Abstract Using prototypes when developing IT artifacts is not something new. With the help of prototypes, developers get a chance to show what the IT artifact can look like without investing too much time or money. The end user also gets the chance to see the IT artifact before it has been developed and gets a chance to add or remove features and requirements. This study examines how to use prototypes and how the use of prototypes improves the experience of mobile application interfaces for young people. In the study, young people from a leisure center were interviewed regarding the development of a mobile application. Three different prototypes have been presented and data has been collected on those prototypes to then see how the different prototypes can be used in a development process. After data collection, it turned out that the Lo-fi prototype did not contribute as much as the Hi-fi prototypes, so there is no need to develop Lo-fi prototypes in order to obtain data on user experience.

In this paper, we first describe various synchronous and asynchronous methods for enhancing student engagement in big online courses. We showcase the implementation of these methods in the “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)” course at Luleå University of Technology, which has attracted around 500 students in each of its iterations (twice yearly, since 2019). We also show that these methods can be applied efficiently, in terms of the teaching hours required. With the increase in digitization and student mobility, the demand for improved and personalized content delivery for distance education has also increased. This applies not only in the context of traditional undergraduate education, but also in the context of adult education and lifelong learning. This higher level of demand, however, introduces a challenge, especially as it is typically combined with a shortage of staff and needs for efficient education. This challenge is further amplified by the current pandemic situation, which led to an even bigger risk of student-dropout. To mitigate this risk, as well as to meet the increased demand, we applied various methods for creating engaging interaction in our pedagogy based on Moor’s framework: learner-to-learner, learner-to-instructor, and learner-to-content engagement strategies. The main methods of this pedagogy are as follows: short, and interactive videos, active discussions in topic-based forums, regular live sessions with group discussions, and the introduction of optional content at many points in the course, to address different target groups. In this paper, we show how we originally designed and continuously improved the course, without requiring more than 500 teaching hours per iteration (one hour per enrolled student), while we also managed to increase the successful completion rate of the participants by 10%, and improved student engagement and feedback for the course by 50%. We intend to share a set of best-practices applicable to many other e-learning courses in ICT.

A well thought out process is today a commonly used approach to enable new employees to become efficientin their new role. Axfood is a Swedish company group that operates in the food and logistics industry. Thegroup includes chains as Willys & Hemköp, among others. With over ten thousand employees and a growingcompany the need for recruitment is always present. Axfood is currently in the process of reorganizing theirinternal onboarding processes, rebuilding it from the ground up. This master thesis has been a part of thisbigger initiative and have focused on the onboarding process at the store chain Willys.

The project has followed the human centered design process, developed by IDEO. This process includes thethree phases, inspiration, ideation, and implementation. The methods used to reach a final result has been interviews,user journey maps, creative workshop, ideation methods, wireframing, prototyping and user testing. In the inspiration phase the current state and the users experiences of the onboarding process was explored.This made it possible to identify enhancement opportunities, one of them being the fact that none of the askedemployees did continuously use Willys intranet. In decision with Axfood, this opportunity was selected as thefocus of the solutions proposal. When the project reached the creative phase it therefore had a new direction,which led: how can Axfood use digital tools to reach employees and distribute information in an attractiveway?

Throughout the creative and implementation phase a solution for this problem was explored, prototyped,tested and enhanced.The project resulted in a solutions proposal in the form of a mobile application aimed to employees. Thesolution functions as an inspiration of how Axfood can mediate information to employees in a attractive anduser friendly way. The content has been developed based on the user groups request and needs, providingthem with information and support that make them more efficient in their role. Beyond the final result theproject has also contributed Axfood with usable data of their employees needs and knowledge of how humancentered methods can be used in the future.

Background: Conversational user interfaces, or chatbots, are becoming more popular in the realm of digital health and well-being. While many studies focus on measuring the cause or effect of a digital intervention on people’s health and well-being (outcomes), there is a need to understand how users really engage and use a digital intervention in the real world.

Objective: In this study, we examine the user logs of a mental well-being chatbot called ChatPal, which is based on the concept of positive psychology. The aim of this research is to analyze the log data from the chatbot to provide insight into usage patterns, the different types of users using clustering, and associations between the usage of the app’s features.

Methods: Log data from ChatPal was analyzed to explore usage. A number of user characteristics including user tenure, unique days, mood logs recorded, conversations accessed, and total number of interactions were used with k-means clustering to identify user archetypes. Association rule mining was used to explore links between conversations.

Results: ChatPal log data revealed 579 individuals older than 18 years used the app with most users being female (n=387, 67%). User interactions peaked around breakfast, lunchtime, and early evening. Clustering revealed 3 groups including “abandoning users” (n=473), “sporadic users” (n=93), and “frequent transient users” (n=13). Each cluster had distinct usage characteristics, and the features were significantly different (P<.001) across each group. While all conversations within the chatbot were accessed at least once by users, the “treat yourself like a friend” conversation was the most popular, which was accessed by 29% (n=168) of users. However, only 11.7% (n=68) of users repeated this exercise more than once. Analysis of transitions between conversations revealed strong links between “treat yourself like a friend,” “soothing touch,” and “thoughts diary” among others. Association rule mining confirmed these 3 conversations as having the strongest linkages and suggested other associations between the co-use of chatbot features.

Conclusions: This study has provided insight into the types of people using the ChatPal chatbot, patterns of use, and associations between the usage of the app’s features, which can be used to further develop the app by considering the features most accessed by users.

Mental health chatbots are particularly useful for those who are isolated and may have difficulty attending services or for those who are reluctant to speak to a professional. In this study, the usability and trust of a chatbot known as ’ChatPal’ has been assessed. ChatPal has been developed by an interdisciplinary team encompassing health service providers, local authorities, charities and universities to promote positive mental wellbeing among individuals in rural areas across Europe. This study employed a usability test protocol to recruit representative users to complete a set of tasks using the ChatPal chatbot. Usability issues were assessed along with trust and users’ satisfaction on the System Usability Scale and the Chatbot Usability Questionnaire. The study shows the usability issues and trust with a mental health chatbot and highlights recommendations for improvement.

