The purpose of this master?s thesis is to study an electronic reference service from a user perspective. By qualitative interviews with eight students the thesis examines their information behaviour, why and when they use the service, the user?s experiences of the service and the communication with the librarian. The users have all used the Swedish electronic reference service Fråga biblioteket ? Forskningsbibliotek.

The aim of this study is to examine how important a factor the environment and the interior is to the creation of a user-friendly children?s library. In this study, environment is taken to mean the furnishing and the equipment in the children?s area at the library. The environment plays an important role in society today and because of that this is a current topic.

In recent decades here has been a huge development in information technology (IT), where we humans are increasingly using IT in our daily lives, ranging from social media to music streaming services; this has also been a reflection of the technologies developed to our cars. Infotainment systems have become an increasingly regular feature in modern cars where the high degree of integration such as navigation, mobile and Internet has become more common and more sought after. Despite this, relatively little research problemized User Experience of a complex infotainment system in a car. This study thus has the intention to consider the relevance of reality based tests by examining how the user experiences a complex infotainment system in a car. We asked ourselves; How do the user experience a complex infotainment system in a car? We conducted our qualitative study, an interview with researchers in the field of vehicle and road safety and designed a number of system-related activities in a test session where we observed three users.

This essay is a survey of thirteen user studies performed in the field of image retrieval. The purpose is to try to distinguish principles that should be kept in mind when wanting to make image databases available for a wide and varied group of users. The essay tries to answer two questions, namely: Are there any results in accordance among the different studies? What in the user studies should be considered when it comes to how content description, interface and functions for searching can be designed when creating systems for image retrieval? Each study is first reviewed on its own, and then a comparative analysis of all the studies is carried out. Derived from the result of this analysis, the conclusion is presented in the form of a row of suggestions to which aspects are to be suitably included in the design of image databases.

Purpose?This study has examined the information behaviour and perception of information in a group ofinformation users who have a critical approach to the media and the information supply. Some of them call themselvesor are being called conspiracy theorists. The purpose was to examine how their information behaviour is influenced by the belief that the information is biased or inaccurate and what the information behaviour looks like when the user searches for discrepancies rather than a response to a question.Method?The study is based on transcribed interviews and email responses to interview questions.

This report details the development of an application for personal safety for the Android operating system. Android is a relatively new platform, primarily used on mobile phones.The purpose of the developed application is to give the user the possibility to easily and quickly alert a number of contacts by phone in case of emergencies, and to show the user?s location on a map. This is not only used during emergencies, but for other purposes as well ? for example to monitor a jogging round.The project was carried out in co-operation with the company D-Safety, the developer of the "SoftAlarm" ? the product on which the developed application is based..

A common form of communication within Facebook is the communication between users via status updates. If you write a status update all your friends have the opportunity to read and to respond to the update. The overall issue of this survey is: how are Facebook users to commu- nicate with status updates?  The survey aims to gain insight and greater understanding of communication patterns and user awareness of social contexts when they write status  updates. The study will act as an attempt to understand a small part of a complex interaction taking place in a social situation.

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.

In today's society it is important to easily and smoothly get accurate information. Withthe help of the application VasaSvahn it is possible to get expert help for Crosscountry ski waxing. The application VasaSvahn has been ported from an existingversion for iOS to a new version for Android. The application uses a third-party Webservices to obtain necessary information and support distribution of information. Theapplication is also connected to a database.

The theoretical focus in this master is information retrieval (IR), and especially the part of IR that includes interactivity. This research is by some researchers called IIR. Our principal aim was to examine if search engines on the WWW are taking advantage of research results from IIR research. A way to do this is to look at the application of special features, in this case query expansion (QE) and relevance feedback (RF). Both these methods aim for a better matching of documents and the searchers information need.

This master thesis deals with events, dynamics and problems of mediated information seeking within the context of a new information service called "Book a librarian". The study, based on a survey and interviews both in academic and public libraries and participant observations in academic libraries, has its theoretical base in the cognitive theory of information retrieval interaction. The cognitive view is used to throw light upon the need of an ongoing dialogue during the session in order to detect the information needs of the user and to conduct a successful retrieval of information. The communicative interaction is seen as threepart interaction between the intermediary, the user and the information system, where the current cognitive states of all three participants are involved. The study shows that the cognitive obstacles for a successful mediation and information retrieval are mostly connected to participants current knowledge of the subject and of the retrieval techniques.

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..

In this paper we analyze a social network specifically designed for the elderly, people with Dementia and people with generally low computer experience. This is a relatively unexplored use for such software, and our goal is to find out whether the technique to be used is simple enough to use for the intended user group, and generally how the whole situation is experienced by the users. To achieve this we conducted an expert evaluation and interviewed a number of users at two separate occasions during their first weeks with Modernfamilies. We came to the conclusion that this software generally is simple enough to use for the intended target group. Some of the users we came in contact with experienced the software as a positive addition to their daily lives, while some could not see any reason for a further use.

This Master's thesis aims to investigate the reference interview using the discourse analytical method discourse psychology. The reference interview has been studied thoroughly, and its importance has been proven repeatedly within the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). However, it has never been studied from a discourse analytical point of view before.The material for our study was gathered at Malmö public library, and consists of 10 tape-recorded and then transcribed reference interviews. Our study shows that there are several discourses within the reference situation. The dominating discourse, the reference interview discourse, is found within all the reference interviews.

The purpose of this study was to follow a research-oriented design process and to develop a design draft for a digital service that supports users to make more environmentally conscious choises in their everyday life. By following an interaction design process from start to final delivery, the study aims at creating a broad understanding of the process. Therefore, many userrelated activities were implemented in the study: eg. personas, scenarios, sketching and user testing. The project resulted in digital wireframes for an iPhone application using embedded GPS to identify and locate environmentally friendly businesses.