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In DSM and nanometer technology, there will present more and more new fault types, which are difficult to predict and avoid. Applying fault tolerant algorithms to achieve reliable on-chip communication is one of the most important issues of Network-on-Chip (NoC). This paper reviews the main on-chip fault tolerant communication algorithms and then proposes a new routing algorithm with end-to-end feedback. The average transmission latency, power consumption and reliability are compared with other techniques. As experiments show, the proposed algorithm has lower latency, lower power consumption compared with those of others, and it can provide high reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European research project INT-MANUS embedded in the I*PROMS European network of excellence addresses the increasing demand for flexibility and adaptivity, which is summarized by rapid reconfigurations of complete factories as well as related aspects in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Software, and Production Systems. The project's main goal is to develop a new technology for the production plants of the future, the Smart Connected Control Platform (SCCP). This platform allows controlling a factory with the help of an open distributed learning agent platform that integrates machines, robots, and human personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DiFac is an IST research project (FP6-2005-IST-5-035079) funded by the European Commission within the 6th Framework Programme priority called "Collaborative Working Environment". The project aims to develop an innovative Collaborative Manufacturing Environment (CME) for the next generation of Digital Factory in order to support the competitiveness of SMEs. A digital factory represents a persistent hybrid community where a rich virtualised environment representing a variety of factory activities will facilitate the sharing of factory resources, manufacturing information and knowledge, and help the simulation of collaborative design, planning, production and management among different participants and departments. The DiFac CME will be used as a framework to support group work in an immersive and interactive way for three manufacturing activities: product development; factory design and analysis; and training of workers. Furthermore it will provide support for data analysis, visualization, advanced interaction and presence within the VE, ergonomics analysis and collaborative decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is classified into two mainstream technologies; CDMA2000 and CDMA-TDD (Code Division Multiple Access with Time Division Duplex mode). Specifically, in China, the CDMA-TDD mode has been used as the standard of 3G mobile network system. In this paper, we investigate the performance of automatic protection switching (APS) of CDMA-TDD wireless communication system, where APS is the familiar technology to guarantee highly reliable communication networks such as an asynchronous transfer mode network. We develop a stochastic model based on a continuous-time Markov chain for the CDMA-TDD wireless communication system with APS, and derive some related quantitative performance measures in terms of Quality of Service (QoS). Throughout numerical experiments, we examine how the design of APS and network affects the performance measures quantitatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User interface events, resulting from the normal operations of a window-based application, provide crucial information for usability evaluation. Since user interface events are extremely voluminous and rich in detail, automated capture tools are required. With the intent to support usability evaluation in early development phases, such a tool must meet two basic criteria: acquiring relevant usability information at the desirable level of abstraction and adaptable to continuous changes in the user interface. Here, we propose an aspect-oriented approach to capturing user interface events. As the user interacts with an application through its user interface, user interface events occur in various components across the application. Aspects allow capturing select user interface events in a self-contained fashion without imposing undesirable constraints on the target application. We demonstrate in this paper that our approach is a suitable one for early usability evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of analysis strategies and design methodologies are widely applied to accommodate uncertainties in engineering design. Generally there exist two different types of uncertainties in practice, aleatory uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. When data and information are very limited, the probabilistic methodology may not be appropriate. Among several alternative tools, possibility theory is proved to be a computationally efficient and stable tool to handle incomplete information. In this paper, we first introduce two issues concerned with possibilistic approaches: reliability analysis and design optimization. Then the type of uncertainties in these issues are explained with emphasis on the epistemic uncertainty. After that, this paper presents both theoretical development and computational improvement of possibility theory in recent years. More details are given to reveal the capability and characteristics of quantified uncertainty from different aspects. In the end, future research directions are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product evaluation throughout various stages of a design process is crucial to the final product's success, and this may be a costly, time consuming and logistically complex process. Currently there are limited product design evaluation tools available to provide better support to the whole product design and development process. Virtual