As the power, utility, and prevalence of generative AI technologies continue to grow, the debate on whether and how designers should incorporate text-image models into the design process is gaining momentum. To ensure productivity, creativity, and human values, this project seeks to address design interaction and task allocation between designers, and generative AI models become essential. Explainability is a growing area of research, although many of the explanations to enhance interpretability and transparency in ML models target ML engineers rather than end users. This project investigates what kind of explanations the designers would need to communicate with the models successfully. Through a participatory design approach, this project resulted in some key findings regarding the creative nature of using natural language to express design, how experience using generative AI models affects how you use them, and how designers can benefit from recognizing the model as creative. The project resulted in two concepts for enhancing the user experience of prompt engineering, one targeting user behavior and the other improving explainability and transparency in image-generative AI models.

Understanding how different levels of immersion influence the experiences of flow and presence can shed light on the intricate interplay between these constructs and provide valuable insights into the factors that contribute to engaging and immersive gameplay. The independent variable, immersion, was manipulated in three conditions (high, moderate, and low) in a between-subject design within the video game Minecraft. Participants were asked to complete 15 min of gameplay and then fill out the questionnaires concerning flow and presence. The experiment was conducted remotely on a video-sharing platform. Bayesian analysis revealed an effect of immersion level on flow, while no evidence of an effect was found for the experience of presence. This study provides evidence in favor of a relation between flow and immersion while supporting a presumed double dissociation of immersion from presence. Future research using a Bayesian approach is encouraged to build further knowledge on this research topic.

The increased pace of adopting virtual reality (VR) technology in the digital age as a new way of communication, enabled the decision-making concept to evolve in environments influenced by improved technologies and operational processes. Human Factors pertinent to team members sharing a real and a virtual environment (VE) have been examined by capturing the interaction capabilities to gain and maintain individual situation awareness (SA) impacting the team SA level. This baseline has been explored with a Joint Cognitive System foundation and integrated in a modified cyclical model with different modes to measure the level of immersion required for achieving higher levels of SA. In addition, a modified Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (OODA) model is introduced to address how information is collected, processed, and conveyed through the interchange of individual and shared mental models of one user immersed in the real world and one user immersed in virtual reality. 

A Virtual Reality (VR) system is introduced in a modified Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (OODA) model for supporting information sharing and situational awareness in a complex environment. At the same time the cooperation and interaction with technical systems provided organizational process support, guidance, and monitoring of system critical functions.The OODA-VR combination enabled bringing together theoretical discussion and practicality responses in dyadic interactions. With the integration of simulation and reality metaphors the reasoning process takes advantage of environmental and cognitive knowledge constructed from complexity tasks. From an interaction viewpoint a more holistic view has been performed in relation to the problem space to articulate the thinking and decision-making process.The provision of the VR interaction capability has been extended to reshape quantum formalism and reality and complement the measurement collapse theory. This baseline has been explored through the Theory of Decoherence and Everettian quantum mechanics representing different measurements outcomes on a system.

A learning framework for combining state-of-the-art augmented reality (AR) technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) for helmet-mounted display applications in combat aviation has been proposed to explore perceptual and cognitive performance factors and their influence on mission needs. The analysis originated through examining helmet-mounted display (HMD) design features and their configurations for tactical situational awareness (SA). In accomplishing this goal, the relationship between the pilot visual search and recent advancements in AI have been gauged as a background source to unlock pilot’s uncued visual search limit. In this context, the Augment-Me framework is introduced with the ability to view and organize SA information in a predictive way. The provisioning of AI-augmented fixation maps could effectively outperform current AR-HMD capabilities, facilitating human decision while pursuing the detection and compensation of the mechanisms of human error.

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) is gaining a strong momentum to become a major interactive technology that can be applied across domains and purposes. The rapid proliferation of MAR applications in global mobile application markets has been fueled by a range of freely-available MAR software development kits and content development tools, some of which enable the creation of MAR applications even without programming skills. Despite the recent advances of MAR technology and tools, there are still many challenges associated with MAR from the User Experience (UX) design perspective. In this study, we first define UX as the emotions that the user encounters while using a service, a product or an application and then explore the recent research on the topic. We present two case studies, a commercial MAR experience and our own Virtual Campus Tour MAR application, and evaluate them from the UX perspective, with a focus on emotions. Next, we synthesize the findings from previous research and the results of the case study evaluations to form sets of challenges, opportunities and best practices related to UX design of MAR applications. Based on the identified best practices, we finally present an updated version of the Virtual Campus Tour. The results can be used for improving UX design of future MAR applications, thus making them emotionally engaging.

The objective of this study was to unveil the importance of emotions and feelings in developing mobile-based tourism applications. We gathered and analyzed emotional requirements to develop a mobile context-aware application for tourists. Emotional requirements are non-functional requirements affecting users’ emotional experiences around using applications, which are important for sustainable application usage. Many tourism applications exist, but were designed without considering emotional requirements or related UX factors and emotions. We developed a proof-of-concept prototype service-based context-aware tourism application (SCATA), and users participated in the design and evaluation processes. Emotional requirements are key to sustainable usage, especially regarding security. This paper details the application design and evaluation processes, emotional requirements analysis in each design phase, and the emotional effects of content accessibility in the application’s offline mode in unknown environments. The results show that trust, security, adjustability, and reliability are important factors to users, especially in unknown environments.

Shared autonomous vehicles provide a solution for the future of sustainable and accessible transportation in urban areas, both in terms of social and environmental sustainability. However, these types of vehicles face different challenges in comparison to privately owned ones. For example, it is of greater importance that a shared autonomous vehicle can cater to a large number of users with different prerequisites such as age, limited movement and strength, or visual impairment. 

