Graphic design is an integrated part of the public spaces we move through in our daily lives. This thesis explores the emotional aspects of graphic design, with a focus on environmental graphics for the public space. The goal is to find ways in which the emotional aspects of a design solution can be varied without compromising the practical aspects, i.e. affect the conveyance of information. This goal is pursued through an analysis of historical and contemporary literature as well as by design practise.

The project has been performed in a close collaboration with Hörsam who works in the field of hearing technology. In a first meeting with the company, the Project group was showed a few existing storage boxes for hearing aids. The company thought they were unnecessarily large with plenty of unused space and wanted a new, smarter solution to be developed.The project began with user studies in which audiologists, maintenance technicians, future users and others were interviewed. The purpose was to obtain their views on today's storage boxes and to find out how well the users maintained their hearing aids. It proved to be a large lack of knowledge regarding the management of hearing aids within the users.

Hösterminen 2006.

Title The User Created Fire ? Risks and Opportunities with Crisis Communication in Social Network SitesAuthor Charbel SaderCourse Master Thesis in Media? and Communication Studies, Department of Journalism and Communication, University of GothenburgSemester Spring semester of 2013Tutor Nicklas HåkanssonNumberof pages 75Purpose To find a deeper understanding of the digital media?s role in Swedish society in relation to crisis communication.Method Qualitative approach using focus group interviewsMaterial Semi structured focus group interviews with a total of 18 participants in five groups. The focus group sessions were made during February, March and April 2012.Main results The main findings in this study are that users expect the communication flow in social network sites (SNS) during a crisis is to be a shortcut to information without a detour through organizations or traditional media. Although we find personal gratification, like interpersonal communication, quick information and sharing feelings and experience with others by using SNS during a crisis, users also tend to be hesitant about the credibility of the shared information. Alongside the user created content, we look to professional media experts and organizations as a guarantee for the veracity of the shared information.

We live in a high tech era of electronic media, which is changing our lives (Giddens, 1999). Apps are examples of technologies that affect our lives. An interesting question in this context is what apps will have for significance; on one hand for the development of technology, and on other hand for humans? relation to technology. Since the development and change process are central issues in the science of education I will explore the development of applications.

The aim of this thesis was to look closer into the shelf arrangement and user behavior in a fiction collection with the municipal library in Lund as an example. The purpose was to investigate to what extent the shelf arrangement in this library is adapted to the behavior of users when it comes to searching for and choosing fiction. The study is mainly focused on the division between Hc- and Hce-classified books (Swedish fiction and fiction translated into Swedish), the special shelving of the publications of the last five years, and the genre categorization. The user behavior is primarily examined from the perspective of three search strategies; looking for a specific author or title, browsing within a genre or browsing without having a specific genre in mind. The study also deals with within which genres of fiction the users are searching and if they are looking for a book that is translated or not, new or older.

This paper describes how files and information can be shared in organisations and workplaces. We studied and compared the traditional file sharing in Microsoft Active Directory and the Social file sharing that comes with Microsoft SharePoint Sites. We used qualitative studies based on interviews with system administrators, management and by our own observations to acquire the necessary data. Using independent research, we were able to analyze the data and show the general difference between the traditional and the social file sharing systems. Social file sharing enables the user to easily store and share files in a flexible online environment.

A new phenomenon on the Internet is the online audience response. Mentimeter is a web-based tool where you can create online polls. The users can then cast a vote and the result is shown in real time. We want to test the information visualization in Mentimeter and we base our hypothesis, that a better graph design is possible, on the work of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few. Edward Tufte is an emeritus at Yale University, where he held courses in statistical evidence and information design and has created theories about how visual information should be designed.

According to the theory of elitist democracy civic political participation should be reduced to participation in the democratic elections. This essay examines whether a high rate of institutionalized political participation beyond the elections leads to: (a) that those who are included gets a more favourable treatment at the expense of the common interest, in other words that their self interest threatens the political equality, (b) reduced freedom of action for the politicians and the headmasters, (c) the emergence of vague conditions of responsibility. These hypotheses are examined in an empirical study of user-boards at four schools on three locations in southern Sweden. In these user-boards the parents are in majority and have the right of decision, which has been delegated to them from the local government and the headmaster. The main conclusion is that, based on this empirical investigation, there is no support in any of the hypotheses.