reality (VR) has matured to become useful technology to support efficient and effective product design and development applications. This paper reports an investigation on applying VR technologies to computer aided product evaluation. The research work has concentrated on: i) investigating the potential of emerging VR based technologies such as three dimensional (3D) haptic interaction and 3D stereoscopic viewing, ii) integrating and implementing these VR based technologies into a computer aided product evaluation application and iii) exploring the efficiency and effectiveness of these VR based technologies in comparison with traditional techniques used during the product design evaluation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of social information, the application of distributed database system is increasing. Distributed data mining will play an important role in data mining, because distributed database system is different from centralized database system. We need to develop special algorithm for data mining on distributed database. Although current algorithms of association rules based on apriori have been optimized to a certain extend, we still have more work to do to increase its efficiency. This paper analyzes and introduces the algorithm for mining distributed association rules, and puts forward a new method for distributed data mining based on similarity which takes the heterogenous data source well into account. Finally the experiment also proves the increased veracity of this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of the underlying storage subsystems for multimedia applications faces significant challenges for capability Ahigh I/O performance and availability requirements. A RAID system is defined as a storage system that distributes data redundantly across array of disks and can provide high throughput as well as higher availability. In this paper, we present a novel cache scheme (for short Stripe-cache) for building a multimedia oriented RAID system. This efficient stripe-cache has the following innovations: (1) Hierarchy architecture with different block structure according to the underlying data layout that exploits temporal locality and spatial locality (2) Timing-transfer and replacing scheme forwardly move data block in cache for special efficiency. We built up the multimedia oriented RAID system as a device driver module upon the X86-Linux platform with the stripe-cache. Evaluation results show that the system can offer much higher I/O performance in handling multimedia applications than lots of conventional storage systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to support fast, freedom and natural multi-user interaction, a replicated framework for collaborative design of 3D solid model is presented. The framework combines general collaborative problems with special challenges from 3D design. In consistency maintain of multi-user interaction, an extended event order of operations is studied to integrate causal order and independent order based on semantic analysis of 3D design. A special consistency problem, the name consistency, is analyzed. A collaborative naming mechanism is provided with a case study. The proposed method will constructed the footstone to take the potential advantages of replicated 3D collaborative design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D modeling applications are widely used in many application domains ranging from CAD to industrial or graphics design. Desktop environments have proven to be a powerful user interface for such tasks. However, the raising complexity of 3D dataset exceeds the possibilities provided by traditional devices or two-dimensional display. Thus, more natural and intuitive interfaces are required. But in order to get the users' acceptance technology-driven solutions that require inconvenient instrumentation, e.g., stereo glasses or tracked gloves, should be avoided. Autostereoscopic display environments in combination with 3D desktop devices enable users to experience virtual environments more immersive without annoying devices. In this paper we introduce interaction strategies with special consideration of the requirements of 3D modelers. We propose an interscopic display environment with implicated user interface strategies that allow displaying and interacting with both mono-, e.g., 2D elements, and stereoscopic content, which is beneficial for the 3D environment, which has to be manipulated. These concepts are discussed with special consideration of the requirements of 3D modeler and designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main task of operators in the modern nuclear power station is to monitor and control the processes related to power production and safety. In order to efficiently support operators' tasks the human-system interface should, e.g., support awareness of the process and collaboration with different stakeholders. In a Finnish project, Novel Affordances of Smart Environments, the aim is to develop an interaction concept and a prototype for more efficient and effective operation of complex industrial processes. The central element in this is "Affordance Table" which is equipped with innovative smart artefacts based on, e.g., tangible computing and virtual reality applications. In the present theoretical paper we first present a conceptual model and definition of Affordance Table based on James Gibson's ecological theory. After that, suggestions are made for a combination of smart tools to be applied for supporting the monitoring and control of the power process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the progress of Internet technology and the increase of distributed information on networks, the present knowledge management has been based more and more on the performance of various experienced users. In addition to the increase of electronic documents, the