In this project, methods, and interactions for creating a human-centered design solution for backup door opening of automatic doors in the shared autonomous vehicle CM1e have been investigated. The aim of the project is to support the development of safer autonomous vehicles by implementing a solution that is user-friendly and inclusive for a large number of users having different prerequisites. The project has been conducted in Gothenburg at the company China Euro Vehicle Technology (CEVT). At the end of the project, it is expected to deliver a viable mapping of use cases where the user needs to use a backup door opening solution or has to exit in a non-optimal way, pain points of the current solution for the mapped-out use cases, a well-informed and holistic approach to decide which use cases are most relevant to solve considering different criteria, and finally a feasible solution at a conceptual level, solving the most urgent use cases and pain points.

This project has had a holistic approach and has focused on both the context and scenarios of usage and how this impacts the users and usability. The investigated area is rather complex having many functions and several mediums. This has also contributed to the project to consider delivering a solution that caters to a task (in this case, exiting a vehicle) rather than one individual interaction. To achieve this use cases have been generated along with user journeys with personas having different prerequisites. This to achieve an objective description of the current functions as well as a subjective description of its limitations depending on the prerequisites of the users. To generate a large number of ideas and select the most relevant ideas, the ideation phase has focused on co-creation with relevant stakeholders and also the enrichment of ideas. By using two different user tests, the proposed solution has been validated in order to create a valuable and credible result.

The delivered result offers a solution for use cases where the user/rider needs to exit the vehicle, but the preconditions do not allow the user to do so e.g., to ensure the functionality of the doors. This was uncovered to sometimes keep the user in the vehicle during undesirable situations where the user wishes to exit. The proposed solution utilizes the function of a dead man switch to override the set preconditions and provide the user with control over the door opening process, enabling possible exit without the doors having to open a 100%. Included in the solution is also communication using interfaces and activation of the dead man switch functionality to create a user-centered, accessible, and safe backup door opening solution. The proposed solution is presented using CAD models and renderings in the shape of storyboards.

Oh My is a design and brand agency that has been developing CHECK, an accounting, billing, and time reporting system. CHECK has been developed to ease the billing and accounting process by making a front-shell system that is easier to use than the existing back-end economic system (Fortnox). To further enhance CHECK’s user experience, a need for a resource scheduling feature arose. The mission of this master thesis project is therefore to design a resource scheduling feature by going through the double diamond design process. 

The double diamond design process consists of four phases, a discovering phase, a defining phase, a developing phase, and a delivering phase. The discovering phase consisted of a literature review, interviews, user observations, a market analysis, and workshops to discover the current resource scheduling market and Oh My’s resource scheduling needs. The defining phase consisted of collecting and sorting the information gathered in the previous phase, which were conducted by using a design specification. The developing phase was the creative phase where solutions were beginning to emerge through paper prototyping. The delivering phase was the iterative phase where user tests were conducted, and the design was changed and improved. The delivering phase contained 4 different user test that resulted in the final version of a resource planning system. 

In the medieval tradition of ballads, a recurring theme is that of transformation. In a staged concert for chamber orchestra, singers and dancers called Varelser och Ballader (Beings and Ballads), we explored this theme using ballads coupled with contemporary poetry and new music. The performance made use of custom-made digital musical instruments, using video analysis and large-scale physical interfaces for transformative purposes. In this article, we describe the piece itself as well as how uncanny qualities of the digital were used to emphasize eerie themes of transformation and deception by the supernatural beings found in the medieval ballads.

Decisions have been automated since the early days. Ever since the rise of AI, ML and DataAnalytics, algorithmic decision-making has experienced a boom time. Nowadays, using AI withina company is said to be critical to the success of a company. Considering the point that it can bequite costly to develop AI/ ML and integrating it into decision-making, it is striking how littleresearch was put into the identification and analysis of its cost drivers by now. This thesis is acontribution to raise and the awareness of possible cost drivers to algorithmic decisions. Thetopic was divided in two subgroups. That is solely algorithms and hybrid decision-making. Asystematic literature review was conducted to create a theoretical base for further research. Thecost drivers for algorithms to make decisions without human interaction, the identified costdrivers identified can be found at Data Storage (including initial, floor rent, energy, service,disposal, and environmental costs), Data Processing, Transferring and Migrating. Additionally,social costs and the ones related to fairness as well as the ones related to algorithms themselves(Implementation and Design, Execution and Maintenance) could be found. Business Intelligenceused for decision making raises costs in Data quality, Update delays of cloud systems, Personneland Personnel training, Hardware, Software, Maintenance and Data Storage. Moreover, it isimportant to say that the recurrence of some costs was detected. Further research should go inthe direction of applicability of the theoretical costs in practice.

How is ethics shaped by the particularities of a design? Through a detailed video analysis, we explore how ethicality is shaped in interaction between a choreographer, a performer and a choir of five drones, performing together on the opera stage. We pinpoint how movements enabled by the human-drone assemblage may limit or liberate artistic expressions vis-à-vis the norms of operatic performance. From a somaesthetics perspective on ethics, we show how the process of crafting rich experiences together with drones can deepen sensory appreciation skills, leading to an increased understanding of underlying somatic drivers and imposed norms. Somatic awareness thereby enables a richer repertoire of movements, expanding the ability to freely choose how to act, and cultivating empathy towards others. This shifts our understanding of ethics in HCI as solely about abstract rules or policies 'out there' to also concern the specifics of how technology informs or dictates movement and experience.  

Movement-based interactions are gaining traction, requiring a better understanding of how such expressions are shaped by designers. Through an analysis of an artistic process aimed to deliver a commissioned opera where custom-built drones are performing on stage alongside human performers, we observed the importance of achieving an intercorporeal understanding to shape body-based emotional expressivity. Our analysis reveals how the choreographer moves herself to: (1) imitate and feel the affordances and expressivity of the drones' 'otherness' through her own bodily experience; (2) communicate to the engineer of the team how she wants to alter the drones' behaviors to be more expressive; (3) enact and interactively alter her choreography. Through months of intense development and creative work, such an intercorporeal understanding was achieved by carefully crafting the drones' behaviors, but also by the choreographer adjusting her own somatics and expressions. The choreography arose as a result of the expressivity they enabled together.

