A new phenomenon on the Internet is the online audience response. Mentimeter is a web-based tool where you can create online polls. The users can then cast a vote and the result is shown in real time. We want to test the information visualization in Mentimeter and we base our hypothesis, that a better graph design is possible, on the work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few. Edward Tufte is an emeritus at Yale University, where he held courses in statistical evidence and information design and has created theories about how visual information should be designed.

According to the theory of elitist democracy civic political participation should be reduced to participation in the democratic elections. This essay examines whether a high rate of institutionalized political participation beyond the elections leads to: (a) that those who are included gets a more favourable treatment at the expense of the common interest, in other words that their self interest threatens the political equality, (b) reduced freedom of action for the politicians and the headmasters, (c) the emergence of vague conditions of responsibility. These hypotheses are examined in an empirical study of user-boards at four schools on three locations in southern Sweden. In these user-boards the parents are in majority and have the right of decision, which has been delegated to them from the local government and the headmaster. The main conclusion is that, based on this empirical investigation, there is no support in any of the hypotheses.

The purpose of this essay was first and foremost to find out the problems that exist around user education in a university library and the opportunities that exist for university librarians to improve their work with students. My method of use was qualitative and more precise qualitative interviews. By interviewing five teaching librarians with five different subject specializations, I wanted to get an an-swer to what they teach when they meet the students and how they view their teaching. Responses resulted then in an analysis using Christine Bruce's theory of information literacy and Carol C. Kuhlthaus theory of librarian roles and her theory of information retrieval process.

Idag är det många företag som misslyckas med sina implementeringsprojekt av affärssystem och många forskare anser att det beror på bristande användarinvolvering. Implementeringsprojekt av affärssystem blir allt vanligare i små företag, men effekten blir dock stor om ett mindre företag misslyckas med sitt projekt. Små företags misslyckanden är oftast relaterade till finansiella och humanitära kritiska framgångsfaktorer. Ett affärssystem kan ge ett företag en rad olika fördelar och möjligheter. Men för att ett företag ska uppnå dem krävs ett lyckat implementeringsprojekt samt att användarna omgående efter driftstart kan använda affärssystemet. Därför måste företagsledare under projektet se till en rad olika kritiska framgångsfaktorer som är relaterade till användarinvolvering.

Det finns i dagsläget få tids- och kostnadseffektiva metoder och tekniker för att mäta och utvärdera användarupplevelse över tid. Detta trots att tidsaspekten av användarupplevelsen under de senaste åren har uppmärksammats som en viktig komponent av användarupplevelsen inom människa-dator-interaktionsforskning. UX Curve och iScale är två metoder framtagna för att mäta förändringar i användarupplevelse över tid med hjälp av retrospektion och skapande av grafer över utvecklingen av användarupplevelsens olika dimensioner.Mot bakgrund av dessa metoder togs ett webbaserat utvärderingsverktyg fram med målet att undersöka verktygets förmåga att mäta förändringar i användarupplevelse under en utvärderingsperiod. Verktyget testades på 9 deltagare i en utvärdering av en mailklient under två veckors tid.Resultatet indikerar att utvärderingsverktygets dimensioner samlar upplevelser av relevans för de dimensioner som undersökts men visar också på att ytterligare testning och validering av metod och verktyg behövs för att fastställa att mätningarna är reliabla och att det som mäts är vad som avses mätas..

The aim of this thesis was twofold, on the one hand to compile a set of usability and accessibility guidelines in order to establish the characteristics of a user friendly website, and on the other to test these guidelines on eight library webcourses with user education to see how well they adhered to the guidelines. The methods used were literature survey and source studies. The guidelines found in the literature survey were divided into four different categories: document properties, structure and navigability, visual characteristics and accessibility. In order to establish the adequacy of the guidelines, I examined reference sources, mostly on the web. To a certain extent this examination has been based on HCI Human-Computer interaction theories.

This user study was carried out at the library at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in the spring of 1999. Chalmers wanted to investigate how much their employees use electronic journals. To facilitate decision-making and be cost effective, the library needed to know about their customers' opinions. The main purpose was to investigate the usage of electronic journals, how the library's choice of these journals affects the frequency of use and what the attitudes towards them are. A questionnaire was sent out to 2 400 employees; 477 replies were received.