use of paper documents has not been reduced because of their convenience. This paper describes a method of tracking paper document locations and contents using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This research also focused on the expression of a task process and the seamless structuring of related electronic and paper documents as a result of task knowledge formalization using information organizing. A system is proposed here that implements information organization for both Web documents and paper documents with the task model description and RFID technology. Examples of a prototype system are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to extraction the product form features, the Web-based feature database system was carried out and the feature cognition space was constructed. The form feature information was analysed and processed through Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), hierarchical clustering and morphological analysis technology. To enhance the efficiency of the automatic conceptual design, the interactive evolutionary design system (IEDS) based on the Orthogonal Interactive Genetic Algorithm (OIGA) in form design was advanced. With this method, the genetic convergence effects are improved and users' fatigues are alleviated by means of simplifying the solution space orthogonally, communizing the fitness evaluation and visualizing the project interface. Example results indicate the improved IEDS was more feasible and reasonable than the simple IEDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution presents an approach for a scientific driving simulator platform for the representation and evaluation of new driver assistance and information systems. We will give a short introduction to the used gaming engine and then present the developed components of our new driving simulation platform. For a most realistic driving behavior, we implemented an own physics-component basing on a real vehicle model. Further, the platform provides the opportunity to easily create new scenarios depending on the test setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering changes, whether it is desirable or undesirable, incur cost and delay in schedule. It should be avoided as much as possible and change management strategy should be chosen as to minimize the overall cost. This paper proposes a method to represent change propagation and formulate change absorbing problem into mathematical programming. Solution to the mathematical problem can lead to optimal change absorbing strategy that minimizes overall cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our daily life, human beings tend to use both hands to accomplish complex tasks, but not to computers. However, multi-touch technology allows users to control all objects on the screen with more than just one finger. Therefore, how designers can take advantage of such technology and explore its potentials? So we propose a multi-touch interface builder called MToolKit for easy and effective construction of multi-touch interface for designers. By using camera-based sensor framework, we further analyze the multi-touch examples available for the interactive patterns. With these analysis and design requirement for building up an interface builder for designers, we conduct a two-point input and implemented them into our system called MToolkit. MToolkit was implemented by java and based on processing programming environment and a video processing C++ library with java wrapper. An example of using our MToolkit is elaborated in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Scenario Based Design (Rosson & Carroll, 2003) and Micro Scenario Method (Kurosu, 2006), and analyzed the both methodological scenario making processes. In Scenario Based Design, the four making steps are proposed: (1) problem scenario, (2) activity scenario, (3) information scenario, and (4) interaction scenario. In addition, Micro Scenario Method developed two steps of scenario making: (1) problem micro scenario, and (2) solution micro scenario. These methodologies are useful when we consider the human centered design for making products. However, in a pragmatic use case, especially for product designers, it is difficult to visualize the images and ideas taken from the Scenario Based Design and Micro Scenario Method. Based on our analysis, we proposed a new method that is development of scenario method and visual formats for Design Process. The feature of this method is to draw rough sketch and illustration to describe the ideas. Hence, the question which we must consider next is usefulness of this method. Here, we conduct a experiment for testing the programmatic applicability of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We will describe a field test and its evaluation of a truly novel type of mobile computer programs that will assist foreign tourists in their communication with Chinese people. The software is an electronic phrase book and a translation aid but at the same time a powerful multilingual information system connected to numerous services via the Internet. It effectively helps visitors to navigate through the streets, temples and shopping centres of the Beijing megalopolis. It was developed in the German-Chinese project COMPASS 2008, a research action within the Digital Olympics framework. The subjects of the field test were fifteen tourists from seven countries. The test concentrated on usability and acceptance. The applied methodology adapts recognized standards and widely accepted best practice to the specific application type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2006, the Human-centered Design Organization (HCD-Net) began advocating the utility of the HCD process for web systems developers. In this project, we focused on the "move-in/move-out" procedures services of local-government web sites and identified sites