Digital healthcare platforms have enabled patients to receive healthcare in ways that were impossible previously—for example, by providing a “safer” way to meet, as underscored by the Covid-19 pandemic. This article investigates whether older and younger primary care users display behavioral differences on digital healthcare platforms. The article adopts a mixed-method approach in which one-way ANOVA analysis on a sample of 152 000 patient journeys was combined with qualitative interview data. The findings highlight significant differences in usage between elderly and younger patients. The elderly spends more time during use—for example, during anamnesis, onboarding, and in queues. We also outline how the key antecedent factors that are most central to platform usage, such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, digital maturity, and trust, play out in the elderly user context. The study contributes to the nascent literature on digital healthcare platforms and the postadoption usage of information and communication technologies by the elderly. The article also outlines research implications in the area of DHPs and mHealth for elderly users, and it discusses the practical implications for both platform owners and healthcare professionals, where platform design and information management are particularly important for elderly users.

Syftet med studien var att utifrån barns perspektiv, synliggöra hur femåringar i förskolan interagerar med varandra och artefakter som till exempel en robot när de programmerar. Vidare syftar studien till att beskriva och diskutera barns erfarenheter och förhållningssätt till programmering i förskolan. Studien vilar på en sociokulturell teori och ett socialsemiotiskt multimodalt perspektiv. De metoder som användes vid datainsamling var deltagande observatör, videoobservationer och kvalitativ ostrukturerad intervju, vidare medverkade fem barn i studien. Empirin analyserades med hjälp av ett designteoretiskt, multimodalt analyssätt. Resultatet visar att barnen interagerar med varandra genom kommunikation och gester, de har en varierad förförståelse till programmering och använder sig av olika tillvägagångssätt att programmera roboten. Barnen är engagerade vid programmeringen och anser att det är roligt men svårt.

This study investigates different design choices for graphical user interfaces meant to improve depth perception in remote crane operation through measuring efficiency and user experience. To achieve this, three different graphical user interface designs were created and implemented into a cargo port simulator within the game engine Unity. These GUIs consists of a top-down shadow overlay, a guideline overlay and one overlay that would display held containers as see-through, called X-ray overlay. The three GUIs were then tested in a user study along a blank interface which had no overlay, in order to compare task efficiency, accuracy and usability among the four interfaces. In total, 15 participants took part in the user study in which none had any previous experience in using heavy machinery such as cargo cranes. These 15 participants were of various ages between 22-59 and of various genders. The results from the user study shows that the shadow overlay and the guideline overlay were more favoured among the participants who took part in the experiment, as well as more usable in comparison towards the X-ray overlay and having no overlay. The participants were also more accurate and efficient in placing containers while using the shadow overlay and the guideline overlay.

Vägen till ett snusfritt liv är ett arbete som formats utifrån idén att med applikationens hjälp skapa en fungerande lösning för att sluta snusa. Idag tar många hjälp av mediciner för att på kemisk väg bli av med sitt beroende. Min idé bygger istället på att med rätt motivation och hjälp klarar alla av att sluta utan dessa hjälpmedel. I arbetet går jag igenom olika lösningar och hur de fungerar samt ställer de mot min lösning för att kunna utvärdera om mina tankar och idéer verkligen fungerar. Det finns även en kortare bakgrundshistoria om snuset och dess påverkan på kroppen samt statistik på hur många som faktiskt använder sig av snus idag. 

Although analytics have become a widespread practice, we still have minimal knowledge about how dashboards influence decision-makers and through what mechanisms they enhance decision making. In this study, we built on an experiment-based approach with mock-up visualizations and recruited 524 participants, who were divided into two groups (A and B) with variations in their visualizations. We found that the format, currency, and completeness of information indirectly affect decision making quality by reducing the perceived task complexity and enhancing information satisfaction. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the role of visual representation of information quality on dashboard visualizations.

The development of immersive virtual reality (IVR) applications for design reviews is a major trend in the design field. While many different applications have been developed, there is little consensus on the functionalities necessary for these applications. This paper proposes a classification scheme for IVR functionalities related to design reviews (DRs), combining conceptual-to-empirical and empirical-to-conceptual strategies. The classification scheme consists of eight class categories (Input, Representation, Navigation, Manipulation, Collaboration, Edit, Creation, and Output), 22 class subcategories, and 55 classes. The classification scheme has been validated by analysing several commercial IVR applications for DRs. As part of the classification scheme development, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was utilised to review 70 articles that develop IVR applications for DRs. The results from systematic literature reviews suggest the development of solutions that integrate several class categories, are better connected to current design workflows, include various design information, support a DR planning cycle, and support distributed work. The proposed classification scheme helps to orient the future development of IVR applications for DRs and provides a framework to systematically accumulate evidence on the effect of such applications on DRs.

This research delves into the dynamics of active school transport (AST) by utilizing a two-stage co-design process and leveraging persuasive technology within a game for promoting AST called Battleship-AST. The primary aim of this research is to thoroughly investigate the two-stage game co-design process employed in creating a Battleship-AST game. Moreover, our research aims to evaluate participants’ perceptions regarding the motivating and engaging potential of the persuasive technology and gamification features embedded within the final iteration of the game. This evaluation aims to understand how these features influence participants’ motivation to increase their usage of AST through gameplay. In pursuit of these objectives, the research builds upon the existing Battleship-AST prototype and actively engages school children in a collaborative two-stage co-design process. Their valuable insights and preferences were harnessed in refining the game, which was subsequently tested during a tech event in Skellefteå, Sweden. The findings shed light on various aspects of the game’s impact, from its reception to the gamification features integrated within. Notably, the research highlights the positive impact of the co-design process, with increased motivation and engagement observed among the participants. Their involvement in shaping the game’s design resulted in a more engaging and enjoyable experience. The persuasive technology features, encompassing competition, collaboration, auditory cues, a virtual reward system, and an emphasis on similarity, played a pivotal role in sustaining engagement and motivating players. Elements such as rewards, leaderboard progression, and badges proved highly effective in encouraging continued participation and fostering a positive feedback loop. However, the study also identifies areas for potential improvement, including the need to measure real-life progress and refine the game’s levelling system. The research indicates that refining feedback mechanisms and tailoring game content to individual preferences could create an even more engaging experience. Additionally, long-term playtesting is proposed to assess the game’s extended impact. The findings offer promising avenues for enhancing motivation and engagement in AST, which can contribute to the promotion of healthier and more sustainable transportation choices among school children.

