The purpose of this paper is to examine how seams in an interactive system should be managed. Seamsin this study refer to the boundaries that arise when users move between for example differentsoftware, products or positioning systems. These seams are a cornerstone of the relatively unexploredarea called seamful design, which is based on that users can avail highlighted seams through activeparticipation in the use of a system. To analyze this area, seamful design is applied to the developmentof an interface of a smoothie vending machine. This smoothie machine thus provides the analyzedinteractive system, which the research questions are applied to as well as answered by.

The aim of this thesis is to define digital library, and to investigate a relation between the construction of a digital library and user needs. The main questions to be answered are: 1 What criteria was used when constructing a digital library, particularly concerning issues like purpose, function, design, supply, services, resources and future development of the digital library? 2 How do the digital library system designers and system builders criteria correspond with those of postgraduate researchers? And what factors affect the use? A digital library is an enterprise that gives access to information stored digitally and directly available on the net. The crucial is that the enterprise has a control over collection of information and responsibility to make it available to a defined group of users. In order to investigate the relation between the construction of the digital library and user needs, I have interviewed five key people involved with the work with the digital library and twenty postgraduate researchers from the Gothenburg University.

The smartphone is part of our daily life. Smartphone users type on a screen area that is no larger than the palm of a hand. To help with this endeavor the software known as AutoCorrect was created. However little is known about how AutoCorrect actually change the language and if AutoCorrect users at all perceive the impact it has. This study aims to find out if our test subjects are aware of AutoCorrect?s presence and how much it influences them.

The information society creates new demands on the knowledge making individual; besides being literate one has to be information literate. And in the educational society there is an ongoing change from teaching to learning, the focal point being the active student and life long learning. The aim of this dissertation is to within a context of learning and teaching elucidate the relation between user education and subject education by examining what significance the academic libraries user education has for the development of information literacy within students. Some epistemological theories connected with learning is presented as well as aspects of the information search process and of information literacy. Universities and their libraries view of information literacy and the goal of their user education is being focused on in an empirical study.

Today, one of the foremost tools used by the library staff is the library catalogue search tools. It has come to our understanding that some library staff are dissatisfied with how the search tools works. The aim of this study is to illuminate the library staff's negative experiences of the search tools, and to present a basis for future discussion and development. To our help we have used a quantitative survey which were sent to library staff that used one of the two largest integrated library systems in Sweden, BOOK-IT and Mikromarc. The questions regarded the library staff's perception of a number of features in the search tools.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE in regards of recovery efficiency and the overlap of relevant documents when it comes to information searching for academic purposes. Furthermore, it raises the question whether freely available search engines and licensed search engines are interchangeable with each other. The empirical data in this study were collected through searches conducted in the three search engines Web of Science, Google Scholar and MEDLINE. Twenty search queries were used and the first twenty retrieved documents for each query were examined for relevance using previously designed criteria. The documents were scored by a binary relevancy scale and thereafter a precision value for each search engine was calculated.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to evaluate three general query-based web search engines. The search engines chosen are Google, Yahoo! and Live Search. The topics, which where transformed into twenty queries, are based on real users? information needs, taken from an ask-a-question service.

This thesis is a case study of the search function on the University of Uppsala?s web site. The search function in this study was chosen since it exists on a large and complex web site and there were apparent lacks in the old version of the search function. The thesis highlights some of the problems that can appear in the development of a search function on a local site. One interesting find is that one of the most difficult issues is organizational and not technical.

Our aim in this work has been to redesign ModernFamilies and make a user-friendly interface for people with aphasia. The focus has been to identify general issues they might face while using different technology and applications, in order to find better alternative design for ModernFamilies, with a focus on usability. To approach this issue, we used a qualitative method. Our study includes several interviews and observations preformed in conjunction with the AGNES project (AGeing in a NEtworked Society) and speech therapists. Aphasia requires simple design that in the same time gives them support to understand and use technology and different applications.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the usability of the Umeå University library catalogue Album. The aim is to evaluate the catalogue in order to establish if there are any problems that could be solved by modifying the catalogue. The following questions are answered: How should a good catalogue be designed? Which problems are common when using a library catalogue? Is Album user friendly? Are there any problems that occur when using Album and how can the catalogue be changed to avoid the problems? To answer these questions I have performed a usability test in which five persons, all students, got to carry out twenty tasks in the catalogue and talk about what they were doing and thinking while doing the test. This method is a usability method called Think Aloud.

This is the end report of my final exam at Medieteknik. It covers the planning, work process and review of a Flash based web application that I set out to do. The goal was to create a user friendly, interactive e-shop with embedded functionality for playing music, displaying rich media content and researching possible payment solutions, to enable buying music files online. The project involved creating the user interface, the programmatic functionality of a Flash client (an SWF file). Also, setting up an Apache HTTP Server and establishing a working ?bridge? between the Flash client and the web server with Flash Remoting components and AMFPHP.

EPiServer is a content management system where users can publish information on a website by using a web browser. EPiServer has a built-in search engine that is very simple. Many customers using EPiServer web publishing system is in need of more functionality than is offered by EPiServer's built-in search engine. The purpose of this thesis is to develop additional functionality extends that the built-in search engine in EPiServer. The assignment was also to identify what need to be developed in order to give customers a better  opportunity to help their visitors find the right information on their website.Since this thesis was started in 2005, a number of commercial search engine productsentered  the market and it has become more common for companies to invest inthese products instead of using the simple search engine that's built into EPiServer.These products have many of the features that have been developed in this thesis.Another crucial difference between EPiServer?s built in engine and other products isthe method used to index content.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to, through user studies, analyse whether Carol C. Kuhlthaus information search model is applicable in a Swedish school. Furthermore, the guidance that the students may receive from the teacher and/or school librarian is analysed. Answers are sought to the following questions: · How do the students perceive their information seeking? · How do the librarian and/or teacher support the students during their information seeking process? The study is based on a qualitative method of approach, through interviews with four informants: a librarian, a teacher and two pupils.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine which factors influence librarians selection of electronic information sources, and to investigate whether librarians use of search strategies and search tactics changes depending on which information source they use. The electronic information sources are: online databases, Online Public Access Catalogues OPAC, World Wide Web, and CD-ROM databases. The theoretical framework is based on step 3 Select a source and step 4 Formulate a Query in Marchioninis information seeking model. The search strategies are divided into two categories: analytical and browsing strategies. In order to supplement the theoretical framework with empirical facts, 8 librarians were interviewed.

The aim of this thesis is to examine user experience and engagements in interactive cinema.A great deal of the research that is conducted today involves creating interactive films, toexplore and examine film structures. In this study, we build on this research by comparingthree different interactive film structures. To carry out our study, we have categorized threedifferent interactive films after three different models to define their narrative structureand interface. To examine the experiences of those structures we have performed anexperiment where we have collected data from the three different sources; interviews,observations and surveys.It is difficult to draw conclusions about how an interactive film should be constructed asdifferent structures apply to different narratives. Based on our research the conclusion canbe made that the combination between the narrative structure, the narrative content, theaesthetics, the implementation of interactivity and how the film?s interface is constructed ismore important than building a specific structure for an interactive film.