In this Bachelor thesis I explore sound and room as elements in design of user interfaces, both theoretical and practical in a specific application domain, to identify some of the advantages and disadvantage associated with these elements. As application domain I studied email clients and their usage at home amongst students at Blekinge Institute of Technology. In the study I found an activity, which seems to be highly distributed in the physical room where the user is located. The activity was notification of email and could take place in an arbitrary location of the home. I then augmented this activity with ideas from my theoretical assumption about room and sound.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the usage of and attitudes towards electronic books among graduate and PhD students at Karlstad University. The main questions are: How do graduate and PhD students use electronic books? To what extent are electronic books used compared to printed books? To find the answers, a user study was carried out at Karlstad University library. The results show that a majority of the respondents are aware of the possibility to use electronic books but prefer to use printed ones if they have to choose. Many respondents also complained about difficulties reading a text on the computer screen.

Marketing communications have earlier been conducted via traditional channels. Today companies have discovered the possibility of doing much of their marketing communication in cooperation with the web at relatively low cost. This development has led to the ability for small businesses to compete with large companies independent of geographic location. The purpose with this thesis was to examine how small businesses use their website in marketing communications with their customers in the consumer market. In order to reach this purpose we have conducted interviews with five small businesses in different business trade with varying degrees of website usage, located in Piteå and Luleå.

Marketing communications have earlier been conducted via traditional channels. Today companies have discovered the possibility of doing much of their marketing communication in cooperation with the web at relatively low cost. This development has led to the ability for small businesses to compete with large companies independent of geographic location. The purpose with this thesis was to examine how small businesses use their website in marketing communications with their customers in the consumer market. In order to reach this purpose we have conducted interviews with five small businesses in different business trade with varying degrees of website usage, located in Piteå and Luleå.

The essay, which is solely theoretical to its form, presents a critical view upon the unproblematized usage of the concept of ethnicity in the Swedish mass media discourse. Theories of critical discourse analysis and post colonial nature is applied to and used to analyze what ethnicity really means. The essay also provides an insight in the functions and power of mass media in Sweden today to understand why ethnicity is so widely used, and what consequences it may bring upon the systematically excluded "other" and the society as a whole..

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.

AbstractIn this text the attitudes towards and using of blogs in teaching Swedish toteenagers will be explored. The results are based on a survey made amongst 17teachers and 58 students from all over Sweden. The end results show that theusage of blog still hasn?t found a permanent way into the classrooms, but has anappeal to and is being used by predominantly younger teachers both, male andfemale, with a positive response from students regardless of gender. Theconclusion is that using web tools like the blog is an easy first step for schools toconnect to the digital society of the 21stcentury and take advantage of the perksavailable in the digital classroom.Svensk titel:Blogg + Svenska =Sant? ? Bloggande i undervisningen i svenska.Engelsk titel:Blog + Swedish =True? ? Blogging in teaching Swedish.Ämnesord: Blog, Web 2.0, digitalt klassrum, svenska, undervisning,kompetensutveckling.

Operators and Internet service providers invest in broadband to be able to deliver new services that require higher data transmission rate. A way to make this possible is to use ADSL, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, as the access technology. To be able to handle this technology, the service providers should do a pre-qualification. Methods and tools are needed to analyze the local copper lines and decide if these qualify for ADSL with respect to service availability and possible bandwidth through the lines. This report brings up some methods for pre-qualification of ADSL, the important quality parameters and how to gather them from the available services today.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how e-commerce companies work with their relationships to customers. We have conducted a case study of two companies, Koll and Webbshoppen, both active in the e-commerce industry. Our empirical study has shown that it is important for e-commerce companies to create long-term relationships to their customers, but it can be difficult to create these relationships since the companies have little contact to the users of Internet. To build relationships, e-commerce companies market themselves through different types of media to create awareness. It is also essential to be situated high in search engines.

Insufficient intake of vegetables is a reason for micronutrient deficiencies and malnutrition in developing countries. With urbanization, globalization and a growing world population it is of major importance to secure sufficient food supply for the world?s population. Part of the solution to increased food security among the world?s poor could be the introduction of vegetable home gardens, plots for small scale vegetable production which can provide households with sufficient vegetables as well as serve as an extra income source. The study Improving peri-urban home gardens aims at examining the existence of vegetable home gardens in the peri-urban areas of Hyderabad, India.

Today bonuscards are used widely to encourage customers to return for more purchases. Many of those bonuscards are today made of paper which is negative for the environment and since they are not very valuable they are also easy to misplace. The mobile version of these cards most often needs an active download and/or other processes before use and are therefore not so easy to use spontaneous. This project aims to make it easier to handle these bonuscards with today?s smartphones and solve the given problems.

The objective of this entire essay, founded on nineteen interviews of poetry readers at thepublic library in Borås, is to ascertain why people do read poetry. But in addition to examinewhat sort of people who enjoy poetry, as well as what they appear to get out of their exercise.I have also put together the position of the poetry reader as a customer of the library.The summary of contents is primarily based on direct quotations of the interviews, and doesnot reflect any generally applicable facts about poetry readers. I am only trying to focus on thethoughts and sentiments on poetry experienced by a few randomly selected individuals. DanAndersson, Karin Boye, Nils Ferlin and Gustaf Fröding were stated as favourites by many.The only thing in common subsequently found by those interviewed was a great affection forliterature and a diligent usage of the library..

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between mental illness and socioeconomic factors such as education, age and gender among drug users. Descriptive and ANOVA analysis were performed to 68 structured interviews (Addiction Severity Index basic). Analysis addressed associations between drug usage and level of education, age and gender. Results showed gender differences in self-rated mental health with women drug users rating their mental health lower than men. In addition, there was no association between age, educational level and self-rated mental health.

Today there are commercially available databases with active features, i.e. active mechanisms are available for development of information systems. But the usage of active mechanisms is low in practice. This is due to the insufficient methodological support in analysis and design for developing ECA rule based software. It has been proposed that one of the most suitable ways to tackle this problem is not to develop new methods but to extend existing methodologies.In this thesis an extension of the Object Modeling Technique (OMT) is developed, called OMT-A, which is able to model active rules.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the view of Finnish dialects and identity of first, second and third generation of Sweden Finns students in 7th, 8th and 9th graders, in two Sweden Finn schools. The questions at issue for the essay were: How do Swedes of Finnish extraction think of the Finnish dialects? Is there a correlation between identifying as Finnish and knowledge and usage of the Finnish dialects, as opposed to Finns living in Finland? To which extent do the Finnish students have knowledge regarding the Finnish dialects? To answer the questions a quantitative method was used and a questionnaire was answered by over 100 students. The results of the study showed that the Finnish dialects did not exert any influence on the students? life nor their sense of identity.