no significant influence on office workers’ intention to use. This study provides a preliminary evidence on factors that should be consider by researchers, developers and employers in developing smartphone applications aiming to enhance physical activity at workplace among office workers

Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content

There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real users’ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial

A Study on Persuasive Technologies: The Relationship between User Emotions, Trust and Persuasion

A successful persuasive technology is able to persuade people to change from one state to a more well known state. Therefore, to allow for a change, persuasive technology must be able to affect users’ emotion and make the user trust the technology so that they will adopt the persuasive technology into their daily life routine, as well as continue to use the technology for long period. This paper is aimed to study the relation between users’ emotion with trust and persuasion and how they may contribute to the success of changing a person attitude or behavior towards a certain context or issue. Twenty five participants have completed the study in 6 weeks by using two types of persuasive technology that were assessed at three different interaction stages: pre, during and post. Result shows that emotions have a significant effect on trust, whereas the effect of emotions on persuasion using the persuasive technology was mediated by trust