The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate how academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students. International students are a growing usergroup in Swedish academic libraries. The study?s main research question is:- How do academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students?The study was performed with a phenomenographic methodological approach where seven qualitative interviews with academic librarians were conducted.

The aim of this study was to examine the aspect of power in the relationship between the personal assistant and the disabled person he or she works with (the user). The study was based on interviews with five personal assistants who worked for private companies that provided personal assistance. Seven themes were identified and discussed. These were: the users amount of control over the assistance given, the workplace environment, the working conditions, the organization of personal assistance by private companies, the assistants recourses and usage of power and the users participation in chores. To analyze these themes I used Foucault's theory of power and the perspective of Human Resource.

This Masters thesis investigates user education at academic libraries. The increased demand on students to keep themselves updated in the information society of today urges libraries to develop their user education, concerning both content and teaching strategies. The aim of this study is to examine user education at academic libraries, and the approach of librarians in their teaching. The research questions address how librarians implement the user education and what they focus on. We also want to explore what differences and similarities there are between the user educations, and if anything could be further developed within them.

This study focuses on the influence a user may have over his or her welfare service, personal assistance. A county, an assistance firm and a user cooperative are compared with the thesis that the organisation that surrounds the users shapes the possibilities the user have to influence his or her personal assistance. There are questions that try to answer if there are outspoken social goals within each organisation. Questions regarding influence of the user when she or he is choosing the assistance provider and the users possibility to influence and his or her power to decide who and when anyone works as an assistant are asked..

In today?s society the average person is flooded by information from everywhere. This is in particular the case when using the Internet; consider for a moment the fact that a decent search engine at this moment scans 8 058 million homepages. For a user that repeatedly comes back to the same site, the case is often that they know what they are looking for. The problem is to isolate the important information from all the other information embedding it.We would like to state that we have found one possible solution to this problem, where the user himself can define what information he is looking for at a specific server, then scan the server when visiting it with his browser.

This thesis contains a usability evaluation of ?Barnplay?, a Swedish video-on-demand service targeted at children. The objective of the study was to identify usability issues in the video service and to develop measures on improving the user interface, with special focus on adaptation to the broad target group of 3-11 year olds.The study was conducted by first mapping established practices in designs of VOD-services targeted at children, followed by interviews and usability tests with children between 2-11 concerning their use of ?Barnplay?. Based on the initial data collection, a prototype was developed and then evaluated by usability testing and A/B-testing.The main conclusion of the study is the need of better individual adjustment of the video content selection to better appeal to different age segments within the target group.

AbstractThis study examines the technologies appropriate in developing back-and solutions for search-driven user interfaces of e-commerce sites. The study is based on existing research in search-driven user interfaces of e-commerce sites from a design point of view, but instead the focus of this study lies within a back-end perspective. This choice of focus is a result of the gap that was encountered within research and other literature when it comes to general advice in how e-commerce sites best should build back-end solutions to support search driven user interfaces. The technologies that have been examined and compared are traditional relational databse management systems (RDMS) and the newer so called No-SQL database management systems, and also traditional search engines and the newer variant s of search engines. The study concludes that in some cases it is appropriate to combine traditional and newer technologies when it comes to databases, while the comparison of search engines indicates that there are some newer search en gines that have the ability to meet more of the needs that can be identified on the back-end solutions.Primary data consists of interviews made ?face to face? with experts on the subject and questionnaires addressed to selected e-commerce companies via e-mail.

During the year 2014, Artex AB has worked to launch a new product whose function is to locally purify the air. The product is a headboard and its purpose is to give the user clean air while sleeping. The air purifier has different speeds and it`s up to the user to choose which effect that will be on. To get the best experience of the product as possible, the air purifier shall be controlled by a mobile application. In that way the user can increase and decrease the fan speed, even when the user not is home.

This paper deals with how people use public libraries. An attempt is made to distinguishbetween different user groups on the basis of how they use the library. The roles of thelibrary in relation to its users are also discussed.The paper is based on a user study with the cooperation of 195 users. The user studywas carried out at the Public Library of Alingsås 1994. As material for comparisonsimilar studies from Sweden, but even from Denmark, have been used.

The purpose of this Master's thesis is to examine whether a web-based library catalogue is to be considered user-friendly. We have examined this from a user-perspective by interviewing users of a web-based catalogue at a public library. In order to get a picture of the user-friendliness of a catalogue, the thesis is centred upon the following questions: How is a web-based catalogue used? What problems do the users experience? How is the catalogue perceived by its users? Since the producers of these catalogues now are taking into account the research upon human-computer interaction, we are also interested in finding out whether a web-based catalogue is more user-friendly than a more traditional OPAC. We do this by comparing the results of our examination with earlier studies of OPAC use.

This Master?s thesis investigates user education at high school libraries. The aim of this study is to examine user education and the educational approach that librarian?s experience in their teaching. The method used for the study is qualitative interviews with seven high school librarians.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how some librarians working at a public library experience problems that can occur at the reference interview, slightly focusing on communication difficulties. Therefore I interviewed three librarians working at the reference desk on a daily basis. I chose to limit the study to public libraries and to the south of Sweden. My main question is: what difficulties can a librarian encounter during a reference interview and what can he/she do to treat these? In support of my main question I have three subordinated questions:What reasons can there be to a librarian not understanding a user?s information need?What methods are useful for a librarian to enhance the condition of the reference interview? What attitudes and qualities can be of use for the librarian at a difficult reference interview?For the collection of empirical data I chose to use semi-structured interviews.

In this essay we discuss the broad area of website usability from a tourism perspective. Our goal was to investigate the usability in smaller and bigger tourism websites. We have declared what website usability means and the importance of involving the users when designing a user interface. In a pilot study, we conducted three interviews with people who work with usability and then used the information we got to form questions to use in a focus group interview. In this focus group, we asked three people to assess two Swedish tourism websites, one bigger and one smaller, to find out if they were considered usable and if there was any difference in usability depending on the size of the site.

Denna kandidatuppsats undersöker hur user experience kan främjas i ett adaptivt talbaserat system i en fordonskontext. Att undersöka och involvera user experiencei adaptiva talbaserade system är i synnerhet viktigt i denna kontext då den primära sysslan, att köra, bör störas så lite som möjligt. Ett adaptivt system ger möjlighet att effektivisera interaktion och ett talbaserat system låter föraren fokusera på trafiken.Genom att undersöka existerande teori och utföra empiriska undersökningar i form av användartester genom Wizard of Oz-tekniken och intervjuer har vi skapat designoch dialogexempel. Dessa förslag kan främja user experience och på så vis bidra till att den interaktion som sker är effektiv och behaglig. .

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how librarians working in academic libraries are experiencing the reference situation from a pedagogical point of view, by applying a theoretical framework consisting of learning strategies and their different characteristics, to qualitative interviews. Other goals are to elucidate the fact that learning takes place every day at libraries during the reference situation and that this work must be seen as ?one of the most important activities that takes place at the library?, using the words from one of the interviewed librarians, but also to make place for more discussions regarding pedagogic and library work. This is done by posing questions about knowledge, learning, information literacy, communication, the reference encounter, the roles of the librarian, policy and also architectural aspects of the reference situation. The interviews were taped, transcribed and categorized according to the earlier mentioned areas of interest.