The critical interplay between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Trust is investigated in this work. This interplay has profound interdisciplinary implications as it is linked to the adoption of AI systems and services in society. With the increasing influence that AI has on finance, transportation, communication, healthcare, etc., trust in the new technology is pivotal. This work carries out a systematic computational literature review and identifies the major topics that are portrayed when it comes to the interplay of AI and trust. The corpus consists of 34786 publications from Web of Science and Scopus scientific databases. The 91 identified topics reveal the multi-faceted nature and dynamic relation of trust and AI that is scattered across technical, social, and ethical dimensions. The ranking of the topics, the similarity analysis, and the hierarchical clustering in conjunction with critical discussions reveal additional insights. Especially aspects of governance, security, and explainability along several application domains such as healthcare, robotics, financial sector, transportation, etc. emerge. The acquired insights offer value to researchers in the area, businesses, regulatory bodies, and policymakers. The results shed light on the importance of the interplay of trust and AI and point out the broader implications across domains that need to be appropriately addressed.

Technology developments have expanded the diversity of interaction modalities that can be used by an agent (either a human or machine) to interact with a computer system. This expansion has created the need for more natural and user-friendly interfaces in order to achieve effective user experience and usability. More than one modality can be provided to an agent for interaction with a system to accomplish this goal, which is referred to as a multimodal interaction (MI) system. The Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR) are popular technologies that allow interaction systems to combine the real-world context of the agent and immersive AR content. However, although MI systems have been extensively studied, there are only several studies that reviewed MI systems that used IoT and AR. Therefore, this paper presents an in-depth review of studies that proposed various MI systems utilizing IoT and AR. A total of 23 studies were identified and analyzed through a rigorous systematic literature review protocol. The results of our analysis of MI system architectures, the relationship between system components, input/output interaction modalities, and open research challenges are presented and discussed to summarize the findings and identify future research and development avenues for researchers and MI developers.

Background: The older population needs solutions for independent living and reducing the burden on caregivers while maintaining the quality and dignity of life.

Objective: The aim of this study was to design, develop, and evaluate an older adult health care app that supports trained caregivers (ie, formal caregivers) and relatives (ie, informal caregivers). We aimed to identify the factors that affect user acceptance of interfaces depending on the user’s role.

Methods: We designed and developed an app with 3 user interfaces that enable remote sensing of an older adult’s daily activities and behaviors. We conducted user evaluations (N=25) with older adults and their formal and informal caregivers to obtain an overall impression of the health care monitoring app in terms of user experience and usability. In our design study, the participants had firsthand experience with our app, followed by a questionnaire and individual interview to express their opinions on the app. Through the interview, we also identified their views on each user interface and interaction modality to identify the relationship between the user’s role and their acceptance of a particular interface. The questionnaire answers were statistically analyzed, and we coded the interview answers based on keywords related to a participant’s experience, for example, ease of use and usefulness.

Results: We obtained overall positive results in the user evaluation of our app regarding key aspects such as efficiency, perspicuity, dependability, stimulation, and novelty, with an average between 1.74 (SD 1.02) and 2.18 (SD 0.93) on a scale of −3.0 to 3.0. The overall impression of our app was favorable, and we identified that “simple” and “intuitive” were the main factors affecting older adults’ and caregivers’ preference for the user interface and interaction modality. We also identified a positive user acceptance of the use of augmented reality by 91% (10/11) of the older adults to share information with their formal and informal caregivers.

Conclusions: To address the need for a study to evaluate the user experience and user acceptance by older adults as well as both formal and informal caregivers regarding the user interfaces with multimodal interaction in the context of health monitoring, we designed, developed, and conducted user evaluations with the target user groups. Our results through this design study show important implications for designing future health monitoring apps with multiple interaction modalities and intuitive user interfaces in the older adult health care domain.

As the impact of global warming on climate change becomes noticeable, the importance of energy efficiency for reducing greenhouse gas emissions grows immense. To this end, a platform, solution, and mobile apps are developed as part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program to support energy optimization in residences. However, to ensure long-term energy optimization, it is crucial to keep users engaged with the apps. Since augmented reality (AR) and a virtual animal companion positively influenced user engagement, we designed an AR companion that represented the user’s residence states; thereby making the user aware of indoor information. We conducted user evaluations to determine the effect of the AR companion on user engagement and perceived usability in the context of energy management. We identified that the user interface (UI) with AR (ARUI) barely affected user engagement and perceived usability compared to the traditional UI without AR (TUI); however, we found that the ARUI positively affected one of the user engagement aspects. Our results show AR companion integration’s potential benefits and effects on energy management mobile apps. Furthermore, our findings provide insights into UI design elements for developers considering multiple interaction modalities with AR.

The recent proliferation of affordable physiological sensors has boosted research and development efforts of emotion-aware systems. Boredom has received relatively little attention as a target emotion, and we identified a lack of research on the relationship between eye gaze and electroencephalogram (EEG) when people feel bored. To investigate this matter, we first conducted a background study on boredom and its detection by physiological methods. Then, we designed and executed an experiment that uses a video stimulus – specifically designed for this experiment, yet general enough for other boredom research – with an eye tracker and EEG sensor to elicit and detect boredom. Moreover, a questionnaire was used to confirm the existence of boredom. The experiment was based on a hypothesis that participants may feel bored when their gaze deviates from an expected area of interest, thus indicating loss of attention. The results of the experiment indicated correlations between eye gaze data and EEG data with all participants (N = 13) when they felt bored. This study can be useful for researchers who have interest in developing boredom-aware systems.