of excellent usability. This document reports on the history and findings of the project, and suggests tasks for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of the conscious experience of love is a puzzle to people all around the world. Many of us want to understand our love in order to make it more sustainable. An application developed for this purpose is presented in this paper: Rose is a self-evaluation application that aims to help individuals evaluate and understand the many dimensions of their love. Rose is freely available on the Internet. In this paper, we summarize the results of everybody who has taken part in the on-line self-evaluation using this application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research into Mobile Information and Entertainment Services in recent years. This study explored the effect of mobile service quality and its compatibility to mobile technology on users' perceived playfulness toward these services. Perceived Service Quality and Perceived Technology Compatibility were found to influence users' Perceived Playfulness. Furthermore, Perceived Technology Compatibility significantly mediated the relationship between Perceived Service Quality and Perceived Playfulness. This suggests that service attributes need to be aligned with mobile phone functionalities to enhance user's Perceived Playfulness. In addition, Perceived Usefulness, Ease of Use and Personalization were the three most important service quality aspects that influenced Perceived Playfulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a framework for emotional interface where a method for emotional interface evaluation is purposed and the emotion eliciting conditions in online graphic interfaces are explored. Those eliciting conditions are concerning the design elements of an online storytelling system. For the purposes of the evaluation two online storytelling interfaces are compared: a plain user friendly interface versus animated with images interface. The results are analyzed for the user's emotional responses as well as for the user's feedback on the functionality of the interfaces. It is shown that users find "positive emotion" web sites more functional, than the non emotional ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile work in an exposed physical working environment, e.g. in the building industry, challenges the design and use of mobile services. So far, we have seen little or no use of mobile technology on the building sites. This research presents and discusses ideas for mobile services that were created and explored by the workers on building sites. The ideas originate from three ethnographical studies accomplished in 2003-2006. The studies covered different phases i.e. understanding the field, prototyping in the field and deploying in the field. In total we suggest 23 ideas that cover a wide range of mobile services like building work, logistics, health and safety, quality assurance, communication and access to information. These ideas bridge the gap between the building sites and the headquarters. Further, we see a special and interesting potential of the mobile services that aim to avoid discontinuities during work and that aim to improve or replace paper-based routines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, more and more attention is being paid to emotions in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. However, there has been little research that focuses on the relation between emotions and usability or 'web design'. In this context, we examined the correlation between the emotions of the user and the usability of the applications he or she is working with. The main findings reveal that there does not exist a connection between web design and emotions. To some extent, computer and internet experience correlate with the user's emotions. Finally, our results show that there is no significant connection between the application's content and the user's emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent development has suggested a multi-dimensional approach in understanding social presence. Based on environmental psychology literature and prior research on social presence, we propose three dimensions of social presence, i.e., sensory, affective and cognitive, and examine its effect on virtual community participation with a partial mediation of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The research model was empirically tested with a survey involving 430 individuals. The empirical results provided strong support for the multi-dimensional conceptualization of social presence and clarified the effects of various social presence dimensions on participation. But we did not find significant mediating effects of motivational factors. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information security is a great concern to computer users, which is not only a technical problem, but also related to human factors. The objective of this study is to investigate the factors that can influence people's perception of different threats to information security. In the survey study, 602 respondents were asked to evaluate one of 21 common threats to information security with regard to its position on each of the 20 threat-related items. An exploratory factor analysis was then conducted, and a six-factor structure modeling people's perception of different threats to information security was derived. The relations between the factors and the perceived overall danger of threats were also tested by multiple regression analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple viewed search engine presented here retrieves documents of an indicated search area and displays a matrix of the distribution of the clustering from two aspects of the retrieval result. The search engine provides a visual and semantic bird's-eye view of the entire retrieval result. In