The purpose of this essay was first and foremost to find out the problems that exist around user education in a university library and the opportunities that exist for university librarians to improve their work with students. My method of use was qualitative and more precise qualitative interviews. By interviewing five teaching librarians with five different subject specializations, I wanted to get an an-swer to what they teach when they meet the students and how they view their teaching. Responses resulted then in an analysis using Christine Bruce's theory of information literacy and Carol C. Kuhlthaus theory of librarian roles and her theory of information retrieval process.

The main reason for doing this kind ofproject was to find out if it was possible to make a relatively advanced application with user friendly tools. We tested the software MIT App Inventor, and the ability to create a useful application for people who wants to get an overview of their energy intake.During the process we found out that it was possible, but minor setbacks occurred. The main idea of our vision; to make a calculator and a registry with different kinds of food and their amount of calories, was completed quite easily. Later on, design alternatives and more advanced functions were not possible for us to make.This might have been because of the short amount of time the project was given, but also, and more likely, because the software did not contain that kind of advanced functions. Even if there were factors that held creativity back, the basic idea was possible to form..

Det finns i dagsläget få tids- och kostnadseffektiva metoder och tekniker för att mäta och utvärdera användarupplevelse över tid. Detta trots att tidsaspekten av användarupplevelsen under de senaste åren har uppmärksammats som en viktig komponent av användarupplevelsen inom människa-dator-interaktionsforskning. UX Curve och iScale är två metoder framtagna för att mäta förändringar i användarupplevelse över tid med hjälp av retrospektion och skapande av grafer över utvecklingen av användarupplevelsens olika dimensioner.Mot bakgrund av dessa metoder togs ett webbaserat utvärderingsverktyg fram med målet att undersöka verktygets förmåga att mäta förändringar i användarupplevelse under en utvärderingsperiod. Verktyget testades på 9 deltagare i en utvärdering av en mailklient under två veckors tid.Resultatet indikerar att utvärderingsverktygets dimensioner samlar upplevelser av relevans för de dimensioner som undersökts men visar också på att ytterligare testning och validering av metod och verktyg behövs för att fastställa att mätningarna är reliabla och att det som mäts är vad som avses mätas..

The aim of this thesis was twofold, on the one hand to compile a set of usability and accessibility guidelines in order to establish the characteristics of a user friendly website, and on the other to test these guidelines on eight library webcourses with user education to see how well they adhered to the guidelines. The methods used were literature survey and source studies. The guidelines found in the literature survey were divided into four different categories: document properties, structure and navigability, visual characteristics and accessibility. In order to establish the adequacy of the guidelines, I examined reference sources, mostly on the web. To a certain extent this examination has been based on HCI Human-Computer interaction theories.

This user study was carried out at the library at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in the spring of 1999. Chalmers wanted to investigate how much their employees use electronic journals. To facilitate decision-making and be cost effective, the library needed to know about their customers' opinions. The main purpose was to investigate the usage of electronic journals, how the library's choice of these journals affects the frequency of use and what the attitudes towards them are. A questionnaire was sent out to 2 400 employees; 477 replies were received.

As the information society becomes increasingly flooded with digital images, the need for efficient image retrieval systems increases as well. To handle the vast amounts of data involved, the indexing process needs to be run automatically, using content-based descriptors extracted directly from the digital image, such as colour composition, shape and texture features. These content-based image retrieval systems are often slow and cumbersome, and can appear confusing to an ordinary user who does not understand the underlying mechanisms. One step towards more efficient and user-friendly retrieval systems might be to adjust the weight placed on various descriptors depending on which image category is being searched for. The results of this thesis show that certain categories of digital images would benefit from having extra weight assigned to colour, texture or shape features when searching for images of that category..