Sonia C. Sousa

Privacy Awareness of Students and Its Impact on Online Learning Participation – A Case Study

This paper is based on a survey that addresses two main hypotheses - that there is a positive correlation between students’ level of participation and their privacy awareness, and students with high levels of privacy awareness need to be assured that their open learning activities are protected from potential threats in order to achieve positive results. Results show that in fact there is a correlation between students’ awareness of privacy and their predisposition to share and to participate in open leaning contexts. This is especially evident when students share their school assignments, grading results and teacher’s feedback or even their comments with others.

A case study on using social media for e-participation: design of initiative mapper web service

This paper addresses the potential of using social media for improving inclusion of immigrants in society in general, but especially in decision-making about the policies and regulations concerning their life. We describe a case study, which was carried out according to the scenario-based design methodology and resulted with conceptual design and a prototype of a new social Web service called Initiative Mapper. This innovative Web service was designed in line with social media approach and it could be used for enhancing online collaboration between immigrants based on their needs, interests and ideas, through joint action and grass-foot level e-participation.

A Design Space for Trust-enabling Interaction Design

The purpose of this article is to introduce and assess the expressiveness of a design space for trust-enabling interaction design; or in other words aims to assess the extent to which the design space can explain/describe trust-enabling interactions. It starts by situating trust in the domains of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Mediated Interactions. Then, presents the proposed design space analytical tool. A tool, which serves for moving away from artifact-centered design to an intentional creation of value, i.e. support interaction designers on further reflecting on trust-enabling interactions design values. These design spaces dimensions are rationally derived from the model of Human-computer Trust, which builds on uses perceived trust. This model has been previously validated and was also used as a research lens for providing a greater understanding of how individuals interact with systems, in interaction processes like openness, knowledge sharing, users privacy awareness, and collaboration. The article concludes with two examples of application through a comparative inspection of 2 peer-production platforms: Wikipedia and Wordpress. And a reflection on how the proposed analytical tool can be used as a facilitator for supporting trust-enabling interaction design processes.

Incorporating Values into the Design Process: The Case of E-Textbook Development for Estonia

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how interaction designers can reflect on values in interactive artifacts through an adapted method of design space analysis. We claim that value inclusion can be analyzed and incorporated into the design through design spaces. The method we are in the process of developing and present in this paper allows us to critically evaluate existing artifacts. It also allows us to evaluate our design work on a formative basis. The formative evaluation approach enables us to reflect on whether the intended values are reflected in the design. In this paper we establish the role of values in design criticism and critical design and illustrate how values can be incorporated into both activities through the development and application of design spaces. We propose that the method developed and tested by us could be used by others for identifying, evaluating, documenting, and sharing design rationale.

Towards Development of a Reference Architecture for E-government

The implementation of E-government projects faces a number of challenges and failure. Conducted literature review shows that majority of E-government projects fails, either totally or partially, due to unfitted design of the projects. Case studies report that the experience with E-government initiatives are disorganized, unsuccessful, and yet countries are striving for sound E-government adoption. One of the main reasons for the problem is the absence of a comprehensive, and well-founded reference architecture that would save governments a lot of time, research, money and failures. This study demonstrates a need for creating a sound reference architecture where key components (building blocks) are well-identified. This architecture will not merely help the governments to design and implement solid E-government projects, but it also allows them to build on the experiences of others and implement a reliable E-government infrastructure based on existing best practices.

Modelling Trust: An Empirical Assessment

Trust has shown to be a key factor influencing user uptake and acceptance of technologies. Despite the increase in interest in trust research and its stated importance in HCI, prior research has mainly focused on understanding its role in human to human interactions mediated through technology. The ongoing and rapid technological developments have made it necessary to move beyond studying trust relationships between people mediated by information technology IT and focus on studying the relationship of the user with the IT artifact itself. We recognize that HCI discipline lacks a focused body of knowledge on trust and there is a lack of theoretically grounded and robust psychometric instruments for quantifying trust. With this in mind, this article is aimed at empirically evaluating a socio-technical model of trust so as to assess its feasibility in user technology interactions. Using prior established measures and theories, we identify seven trust attributes and test the proposed model using partial least square structural equation modelling PLS-SEM. Our study contributes to the literature by advancing the discussion of trust in human-artefact relationship.

The Influence of Trust on User Interactions in e-Transaction Platforms: The Context of a Developing Country

This paper reports recent findings which aims at informing design ideas and identifying characteristics that could help to develop e-transaction applications and systems that promotes perceived trust. To accomplish our goals, we employed the socio-technical model of trust by Sousa et al. [26], to on one hand determine if users’ trust such e-payment system hosted by a third party company outside well known financial institutions (banks); then we further investigate how to incorporate trust into the platform. And on the other hand, as a design critique to establish bespoke visual clues that promotes perceived trust in the system and inform the system of potential pitfalls in their service design. A questionnaire was deployed to 500 current users of the platform and 106 valid responses were received. Our findings indicated that the trust features of concern to users are willingness, competency, predictability and benevolence with exception to honesty, reciprocity and motivation. Results presented are part of an ongoing research on trust related characteristics that should be tackled when designing and deploying e-transaction platforms in developing countries.

Information Seeking Behaviour of Scholars Using Resource Discovery Systems

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise how academics seek information relevant to their work or study in an academic library context. To accomplish our goals, we involved several stakeholders to better elicit their information seeking behavioural patterns. In this paper we perform a user test which allows us to establish customised information seeking models, which conceptualise the behavioural activity patterns of academic scholars from the information need stage until the termination of the search activity. We also propose suitable user requirements using personas as contextual settings, which might be helpful for informing the design and development of such systems.

Readiness of Afghan government for the deployment of e-government solutions

Evidence exist that e-Governance can facilitate the delivery of information and services needed by stakeholders, citizens, and decision makers in a cost-effective, efficient, and streamlined way; representing a possible solution for some developing countries, such as Afghanistan. As so emerges the need for deliver services and provide access to information in a seamless way. Being the first step to interconnect e-service applications and make them interoperate in all governmental institutions. Or go beyond methodologies for deployment of interoperability frameworks, and extend governance best practices to include various stages and activities for provision of e-services. This article aims to discuss the readiness of Afghan government for deploying e-government services and solutions. It uses Ministry of Education as a particular case study.