addition, the characteristic words of each cluster are displayed in the matrix, and supports narrowing of the search. Furthermore, it is possible to immediately change the analysis criteria or the number of clusters and to use a zooming function. Thus, various retrieval conditions for a query can be attempted immediately and continuously. As a case study, this paper performs several analyses on the electronic journal Zoological Science using a multiple viewed search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to develop a measurement of search result relevance for Chinese queries through comparing four Chinese search engines (A, B, C, D). The relevance measurement was First N method and statistical test. By blind evaluating of first 10 search results, four indexes such as average precisions within first n results (P @ n), hit rate within n results (H @ n), mean dead link rate within n results (MD @ n) and mean reciprocal rank of first relevant document (MRR1 @ n) were figured out. The results implied that except for MD @ n engine C was better, the other three indexes engine A were the best. However, by statistical analyzing, it indicated that there were no significant difference of the P @ n, H @ n and MRR1 @ n among the four engines except for the index MD @ n. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a hybrid methodology to study users in ongoing relationships based on three levels of user data analysis. Most user-centered design methods are ideal for the analysis of users' needs, wants, and expectations at a specific point in time. However, nowadays, most online applications and services have recurrent users whose characteristics might vary not only over time but also depending on the task they want to accomplish and the context in which they are accomplishing it. Therefore, the common user research methods are not adequate for providing long term feedback. Our three-level approach methodology combines qualitative and quantitative data for analyzing user behavior over an extended period of time. The present study is based on an e-learning environment, which is a great example of a website with recurrent users whose behavior changes over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a wearable and handheld Intelligent Gadget (IG). IG is a prototype system for implementing a concept of personalized smart object defined in SPOT. we design and implement a personal life logger and belonging monitor using IGN which provides interaction among IGs for supporting real-time online logging of personal life log and dynamic reconfiguration of personalized services. We also propose a reliable data transmission method within IGN based on ZigBee network, and show performance analysis through an experiment of transferring JPEG data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on ubiquitous computing in homes has tended to focus on system-oriented issues such as automated controls and sensor networks. In contrast, this paper reports on research oriented to families living in homes. Handling and sharing memories stored on external media is difficult within current homes, though sharing memories, and communicating through them is an important part of family life. Relevant data is often kept in digital storage and infrequently accessed if at all. We have established design principles and developed the following prototype interfaces within the home that increase interactions amongst family members: TimeAfterMirror; PushPull; MemoryBubbles; Asnaro. These prototypes jointly form a system for dealing with family memories. This system can be used to capture, organize, review representations of past events, and support communication. These prototypes were demonstrated within a home-like environment at an exhibition in Tokyo in November 2006. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have performed a Web-based survey to analyze a variety of services provided via mobile devices, and we studied how the usage of mobile Internet services is influencing the life behavior of mobile users. The survey was targeted to young generation users in their 20's-early 30's, who are main users of mobile Internet services. Mobile services are categorized into Entertainment, m-Commerce, and Information Service in this work. In total, 236 users participated in the survey. We reviewed the current usage status of mobile services and analyzed how each service affected users' mobile life behavior. The results of this paper illustrate that "Mobile e-mail," "Listening to music," "Travel information," and so on have a significant influence on users' mobile life behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our goal is an interface that allows novice users to browse and enjoy Web contents as easily as they can watch TV. Given this goal, Web page contents should be converted into fully-animated TV-like audio/visual contents, taking users' mental situation into consideration. Moreover, this paper focuses on generating adaptive Web page presentation according to the emotional parameters. To get the user's interest and attention, we utilize two robots which can speak. In order to develop conversions that take account of the user's mental situation, we performed two step surveys. First, the emotional impressions of primitive audio/visual effects were investigated. Second, the effect of the combinations of robot and primitive effects was investigated. The first experiment yielded a 'situation composition grammar;' given an emotional situation, the appropriate audio/visual effects can be selected. The second experiment suggested that presentation media components exhibit mutual interaction. We implemented a prototype and subjectively evaluated it. The results confirm the effectiveness and validity of our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal stories make our everyday experiences memorable over time. This paper