Quality Assurance in Service Procurement --- Total Quality and Total Quality Management refer to popular management philosophies in organizations these days. The purchasing department has an important part in the strive for organizational quality as several studies show corporate spend is significant and increasing. In this master thesis I study the actions companies take to ensure quality in service procurement. I argue that managing quality when sourcing services is particularly tricky, because of the special characteristics that belong to services. The purpose of the study is to examine whether different actions are taken to ensure the quality of different kinds of services.

Service quality occurs in service encounters where both customers and employees come together in an interaction. It is therefore important that the staff give their best because the interaction usually takes place in real time, which is referred to as the moment of truth.The aim of this study was to find out how luxury hotels are working to ensure good service quality, and how the staff are motivated to deliver this service. We wanted to examine this from a management perspective, and an employee perspective. Information was gathered through various interviews, where the staff at the Hotel Kämp in Helsinki and at the Sheraton Hotel Stockholm participated.Survey results show that employee motivation, training and empowerment have a significant impact to provide service in high quality. The results also show that the surveyed hotel, to certain level work in the same way, but it reveals some differences even when both hotels are part of the same concern..

The purpose of this study was to understand what the care recipients considering as care quality in their long-term eldercare. Our intention has been to contribute a bit to the development of the care work. Previous studies show that user surveys are carried out regularly but there is very few studies that are based on care recipients own opinions and experiences. The main questions in the study have been to examine what is considered as good elder care from a user perspective. Even to understand the characteristics of a good meeting with the care staff and also examine how the elder care in Nybro municipality can improve.

Today's technology offers a variety of opportunities to interact with the interactive systems. Human-Computer Interaction in the last decade is the area of research that has contributed the most to this development. But how is this interaction perceived? The user experience is something that is formed by the interaction between human and the computer interactive systems. The objective of this thesis is to investigate how the user experience differs depending on how one interacts with a game.

The role of the quality manager has evolved from being a quality controller to work with a more global business. Within many organizations in Sweden, however, the traditional role of the quality manager's remains and the tasks categorized as quality control still takes up most of the quality manager's time. The survey conducted as part of this master thesis shows that the quality manager in most businesses has multiple roles in addition to the role of quality manager, which can create a role conflict. One consequence of this is that each improvement is not given priority due to time constraints. Although the importance of a clear and committed leadership is the key for succeeding as the quality manager.

Viewer interaction is a common part of live broadcasts on the web and enables production and viewer to communicate with each other. The possibilities in viewer interaction make it easier for productions to create viewer engagement by involving them in the live broadcast through chats and social media. In creating a bond between production and viewer the interaction must be carefully managed to suit both the shows and the viewer?s needs.  A qualitative study has been used to analyze the viewer interaction in two Swedish live broadcasts on the web.

Swedish school has for the last decades been using quality management as a method for improvement. Quality management is an enormous work and the whole school staff needs to be involved. The management consists of several parts like planning, surveys and interviews, analysis of the replies and setting up new goals. Parents, children and teachers are nowadays accustomed with quality surveys. The last few years these quality surveys have been computerized, but they still look almost the same, using little interaction with the respondent.I have had the opportunity to work with the company KMF Ventures, which has a vision that entails a more interactive web survey.

Mobile technology is developing quickly and becomming a part of daily life and communication. Bluetooth Low Energy is presented as a new way of mobile interaction. However there are not enough studies in this field on the interaction between mobile devices and the physical world. In order to understand user needs, and to encourage users to interact, we simulated an interaction process through designing and testing a prototype in a specific indoor environment. Prototype effectiveness and main characteristics for future mobile application was evaluated through a qualitative user study with 20 participants who interacted with our prototype..

This field study examined how elderly and cognitively disabled people used and experienced a social companion robot. The following pages explores the questions: Which are the physical, social and affective qualities during the interaction? The aim was to through observations see how qualities of interaction could activate different forms of behavior. The results show that motion, sound and the eyes together created communicative and emotional changes for users who felt joy and were willing to share the activity with others. The robot stimulated to some extent users to create their own imaginative experiences but often failed to involve user or group for a long time and was also considered too large and heavy to handle..

In modern health care, the quality registry is anexcellent tool to monitor everyday work. Collected data forms a foundation, presented as online reports, from which local work efforts to refine care quality can be performed. All reports are coded manually by specially trained developers. This is a tedious process and hence becomes a bottleneck in the strive for improvement.This thesis evaluates whether an extended way of dealing with reports can fit into the existing work situation, with main focus on the idea of creating custom reports directly within a quality registry. It provides a set of conclusions regarding today's usage of reports as well as the users' general and specific needs within the area.

In this bachelor thesis we have studied how interaction designers describe their profession. The research material is based on nine interviews with interaction designers. Questions cover areas such as interaction design tasks, what abilities they consider important, how they describe their relationship to the users, and cooperation with colleagues. We have analyzed the results using key terms such as habitus, field, and capital, as described by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The interviewees express humanistic views, and ask for more cooperation between interaction designers, as well as other people within the field of IT production.

The purpose of this study is to find out how teachers in preschool interact with children.By unstructured observations of teachers in preschool I intend to find out how they interact with children. Is it possible to see that the operation is built on guided interaction speciality?Positive interaction between adults and children is of importance to a good childhood and a child?s learning. I have asked myself how teachers interact with children in preschool. There are different ways of interaction.

Fastighetsregistret (The Cadastre) is a large and important information sourcesupplied by Lantmäteriet (the Swedish mapping, cadastral and land registrationauthority). Fastighetsregistret provides geographical information about the 3.2 millionestates in use in Sweden. Fastighetsregistret has a large number of users who trustthat the provided data is reliable, but experience shows that the data can have varyingquality. As a user it is not always possible to access more detailed information inorder to assess to what extent the data in Fastighetsregistret is reliable.The purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate the possibilities of a system with agraphical user interface that present, classify and visualize the quality of the data inFastighetsregistret. The defined user group for this suggestion is internal users atLantmäteriet who have a good understanding of Fastighetsregistret.

This paper explores the field of virtual reality and how immersion and presences can be increased when it comes to navigation and interaction with Virtual Environments. The availability of VR technology has sparked a trend, especially in game development. Old ways of designing for interactive environments have to be revised. This is done by exploring the massive body of work done on VR, exploring its underlying concepts, using tested design techniques and ways of evaluating interaction for VR. A design suggestion in the form of utilizing a tablet device as the main input device is derived.

AbstractThe aim with this study was to enhance the understanding of the interaction between schools and social services. The study would also contribute to better understanding of what is considered work and burst in the interaction between the two, and examine the underlying factors for this. The study's approach includes semi-structured interviews with three employees of a school and two employees in the social services of the municipality. Both international and national research has been obtained for the study and theories as well, associated with the outcome. Conclusions of this study point to the existence of different opinions between the organizations in terms of the quality of their collaboration.