This thesis aims to test if there is a connection between modern day fully automatic rifles rate of fire, used loop length in implementation and experienced realism in a first-person shooter game in first-person, fired by the players own character. With a background consisting of papers, books and lectures/conferences given by experienced people and other experts in the game industry regarding first person shooter games, a listening test was conducted and carried out on a computer using headphones with both trained and untrained subjects since players can be both. A simple firing-range was constructed in Unreal Engine 4 (Epic Games, 2017) where the subjects could switch between two weapons with different rates of fire and three versions of each with different loop lengths, 4, 8 and 16. The sounds were divided into layers, e.g. body, mechanical and bottom, played back using looping as implementation. The subjects were also asked to rate the sounds regarding gameplay and preference to see if the results would differ between the three categories. The results showed a tendency to choose the longer loop for all categories, but only four comparisons gave a significant result when doing t-tests.

The present study aims at investigating how eye contact established by a humanoid robot affects engagement in human-robot interaction (HRI). To this end, we combined explicit subjective evaluations with implicit measures, i.e. reaction times and eye tracking. More specifically, we employed a gaze cueing paradigm in HRI protocol involving the iCub robot. Critically, before moving its gaze, iCub either established eye contact or not with the user. We investigated the patterns of fixations of participants' gaze on the robot's face, joint attention and the subjective ratings of engagement as a function of eye contact or no eye contact. We found that eye contact affected implicit measures of engagement, i.e. longer fixation times on the robot's face during eye contact. Moreover, we showed that joint attention was elicited only when the robot established eye contact, whereas no joint attention occurred when it did not. On the contrary, explicit measures of engagement with the robot did not vary across conditions. Our results highlight the value of combining explicit with implicit measures in an HRI protocol in order to unveil underlying human cognitive mechanisms, which might be at stake during the interactions. These mechanisms could be crucial for establishing an effective and engaging HRI, and provide guidelines to the robotics community with respect to better robot design.

An international research collaboration with researchers from northern Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and developed the ChatPal chatbot to explore the possibility of a multilingual chatbot to promote mental wellbeing in people of all ages. In Sweden the end users were young people. The aim of the current study was to explore and discuss Swedish young peoples’ experiences of using a chatbot designed to promote their mental wellbeing. Young people aged 15–19 filled out an open-ended survey giving feedback on the ChatPal chatbot and their suggestions on improvements. A total of 122 survey responses were analysed. The qualitative content analysis of the survey responses resulted in three themes each containing two to three sub-themes. Theme 1, feeling as if someone is there when needed, which highlighted positive aspects regarding availability and accessibility. Theme 2, human-robot interaction has its limitations, which included aspects such as unnatural and impersonal conversations and limited content availability. Theme 3, usability can be improved, given technical errors due to lack of internet connection and difficulty navigating the chatbot were brought up as issues. The findings are discussed, and potential implications are offered for those designing and developing digital mental health technologies for young people. 

The ongoing digital transformation is changing asset management in the railway industry. Emerging digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence is expected to facilitate decision-making in management, operation, and maintenance of railway by providing an integrated data-driven and model-driven solution. An important aspect when developing decision-support solutions based on AI and digital technology is the users’ experience. User experience design process aims to create relevance, context-awareness, and meaningfulness for the end-user. In railway contexts, it is believed that applying a human-centric design model in the development of AI-based artefacts, will enhance the usability of the solution, which will have a positive impact on the decision-making processes. In this research, the applicability of such advanced technologies i.e., Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, and AI have been reviewed for the railway asset management. To carry out this research work, literature review has been conducted related to available Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality technologies and their applications within railway industry. It has been found that these technologies are available, but not applied in railway asset management. Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose a human-centric design model for the enhancement of railway asset management using Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality technologies. The practical implication of the findings from this work will benefit in increased efficiency and effectiveness of the operation and maintenance processes in railway

The effect of design principles on website usability for a wide target population isexamined in this qualitative study. The study specifically looks at how to develop awebsite to meet the demands of the 55–64 year old older demographic. User testing andinterviews were both used as part of the study's mixed-methods strategy to gather data.The findings demonstrate that following design concepts, such as visual hierarchy,distinct contrast, and the use of suitable color schemes, greatly enhances the seniorpopulation's ability to browse the website. The user experience is also improved byapplying gestalt principles like proximity, resemblance, and closure. According to thestudy's findings, a user-centered approach to website design that incorporates gestaltlaws and design principles can increase usability for a variety of users. 

Background: Most children and adolescents in Sweden do not meet the recommended daily physical activity levels of the World Health Organization. Active school transport (AST) and gamification are potential methods for increasing children’s daily physical activity. We previously developed a game named Tic-Tac-Training for promoting active transport at workplaces; however, the game has not been applied to AST.

Objective: The objectives of this study are to investigate how Tic-Tac-Training functions to promote AST among schoolchildren in northern Sweden, improve the game to be more suitable for schoolchildren, and construct a road map for future development based on children’s ideas.

Methods: First, we developed Tic-Tac-Training using the Scrum agile software development method. Second, we conducted a questionnaire-based formative evaluation of the game with schoolchildren (n=16; 9/16, 56% male; 6/16, 38% female; and 1/16, 6% other aged 11-12 years) in Luleå, Sweden. Third, we conducted focus group interviews with 33 children (13/33, 39% male and 20/33, 61% female aged 12-13 years) to gather ideas for gamifying AST. We mapped the interview results to the Octalysis gamification framework and established a road map for future development.

Results: The formative evaluation revealed several issues, including a lack of interesting game features, lack of support for continuous engagement, disliked competitive features, and lack of incentives for discourse and participation. New features such as rewards, collectibles, and levels were implemented based on the results. The focus group interviews revealed additional ideas for gamifying AST, such as using avatars, in-game currency and trading, and context-sensitive tasks.

Conclusions: The results have several potential impacts on how reusable, gamified AST interventions can be developed and what kind of gamification elements schoolchildren in northern Sweden wish to see. These results can interest game researchers and teachers who wish to apply gamification in school contexts. Finally, we aim to continue developing the game based on the road map.