presents 'Everyday Mediated Storytelling', a model of the casual storyteller's process of capturing, creating and sharing personal mediated narratives. Based on this model, an online authoring and publishing application for sharing everyday rich-media narratives named 'Confectionary' was developed. Results from a lengthy study with a group of committed users signify the success of the Confectionary system as an engaging everyday tool for personal storytelling that stimulated self-reflection, broadened the scope of storytelling strategies demonstrated by its users and supported active audience interpretation. The model, methodology, and system presented in this paper provide a basis for understanding how we move fluidly between our direct experiences, our cognitive and emotional reflections and our storied representations and interpretations. This paper also demonstrates how a spatial everyday authoring and publishing application advances the digital storytelling process from one of media collection to one of storied reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lot of work & research has been done in HCI supervision-type industrial context, but mostly relative to control rooms and local supervision. However, many multi-site or extended and complex organisations are faced with some new challenges and trends such as supervisory systems integration and unified access of the different actors which have not been much considered so far. A service oriented solution is outlined and explained in the context of industrial supervision oriented towards to a unified and integrated supervisory HCI design. A representative supervisory scenario taken from a real case study which illustrates the approach is then described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the outcomes of a research carried out in collaboration with the BT Mobility Research Centre and the National Institute of Design in India, aimed of understanding appropriate applications for the use of mobile phones as leisure multimedia devices for nomadic users such as commuters and travellers. This work intended to go beyond the use of mobile devices to broadcast of TV or download of music, video clips, paying special attention to the contextual usage of this media and trying to solve some unsolved issues for these interfaces as the low sociability, creativity, contextual sensitivity and interaction that so far they enable. It prospects a use of mobile interactive multimedia systems in future communication scenarios in which users can create and share self-authored & contextual digital content. Websites such as YouTube, AOL and Yahoo providing access to personal videos that have been taken using webcams, video cameras or mobile phones, evidence an emerging trend where users become authors of multimedia content. This selfauthored content production is finding application in different areas: information (travel, finance, mortgages, cooking, culture, health, etc), entertainment (sports, gossips, performance, etc), government, commerce, etc. For example, BeenThere and TheWorldisnotFlat are user generated travel sites where people can share tips about places to go on holiday. Moreover, some major newspapers like The Guardian, use this content in their Travel section. Furthermore, other more structured websites link the videos to specific places - using, for example, Google maps - enabling users to locate the videos in a map, relating the self-authored content to a specific context. Another interesting example of self-authored content is http://www.wefeelfine.org, which is an 'exploration of human emotion on a global scale', or in other words, a navigation among different people's feelings (self-authored texts, sounds, pictures or videos) and emotions in the past few hours. These feelings are organized by the users into six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.User centered design methodologies that take effectively into account peripatetic users interacting in their real contexts are crucial in order to identify realistic scenarios and applications for pervasive interactive multimedia systems that provide positive user experiences. This article supports the statement that handhelds due to intrinsic attributes such as friendly multimedia production tools (video, pictures and text mainly), ubiquitous presence, communication capabilities and nimbleness to dialog with surrounding platforms such as iTV, PCs, PDAs, in-car-navigators and smart-house deployments, are highly plausible tools to support users' creation and distribution of self-authored multimedia content in pervasive communication scenarios. This paper explores the futures 870 A. Cereijo Roibás, N. Sabnani, and R. Sala of pervasive interactive multimedia systems, and in particular the user experience related to the generation and publishing, broadcasting and narrowcasting of self-authored multimedia content through mobile devices. For this scope, it analyzes some traditional storytelling methods and tools, specially the kavaad - that is still in use in Rajasthan, India - in order to understand mechanisms can be the most suitable for storytelling self-production and sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To design for positive web experience designers require an understanding of what factors elicit specific affective or cognitive responses. To gather user perceptions, which may offer insight for future objective exploration, an online survey asked five open ended questions regarding user perception of design aspects associated with a range of affective and cognitive states; specifically what stimulates web user's curiosity and creativity, what challenges their abilities, what surprises them and what alters their sense of time. The majority of responses can be categorized as either usability or design factors, but 17.4% cannot and warrant further exploration to determine their