The main purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine what librarians in seven public libraries experience as major change in their work tasks. We are also interested in exploring how these changes influence librarians? ways of working. In addition to this we want to explore if librarians have experienced change in relation to user?s expectations and demands and if so, how they are met.

The company Microshop is interested in implementing new features in their product-website, and would like to examine the possibility and usefulness of introducing such functionality. When designing interaction for commercial websites, it is important to make the menus easy to use, and refrain from using deep hierarchies in order to avoid causing unnecessary burden for the users. There is an interest among users for adaptive functionality, but this requires great amounts of trust in the website from the user. Something which can be created by refraining from using implicit information, and provide detailed explanations throughout the website. A usability test was conducted in order to complement the data gathered from the theoretical study, the interviews and the expert evaluations.

This report describes the work process to an interactive movie addressed to children with neurodevelopmental disabilities, where Jippieserien is the client. The aim is to explore how multimodal media can convey Jippieseriens message to children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their parents, by taking the users needs into account.It is important to focus on the people who will use the system when designing interactive systems. This project is therefore using the designprocess human-centered design for interactive systems. The process includes four basic elements and provides guidelines for user-centered design. These parts are analysis, prototyping, implementation, and evaluation (Johansson.

The aim of this study is to examine how young people look at and perceive drugs by studying how they discuss and reason about drugs. The essay's main interest is not whether young people use drugs or not. We are primarily interested in how young people talk about drugs. The questions that we want to get answered are:What are the beliefs that young people have about drugs, drug use and drug users? More specifically we seek answers to which images, symbols and attributes that young people links to drugs, drug use and drug users.What is important in young people's construction of beliefs about drugs and drug users? More specifically, which are the information sources and reference groups that young people assigns significance?We used focus group interviews as the research method.

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate the ideas about functions that public libraries have in the local society. We have used the method idea analysis on four municipal library plans, to find out which ideas about library functions that frequented each plan, and what similarities and differences there were between the ideas about functions in each plan. As a theoretic base, we have used a theory about three dynamic spheres in modern society: the state market and civil society, and examined how these three spheres influence and control the library functions. We have extracted six different ideas about library functions: educational, social, economical, entertaining, serving and democratic functions. The most dominating ideas in this study are ideas that the public library should be an educating and formative institution.

BarnOPAC is a Swedish library interface for children. It was launched in public libraries in Sweden in 2001 and has now become a part of library software equipment in several public libraries. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate the interface BarnOPAC on the basis of the childrens perspective. The questions raised consider: how children experience and handle this interface, how library staff experience it and what viewpoints librarians have on childrens use of it. For this purpose we implemented a user study including eight children using the interface in a school library.

Through the birth and arise of the Internet people has been given great opportunities to make selective selfpresentations online, which in the long run has resulted in an easier retaining of the self- esteem than in the offline world. Simultaneously, the self- esteem has been viewed as a cause for both success and failure since it plays a vital role regarding our attitudes, emotional reactions and behavior. On this basis I wanted to study the relation between self- esteem and self-presentations closer. The purpose of the study is to describe and analyze how some users who publish training photos of themselves on Instagram experience how they present themselves within this forum and how these presentations affect/ are affected by their perceived self-esteem in their everyday life. The study is based on theories regarding self- esteem through Maslows? hierarchy of needs, the inner and outer self-esteem, and social comparisons.

Physical inactivity is the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality. To prevent and change this the society need to develop good approaches and interventions to promote physical activity. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate which experience existing users have of smartphone training applications. Also to study if this can be a possible resource for health promotion. Six active users applied to participation after they had seen an ad in social media.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine and analyze how to improve the design of a Microsoft Surface SUR40 application. The application in focus was an interactive product browser developed by the company Spree, our external client. Spree is a multi-touch software provider, established in September 2010 and they expressed a need for suggestions for how to improve this application. Our work aimed at revealing how to make the application more suitable for several users and make it easier for them to interact simultaneously on the surface. From a qualitative standpoint we have examined how 17 users experienced the application.

The aim of this study is to look at how librarians express theirpart in reading groups organized by public libraries. Thestudy is based on interviews with seven public librarians insouth regions of Sweden. The main theory used to analyse isfound in the article Bibliotekaren som litteraturformidler(1994) written by the Norwegian librarian Jofrid KarnerSmidt, where she talks about five different roles that alibrarian can have in this context and how they appear. Threeof these roles were used in this study: the pedagogue, theliterature expert and the marketer.The interviewed librarians mostly had a similar view on howthey look at their role in the reading group. They saw theirpurpose as to provide all kinds of people with a possibility tojoin in discussions about mutual interests and share variousopinions about books.

This thesis applies a discourse theoretical approach in order to examine in whatways and with what possible meanings the library at KVINFO participates in the overall gender discourse in society. This means that our reading takes place at a metatheoretical level, focussing on the library as a constructor of meaning in relation to society's gender discourse.Besides the actual reading, the thesis argues for the fruitfulness of using both a discourse theoretical and a feministic perspective in the field of Library and Information Science. By looking at libraries in general through a lens provided by these perspectives, libraries are staged as battlegrounds for competing discourses,that attempt to promote its particular knowledge claim on how reality should be perceived.The reading shows that it is possible to perceive the library at KVINFO as amaterial articulation that takes shape by and is part in a feministic counterdiscourse against the masculinistic hegemonic discourse, which throughout ?hisstory? has positioned women as ?the other?, and established men as the normative category in society, including the libraries. Through its practise KVINFO has contributed to a change in the collective identity ascribed to women.

The aims of the practical work carried out for this thesis were to redesign a clinical decision support system for thoracic surgeons, called AssistMe, and to evaluate the concept behind this system. The main objective of the thesis is to give an account of the considerations that were found to be of key importance for designing a clinical decision support system for thoracic surgery. Another aim was to let future users test the system after it had been redesigned and evaluate the concept behind it. The thesis also investigates users? experience of the system and their views on whether it would be applicable in their daily work practice.

Nine out of ten larger companies have an intranet today which is supposed to improve the communication withinthe company and save money. A great part of these intranets were established in the beginning of the 1990?swithout giving any thought to the users and their needs. How does the communication inside the corporationslook like when the intranets that are supposed to be the source for every information request, aren?t usable? Whatother sources do the users use and how much?The aim of this master thesis is to examine information source selection at a specific company.

In health care today at Uppsala County Council the daily work involves spending time at the computer. IT-systems were implemented to support and aid the care givers in their work. Around these systems there is a support organization to support the users in using the system. The aim of this thesis is to investigate this organization in terms of how well it works and how successful it is in helping the users. This has been done by investigating the flow of information trough the organization and by focusing at the role of IT-coordinators with responsibility for support, process development, education and statistics.

The objective of this study was to examine how an IT department has been affected by the changes of increased local usage of IT, and how the usage have affected municipalities IT departments demands of IT support. In the study we explore how both the IT department and the IT support works by interviewing present and former employees at the local IT department. The current IT department have undergone a series of local changes over the last 20 years, the department has gone from only having internal users to getting the entire municipalitiy?s agencies of IT as users. It started with how the municipality began to dig down fiber optic cable in the middle of the 1990?s, and today has started to develop solutions as to how to meet the demands of future usage of IT.