Virtual Reality provides the ability to immerse users in realistic environments, which enables utilization of the technology as an immersive educational tool. This is particularly useful for educational fields that require students to visit certain locations, or that concern hazardous situations and materials. The EIT Raw Materials Project MiReBooks intends to develop novel augmented and virtual reality teaching tools to mining education. Within the project, we developed an interactive multi-user VR environment, named MiReBooks VR, for teaching mining to students by simulating a VR mine and creating learning scenarios in it. In this paper, we briefly described MiReBooks VR, and then focused on determining the capacity of the server running in a head-mounted display by measuring latency. To assess the system's capacity to handle multiple students connected to a class session, client simulation tests of up to 30 simultaneous connections were conducted. The results suggests performance issues with respect to latency affecting all peers that could cause a negative effect to the VR user experience. In addition, the results indicate that the frame rate requirements for VR applications are difficult to maintain in multi-user environments using current off-the-shelf VR equipment. Based on the development experiences and the tests, we provide five lessons learned that can be of interest to software engineers and researchers working on the development of multi-user VR systems.

Since the start of the pandemic, the number of downloaded health apps have increased by 25 percent (Orcha, 2021). Today, there are hundreds of apps available. However, these are deficient in several aspects. Some of them offer complete diet programs, but then the user lacks the flexibility to freely choose what to eat. In other cases, the user may create their own programs. Instead, a time-consuming method is required where the user must either critically evaluate different foods from a database or alternatively enter the nutrient content for different foods him- or herself. This has led to the idea of an app that automatically generates diet programs that matches the user’s needs for energy and energy sources, at no cost to flexibility.

This is a bachelor’s theses in industrial design engineering at Luleå University of Technology (LTU). The project has been carried out for ten weeks and has corresponded to 15 higher education credits. The purpose of the project was in part to give people interested in diet the opportunity to create their own, individualized diet programs quickly and easily, which will lead to healthier eating habits. The goal of the project was to develop a prototype for an app that generates high-quality and user-friendly diet programs with minimal effort from the user. 

The project has followed IDEO’s user centered design process. At the beginning of the project, a project plan was made followed by a literature study that resulted in a theoretical framework. The project followed three major phases: context research, idea generation and concept development.

To investigate the context, a survey was first conducted to investigate people's opinions regarding today's diet apps. Furthermore, a competitor analysis was performed consisting of several steps, most notably user tests on competing products. Based on the data that was gathered during this phase, two personas were created.

The idea generation phase began with a brainstorm to generate partial solutions. Four different solution proposals were then created with the morphological matrix method and then evaluated with a concept weighting based on criteria gathered from previously collected material with support from an interview. In this way, a concept was chosen for further implementation.

In the concept development, paper sketches were first made for the selected concept. Then an early prototype was made in the form of a wireframe in Adobe XD. Based on this wireframe, the final prototype was then created.

The final concept resulted in a prototype for an app called HälsoHjälparen (HealthHelper) whose main function is to generate customized meal plans that match the user's needs for energy and energy sources. Furthermore, the focus lieson usability through the implementation of other functionality based on the needs identified throughout the project. The project is considered to have fulfilled its purpose by developing a product that can potentially improve peoples’ health. 

Investigating online child sexual abuse (CSA) crimes is challenging for law enforcement agencies, demanding both digital expertise and knowledge about offences against children while exacting a mental toll on investigators. This article identifies challenges in the investigative process, drawing on audit reports, interviews with police management, observations of meetings, and a workshop with online CSA investigators. The findings reveal difficulties in resource allocation due to varying case sizes and rapid escalation. In addition, while online CSA investigators handle most cases, they require support from other police units; however, a widespread fear of these cases among non-specialized investigators complicates collaborative efforts. Lastly, a culture of organizational “compartmentalization” was described as hindering collaboration, as different branches of investigation remain separated. We discuss how these challenges pose problems to online CSA investigation practices.

This study focuses on the automatic decoding of inner speech using noninvasive methods, such as Electroencephalography (EEG). While inner speech has been a research topic in philosophy and psychology for half a century, recent attempts have been made to decode nonvoiced spoken words by using various brain–computer interfaces. The main shortcomings of existing work are reproducibility and the availability of data and code. In this work, we investigate various methods (using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTM)) for the detection task of five vowels and six words on a publicly available EEG dataset. The main contributions of this work are (1) subject dependent vs. subject-independent approaches, (2) the effect of different preprocessing steps (Independent Component Analysis (ICA), down-sampling and filtering), and (3) word classification (where we achieve state-of-the-art performance on a publicly available dataset). Overall we achieve a performance accuracy of 35.20% and 29.21% when classifying five vowels and six words, respectively, in a publicly available dataset, using our tuned iSpeech-CNN architecture. All of our code and processed data are publicly available to ensure reproducibility. As such, this work contributes to a deeper understanding and reproducibility of experiments in the area of inner speech detection.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has substantiated play for play's sake, thus focusing on the doing or being of play rather than any potentially desired outcomes. Examining this type of play from the perspective of the child acknowledges children as meaning-makers. A scoping review was conducted to expose and map the extent of the evidence available in the emerging and diverse field of children's experiences of play in digital spaces. Specifically, the literature was examined with regards to relevance to children's everyday lives, the personal and ecological relevance, and the methods used. A systematic search of the literature over the past fifteen years found thirty-one articles appropriate for inclusion. The analysis of the literature revealed that the articles formed four categories of how play in digital spaces was approached: 'Videogames, behaviours, and societal norms', 'Videogames for its own sake', 'Videogames for learning', and 'Active Videogames for health promotion'. This scoping review has identified a lack of articles focusing on children's experiences of play in a digital space, and these perspectives are essential for parents, professionals, game designers, and policymakers alike to contribute to an enhanced understanding of the role of play in digital spaces.

Digitalization and automation technology offer new possibilities to increase productivity and obtain higher levels of autonomy in mining operations. Introducing autonomous systems into mining is not only a technical problem in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, nor a problem of safety in human-automation interactions. The systems also need to be designed and developed so that they foster healthy and attractive working environments. The design and development phase of new mining technology has not been extensively studied previously. To fill this knowledge gap, we investigated technology developers’ basic assumptions about humans and their interactions with the technology they develop. We conducted five semi-structured workshops within an EU funded project concerned with developing digitalization and automation solutions for the mining industry. The data suggests that many critical functions will still be under human control in future mining systems. The results also indicate increased complexity in the interaction between autonomous systems and humans as the technology becomes more advanced. As a result, we suggest that a human perspective, based on sociotechnical principles, should not only be considered in implementing the technology at mines but also in the early conceptual phases of developing and designing the technology. This will ensure healthy and attractive work environments in the future mining industry.