utility for designing optimal user experience. Results also indicate that for each of the states there are trends in the responses, suggesting that certain aspects of web interface design elicit specific reactions. These aspects should be explored and applied if designers want to encourage pleasurable website experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to unobtrusively observe users' interactions on web browsers for the measurement of users' interest. Moreover, the observation should be performed on the client side in real time, because the contents of web pages are dynamically subject to change in the current Internet environment. In this paper, we suggest a simple method of inferring a user's interest for web contents by monitoring the amount of processed GUI messages while the user is reading a web page. We developed a software module that runs behind the Internet Explorer and monitors the number of processed GUI messages, the viewing time and the size of a web page. We found that the number of processed GUI messages, when properly normalized by the size of a web page, is close correlated with a user's interest for web contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In face of the diversified individual and collective requirements of Web applications, we argue that the Web interfaces should be flexible enough to adapt or to be adapted to each usage context. We draw on the idea of Tailoring to design for flexibility. However, due to the additional effort to provide flexibility, usually the construction of a tailorable application results on higher costs and complex solutions. The objective of this work is to provide developers and designers with a framework to support the development of tailorable Web applications. This framework is based on a normative approach to describe the volatile requirements including social and pragmatics aspects of the system usage. In the paper we discuss the theoretical basis, describe the framework, and provide short examples of how to use it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of three selected elements (colors, fonts and locations) of physical consistency of a Website interface on performance and satisfaction of users. An experiment was conducted using an Arabic Website, where three physically inconsistent designs of the Website according to each of the selected elements of physical consistency were used as independent variables, and a consistent design was used for control. Subjects were instructed to perform a number of common Web tasks in the Websites. Two performance variables (dependent variables) were measured: tasks completion time and number of errors. Satisfaction level was also recorded. Results showed that both the fonts element and the locations element have a significant effect on number of errors. The locations element and the colors element have a subjectively significant effect on satisfaction. None of the three elements has a significant effect on completion times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to bring forward the idea of the role of cognitive styles in groupware acceptance. The study examines the role of cognitive styles and other TAM variables and predicts the role of cognitive styles in influencing the usage of groupware. A simple random sampling method was used in this study and 109 respondents were participated who are from Administrative staff in Universiti Teknologi Mara, Shah Alam (Uitm), Selangor. A theoretical framework from information system (Technology Acceptance Model) was based for this study and cognitive styles as external variables. The goal for studying cognitive styles in groupware acceptance is to understand how user process information and how systems can be better built to accommodate the diversity of the population. Due to this, it leads the understanding of the individual differences in groupware acceptance specifically in making a decision to change. The results indicate that cognitive styles do affect ease of use and usefulness; unfortunately it does not significant lead to the usage of the system. This result will help system designers in creating the interface design and etc. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's collaborative working environment requires real-time control and monitoring of business processes which involve participants with different roles and responsibilities. Therefore, a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) system should provide personalized monitoring capabilities. The purpose of this paper is to develop a personalized BAM system. We have identified functional requirements of the system and then develop a system design. Implementation of the design is also provided on top of a commercial BAM solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brainstorming is a commonly used method for diffusion thinking in early design stage. While the communication between two participants is blocked with isolated communication boundaries, the ideas are often transferred via a propagated interaction process among design team participants. The paper describes an organization-communication method to study the interaction between designers and design teams using act/react characteristics of role-interplay. Adapting a role-play framework called DARIS; a particular controlling agent called Playwright Agent is developed and used for implementing the adaptive scripts. Furthermore, by simulating the interconnecting process among discrete communication boundaries, the interaction and controlling mechanism of Playwright Agent is also unleashed in the paper. The mechanism and the agent implementation of proposed framework, namely DARIS +  is shown to represent the interaction as well as their consequence. An example for describing how Playwright Agent works is also shown in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprises are investing a