As the information society becomes increasingly flooded with digital images, the need for efficient image retrieval systems increases as well. To handle the vast amounts of data involved, the indexing process needs to be run automatically, using content-based descriptors extracted directly from the digital image, such as colour composition, shape and texture features. These content-based image retrieval systems are often slow and cumbersome, and can appear confusing to an ordinary user who does not understand the underlying mechanisms. One step towards more efficient and user-friendly retrieval systems might be to adjust the weight placed on various descriptors depending on which image category is being searched for. The results of this thesis show that certain categories of digital images would benefit from having extra weight assigned to colour, texture or shape features when searching for images of that category..

The emphasize of this study is to evaluate security issues for home users having a personal computer connected to the Internet. It focus on the usage of advantages and disadvantages when using a firewall while connected to the Internet. The hypothesis is that it gives a better protection to install and use a firewall compared not to do so, due to security flaws in the operating system. The prediction was tested on a home user's personal computer. The testwork was divided into two major tests, each of them performed with, respectively without, a firewall. These major tests were divided into five smaller semi­ tests. The first semi­test without a firewall suffered from a virus or worm attack resulting in loss of data and log files.

This study examines use and users of information and records originating in the context of a contemporary police organisation. This area of research has only been of focus for a relatively few researchers. This in contrast to use and users of historical archives which has been in centre for more studies. The study is conducted with a quantitative method structuring data from 120 selected registered matters containing user queries. The research questions addressed are:- what user categories use the records of the authority- which are the ways of contacting the authority preferred by the users- which are the identifiers provided by the users and how well are they matched by the search artefacts available to the staff of the authority- what information and records are sought-after by the users.For comparing the identifiers provided to the search artefacts has been selected the two most frequently used registry systems within the authority.

The emphasize of this study is to evaluate security issues for home users having a personal computer connected to the Internet. It focus on the usage of advantages and disadvantages when using a firewall while connected to the Internet. The hypothesis is that it gives a better protection to install and use a firewall compared not to do so, due to security flaws in the operating system. The prediction was tested on a home user's personal computer. The testwork was divided into two major tests, each of them performed with, respectively without, a firewall.

There is an increasing demand for information literacy, which is mirrored in curriculum throughout the whole educational system. This, in turn, has brought forward a growing need for librarians who can teach. But do librarians possess pedagogical competence, and if they do, how is this ability used in everyday library practice? The aim of this study is to investigate librarians' conceptions of the pedagogical role, as it is expressed in their didactic interaction with the users. The research questions focus on librarians' experiences of teaching information seeking and use and their activities in this respect.

Computational techniques have transformed the journalistic approach. Journalists now have the opportunity to integrate user-statistics from the news website with their work. Singer (2011) argues that journalists seem particularly afraid of items, which they perceive as trivial or otherwise unsavory, will prove popular - potentially creating management pressures to produce more of those stories. She describes this practice as ??traffic whoring??.

The purpose of this study is to examine how participants perceive virtual agents shown on a computer display. In particular, it is explored to what extent participants transfer gender and attraction stereotypes that are commonly applied in the physical world to virtual agents. Previous related studies have often explored only text or voice interfaces, without any visually appearing agents, and here indeed found evidence for a transfer of gender stereotypes. Our hypothesis was that the addition of a visual agent interface would reinforce this effect. The results support our hypothesis that participants transfer human gender and attraction stereotypes onto virtual agents, as well as that these processes are affected by the visual representations of the agents..

The aim of this thesis is to examine the Swedish public libraries acquisition processes when it comes to fiction for adults. The thesis focus on how the librarians responsible for acquiring view literary quality when they manage their collections and how their views coincide with that of the user?s explicit wishes. Furthermore this thesis looks at the librarians reading habits and how they coincide with that of their perceived users.The study uses literature pedagogic perspective theory to see how the librarians look at fiction and what they value in it. In order to get answers six librarians have been interviewed in this study that uses a qualitative approach to getting answers.