The focus of this essay is to develop a design concept for online public discussions with deep discussions and low information overload. The method used is Concept Driven Interaction Design (CDID) which involves constructing a design concept by applying a variety of theories in tangible interaction design. A design concept has three basic parts: a name, high-level goals and outlines generic principles. CDID includes seven steps which is used in this work:

1.      Concept Generation – Formatted into a table that compare forum discussion (with several hypothesis) compared to discussions with the method Philosophy for Children (P4C) and other theories.

2.      Concept Exploration – Eight distinct design aspects are identified from the comparison table.

3.      Internal Concept Critique – The design aspects are compared to three similar discussion formats.

4.      Design of Artifacts – Design concept version 1 is created.

5.      External Design Critique – Interviews are conducted to explore their general experience of online discussions, investigate the hypothesis from the comparison table and to seek direct feedback on the first draft of the design concept.

6.      Concept Revisited – Changes are made to the design concept based on the interview material and the direct feedback.

7.      Concept Contextualization – The design concept is related to the original literature.

The result of the study is a design concept named CoFramer. CoFramer’s generic principles are summarized and contrasted against factors identified from the interview material in this table:

Tabell 2: CoFramer’s generic principles and interviews about online discussions.

CoFramer’s generic principles | From interview material on forum discussion

Organized start and ending | Discussions without clear ending

Limited number of participants | Large number of participants

Minimum number of participants | Large number of inactive spectators

Explicit participants | Low information about participants

Common conditions | Vagueness in participants conditions

Limited information density per post | Long posts and/or fast posts

The red thread and parallel threads | Often parallel threads

Active facilitator | Unresolved misunderstandings

The study indicates that CoFramer would create more structured discussions with a lower amount of information overload and less grounding cost compared what normally arise in public online discussions.

Imagine you have booked a trip to the mountains and want to experience nature and the slopes. But unfortunately, you do not own your equipment and need to rent from a ski rental. As a customer, you then hope the rental process goes quickly, smoothly, and efficiently to avoid standing in long queues. That is exactly what this master thesis is about, is it possible to make the ski rental process more efficient and design a solution or service that optimizes the flow. Bottlenecks are something that slows down the process and by improving the bottlenecks hopefully a more optimized ski rental can be achieved. This master thesis is a collaboration with the company No More Boots. They have developed a tool called SkiClicker which makes the ski binding adjustment easier. SkiClicker had optimized the ski renting process by 40% and this master thesis is about to examine if more solutions could streamline the flow.   

This project is built on human-centred design and service design. IDEO (2015) explain that human-centred design is about designing solutions after the users´ needs and believing the users who face the problems every day have the answer and the key to the solution. Performed interviews, surveys, and observations to understand the staff and the customer’s problems, needs and what they experience in a ski rental. Translated the problems into needs and according to Patnaik & Becker (1999) is better to build a project on the users´ needs because needs last longer than any specific solution. Further Patnaik & Becker (1999) describes it is more likely that the end-user will use the solution if it is built on their needs. Stickdorn et.al (2018) describe service design is about designing a whole service/ process after all stakeholders that are affected by the system and giving valuable experience to all stakeholders. 

Used the Design Thinking process from IDEO in this project, the process involves three main phases Understand, Explore, and Materialize. The first phase is about empathize whit the user and understand their problems. Then define the needs and narrow down the information from the empathize phase and pinpoint the work further. The next phase is about generate ideas and create prototypes, to then test the ideas with the user. Last phase is about to materialize and implement the solution. 

Radio Frequency Identification, RFID is a technology that enables wireless transmission of data by using radiofrequency waves (Smiley, 2020).  The advantage of RFID is that the tags can be detected through objects and at distance (Smiley, 2020). The result of this project became a service of renting, trying, and returning ski equipment by using RFID technology. Through guidance and recommendations is the goal to let the customer pick and try the ski boots by themselves without help from the staff. The return process is also something that was improved in this project. With this new return station, the customer no longer needs to take a queue note for returning the equipment. The customer can quick and easy just place the equipment in a return station and then is the equipment returned. Directly after new items had been placed on the return shelf, an icon will appear on a screen that the equipment is returned. All skis and ski boots are marked with RFID tags and the return station involves RFID readers to detect the tags. The staff already has a lot to do in a rental, so by allowing customers to perform more tasks on their own, a more time-efficient flow can probably be achieved. 

Nowadays, higher education worldwide is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has affected students’ attendance in the universities and causes universities to close down in more than 190 countries. On the other hand, novice engineers studied only a few lectures related to highway engineering. Their lectures have included very little knowledge about asphalt pavement construction as highway engineering consists of many areas that are not studied in detail during their studying years subject to their traditional education. Due to all mentioned, a new drive to promote online learning paves the way to evaluate our future approach to curriculum development and delivery of educational materials for engineering courses. However, experts can offer solutions to these problems using their past experience. Hence, a system that allows experts to share their experience with other engineers after completing a project is needed. Nevertheless, the web-based expert system for maintaining flexible pavement problems in tropical regions (ESTAMPSYS) designed in this study is a novel concept. Prior to developing this system, the need for such a system was determined through literature review and validated through a questionnaire survey. Experts were interviewed, and a questionnaire survey was conducted to construct the knowledge base of the system. Knowledge was presented as rules and coded in software through PHP programming. Web pages that support the user interface were designed using a framework that consists of CSS, HTML, and J-Query. Furthermore, the system was tested by an array of users engaged in highway engineering, namely, experts, teaching experts, novice engineers, and students. The mean values of the overall system evaluation performed by 20 users using a five-point Likert scale were 4, 4.5, 3.75, 4.25, 5, 4, and 3.5. Expert and user satisfaction prove the effectiveness of the proposed system.