great amount to utilize information systems. These investments are expected to increase worker productivity and thus bring forth a considerable amount of profit to the enterprise. Given this situation, there are many studies being conducted on the relation between IT investment and an increase in individual productivity. This study deals with more general enterprise information systems, and has the objective of developing a model to assess the user's utilization of the enterprise information systems. Using the User competency evaluation model as the basis, the assessment model uses User's EIS basic knowledge, general application, master application, personality as the measurement areas, and utilizes a different measurement method for the different categories taking into account the characteristics of each category. Also, in order to test the validity and credibility of the assessment model, we applied a case among approximately 18,000 female employees of Korea's representative automobile companies. As a result, all of the measured categories with the exception of User's EIS Personality were proven to be valid and credible. The User's EIS Personality is an index that is more prone to be affected by the individual characteristics of the user, and thus requires further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many hospital appliance PCs, Notebooks and PDAs used in clinical but they have several limitations. Tablet PCs combine the advantages and improved disadvantages of these media, but are not widely used in the clinical. ‘Scenario observation‘ is an approach for product development processes. Its basic theorem is ‘user-orientated design (UOD)‘. During the development process ‘visualization‘ and ‘actual experience‘ methods are employed to guide developers from the user's point of view and scenario to evaluate the maturity and ‘completeness‘ of a product. Therefore the purpose of this study has been to use ‘scenario observation‘ approach to define the design strategy for medical Tablet PC applications. The results of this study indicate that the ‘hospitalized-placed‘ nurse has more demand than other medical workers. Accordingly, there are 10 proposed design demands concerning medical Tablet PCs. Current medical Tablet PCs do not fully understand or satisfy medical workers' demands therefore using user ‘scenario observation‘ surveys will help to define better design strategies and better medical Tablet PC applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to support the management of the offshore projects, HOPE (Hitachi Offshore Project Examiner) is developed based on some open source tools. HOPE can automatically collect the raw project data, organize them in the database, calculate the different data granularities, analyze the project indexes, detect the exception/release information according to some specified rules, and generate the HTML reports for the offshore projects. Furthermore, HOPE can be executed periodically according to the schedule specified by the user. To ensure HOPE adapt to the different users, an extensible plug-in architecture is designed. Both the data collection and the project diagnosis are implemented by the customizable plug-ins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative workspaces are in dire need of elegant floor control policies, resolving and preventing conflicts without interrupting the dynamic workflow. Our approach employs the user's roles and focus to extend existing solutions. Roles define a user's responsibilities and privileges during a particular activity; tracking the users' focus provides a means of improving mutual awareness within a multi-user setting. Furthermore, in combination with document properties such as content type and sensitivity, roles make up an effective access control system. We apply the approach to a co-located group of users, interacting simultaneously on a collaborative shared display, which results in graceful (e.g. correct in a socio-organizational context) conflict handling and access to shared data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air traffic controllers use visual displays to interact with various automation systems. Information complexity in those systems may cause controllers to miss or misinterpret visual data, thereby reducing safety. The purpose of this study was to answer three basic questions: 1) What constitutes information complexity in automation displays? 2) How complex is "too complex" for controllers? 3) Can we objectively measure information complexity in the displays? We first developed a general framework for measuring information complexity. The framework reduces the concept of complexity into three underlying factors: quantity, variety, and the relations between basic information elements; each factor is evaluated at three generic stages of human information processing: perception, cognition, and action. We then developed nine metrics of display complexity, each measuring the effects of a complexity factor on information processing at a given stage. These metrics provide an objective method to evaluate automation displays for acquisition and design prototypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced business applications like enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) are characterized by a high degree of complexity in data, functionality, and processes. This paper examines some decisive causes and their implications on software configuration and user interaction specifically. A case study on SAP®'s R/3® Sales & Distribution module exemplifies complexity in order management systems and documents its impact on the user experience. We emphasize the need to shield users appropriately from underlying system complexity to provide a convenient and simple to use software tool. Several approaches to address this goal are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]