Petri Mannonen

Usability and compatibility of e-book readers in an academic environment: A collaborative study

New technologies create great opportunities as well as new challenges when libraries build their virtual collections. As e-book readers and other portable devices grow in popularity, collections can no longer be evaluated purely on the basis of content; their adaptability and ease of use on various platforms has to be taken to account. Collaboration between libraries, users and usability professionals is paramount in building virtual collections of the future. Only users can tell how these platforms are going to be used, as mobile tools for study or as entertainment devices. It is important to learn how usable the e-collections really are and what essential materials are currently incompatible with these devices. Digital rights management and technical compatibility issues should become standard considerations in all acquisition of electronic materials. This paper will present a study conducted in the Helsinki University of Technology Library, currently part of the Aalto University, from autumn of 2009 until summer of 2010. In collaboration with the Strategic Usability Research Group, various e-book readers were tested by both professionals and students. In the study, e-book readers were given to students for one study period with all the course material provided in electronic format. Feedback from the students was collected through discussions, study diaries and questionnaires. In the library, the e-book readers were tested in order to see what demands and restrictions they pose on e-materials and how well the current e-collections of the library are usable on these devices. Results suggest incompatibilities with many licensed e-materials, whereas most open access materials can be easily downloaded and used.

Enriching Literature Reviews with Computer-Assisted Research Mining. Case: Profiling Group Support Systems Research

In this paper we discuss and demonstrate how traditional literature reviews may be enriched by computer-assisted research profiling. Research profiling makes use of sophisticated text mining tools designed for structured science and technology information resources, such as the ISI Web of science, INSPEC or ABI/INFORM ProQuest. Besides aiding in summarizing and visualizing knowledge domains, these research mining tools act as interactive decision support systems for researchers. We illustrate research profiling with 2.000 publications on group support systems between years 1982-2005

Use of future-oriented information in user-centered product concept ideation

User-centered product concept design aims at creating concepts of new products. Its success is dependent on the design team’s ability to use present-day information to come up with concepts concerning future products. This paper takes as its task to investigate and explore what underlies this use of future-oriented information and what challenges it poses at the creative stages of a design process. The proposed solution is based on an analytic division of available information into (1) trends such as company strategies, trends in the society and working life that denote changing conditions, and (2) stable context features that describe issues that are unlikely to change in the timeframe concerned. A small case study is presented that exemplifies how this analytic distinction can be put into use. More broadly, the paper encourages designers to think reflectively about the nature of information on which design decisions are based.

User-centered concept development process for emerging technologies

This paper describes a user-centered concept development process especially suitable for emerging technologies. The process consists of four phases: 1) Definition of development goals, 2) User and technology research, 3) Iterative concept development and 4) Process wrap-up. Our variation of concept development process differs from prior ones by having a stronger emphasis on technology framework surrounding the concept development. The findings are gathered from 16 cases during the last three years in research projects and post-graduate courses.

International remote usability evaluation: the bliss of not being there

This paper describes the planning and implementation of a cross-border usability test that was to be executed in five European countries. The usability evaluation was designed by the Usability Group at Helsinki University of Technology who also performed the testing for the Finnish partner. In the other countries the usability tests were to be implemented by teams of subject matter specialists with very heterogeneous disciplines ranging from software engineering to social sciences, gender equality and vocational counselling. This paper describes the level of materials and training prepared for the remote usability testing and discusses its adequacy both via test personnel satisfaction and comments, and by comparing the found usability problems and observed phenomena in the test sessions between the test executed by the usability experts and the subject matter specialists.

Utilizing Experience Goals in Design of Industrial Systems

The core idea of experience-driven design is to define the intended experience before functionality and technology. This is a radical idea for companies that have built their competences around specific technologies. Although many technology companies are willing to shift their focus towards experience-driven design, reports on real-life cases about the utilization of this design approach are rare. As part of an industry-led research program, we introduced experience-driven design to metal industry companies with experience goals as the key technique. Four design cases in three companies showed that the goals are useful in keeping the focus on user experience, but several challenges are still left for future research to tackle. This exploratory research lays ground for future research by providing initial criteria for assessing experience design tools. The results shed light on utilizing experience goals in industrial design projects and help practitioners in planning and managing the product design process with user experience in mind.

A creative prototype illustrating the ambient user experience of an intelligent future factory

This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype ‘A remote operator’s day in a future control center in 2025’ was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical objective was to carry out experience design research, which was based on explicit ambient user experience goals in the nominated industrial work context. This article describes the complete creative prototyping process, starting from the initial user research that included evaluations of current work practices, technological trend studies and co-design workshops, and concluding with user research that assessed the final design outcome, the science fiction prototype. The main contribution of the article is on the ambient user experience goals, the creation process of the video-illustrated science fiction prototype, and on the reflection of how the experience-driven prototype was evaluated in two research setups: as video sequences embedded in a Web survey, and as interviews carried out with expert process control workers. For the science fiction prototyping process, the contribution demonstrates how the method may employ video-illustration as a means for future-oriented user experience research, and how complementary user-centered methods may be used to validate the results.

Uncovering the user experience with critical experience interviews

User experience (UX) design relies on comprehensive understanding about the experiential aspects of users and their tasks. Gathering the understanding is difficult and there is a need for cost-efficient ways to build the UX knowledge. This paper describes a study where the critical decision-making method (CDM) was adapted to user experience research and tried-out in process industry context. CDM is a retrospective interview strategy, which aims to elicit the insights of decision-making of professionals through a walkthrough of non-routine decision-making events. Our adapted version of the CDM, critical experience interview, utilizes the structure and core logic of CDM but focuses on experiential and emotional factors instead of reasoning and decision making ones. The strengths of the critical experience interview lie in the multiple viewpoints and iterative interview strategy. In the study, the critical experience interview was able to produce useful and rich descriptions of work related experiences of the interviewees.

Shaping the Future with Users --- Futures Research Methods as Tools for User-Centered Concept Development

We have identified four problems when developing futuristic concepts. Technologies cannot be used as boundaries for concept creation, there is a lot of room for surprises, user knowledge is bound to present day, and futuristic concepts are not easily communicable. We propose three methods from Futures Studies to tackle these problems, with the emphasis in developing futuristic product and service concepts in a business-to-business context. In this paper, we introduce the methods and discuss the possible benefits gained from their use.

Ontology-based Knowledge in Interactive Maintenance Guide

This paper describes 4M, a language technology research project where a dialogue system is applied on a mobile platform in a maintenance job scenario. The human-machine interface uses speech synthesis and recognition, assisted with a hypertext display. We describe a modular agent architecture, composed of independent program components which are implemented by or communicate using ontology programming techniques. Domain content and lingware are developed and shared using standard Web ontology formats and ontology-aware offline tools. A contribution of the project is the attention paid to standardization to help provide the system with new content and to migrate it to new domains, languages and purposes