User-centered video quality assessment for scalable video coding of H.264/AVC standard

Scalable video coding of H.264/AVC standard enables adaptive and flexible delivery for multiple devices and various network conditions. Only a few works have addressed the influence of different scalability parameters (frame rate, spatial resolution, and SNR) on the user perceived quality within a limited scope. In this paper, we have conducted an experiment of subjective quality assessment for video sequences encoded with H.264/SVC to gain a better understanding of the correlation between video content and UPQ at all scalable layers and the impact of rate-distortion method and different scalabilities on bitrate and UPQ. Findings from this experiment will contribute to a user-centered design of adaptive delivery of scalable video stream.

Driving toward user-centered engineering in automotive design

In an industry worth more than €500 billion annually, producing more than 80 million vehicles worldwide each year and consisting of over 50 major manufacturers worldwide, the automotive industry represents a lucrative but highly competitive manufacturing industry (Deloitte, 2009a; European Automobile Manufacturers Association, 2012). With sales falling in Europe in 2013 for the sixth consecutive year (Boston and Curtin, 2014), automotive manufacturers are increasingly turning to new strategies to retain their share of sales in a contracting market. Some strategies have focused on the industry approach to manufacturing, namely, a technically focused push for a build-toorder process rather than the current build-to-stock approach in order to reduce overall value-chain costs and to increase efficiency (Parry and Roehrich, 2013, p. 13). However, others stress a more customer-orientated approach, striving to develop products that meet customer requirements (Oliver Wyman Group, 2007).

Cipher cities : effective user interface design for building a digital social network around location-based gaming

In this paper we explore what is required of a User Interface (UI) design in order to encourage participation around playing and creating Location-Based Games (LBGs). To base our research in practice, we present Cipher Cities, a web based system. Through the design of this system, we investigate how UI design can provide tools for complex content creation to compliment and encourage the use of mobile phones for designing, distributing, and playing LBGs. Furthermore we discuss how UI design can promote and support socialisation around LBGs through the design of functional interface components and services such as groups, user profiles, and player status listings.

User interface design for social web theme and opinion analysis

The Social Web is a torrent of real-time information and an emerging discipline is now focussed on harnessing this information flow for analysis of themes, opinions and sentiment. This short paper reports on early work on designing better user interfaces for end users in manipulating the outcomes from these analysis engines.

CubIT : Large-scale multi-user presentation and collaboration

CubIT is a multi-user, large-scale presentation and collaboration framework installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility, an interactive facility made up 48 multi-touch screens and very large projected display screens. CubIT was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. The system allows users to upload, interact with and share media content on the Cube’s very large display surfaces. CubIT implements a unique combination of features including RFID authentication, content management through multiple interfaces, multi-user shared workspace support, drag and drop upload and sharing, dynamic state control between different parts of the system and execution and synchronisation of the system across multiple computing nodes.

Making sense of purpose, direction and innovation : an embedded design led innovation case study in the Australian mining industry

The mining equipment technology services sector is driven by a reactive and user-centered design approach, with a technological focus on incremental new product development. As Australia moves out of its sustained mining boom, companies need to rethink their strategic position, to become agile to stay relevant in an enigmatic market. This paper reports on the first five months on an embedded case study within an Australian, family-owned mining manufacturer. The first author is currently engaged in a longitudinal design led innovation project, as a catalyst to guide the company’s journey to design integration. The results find that design led innovation could act as a channel for highlighting and exploring company disconnections with the marketplace and offer a customer-centric catalyst for internal change. Data collected for this study is from 12 analysed semistructured interviews, a focus group and a reflective journal, over a five-month period. This paper explores limitations to design integration, and highlights opportunities to explore and leverage entrepreneurial characteristics to stay agile, broaden innovation and future-proof through the next commodity cycle in the mining industry.

Cross-cultural web user interface design for Indigenous internet users

This project investigated 1) Australian web designers’ cultural perceptions towards Australian Indigenous users and 2) Australian Indigenous cultural features in terms of user interface design. In doing so, it reviews the literature of cross-cultural user interface design by focusing on feasible models and arguments to articulate and integrate Australian Indigenous Internet users’ cultural needs of web user interface. The online survey results collected from 101 Indigenous users and 126 Web designers showed a distinctive difference between them on the integration of Indigenous users' cultural in Web sites. The interview data collected from 14 Indigenous users and 14 web designers suggested practical approaches to the design implications of Indigenous culture.

User centred design for engineering e-government web usability

E-government provides a platform for governments to implement web enabled services that facilitate communication between citizens and the government. However, technology driven design approach and limited understanding of citizens' requirements, have led to a number of critical usability problems on the government websites. Hitherto, there has been no systematic attempt to analyse the way in which theory of User Centred Design (UCD) can contribute to address the usability issues of government websites. This research seeks to fill this gap by synthesising perspectives drawn from the study of User Centred Design and examining them based on the empirical data derived from case study of the Scottish Executive website. The research employs a qualitative approach in the collection and analysis of data. The triangulated analysis of the findings reveals that e-government web designers take commercial development approach and focus only on technical implementations which lead to websites that do not meet citizens' expectations. The research identifies that e-government practitioners can overcome web usability issues by transferring the theory of UCD to practice.

Making usability affordable in the design of e-government services: User-centred design for public sector websites

E-government provides a platform for governments to implement web-enabled services that facilitate communication between citizens and the government. However, technology-driven design approach and limited understanding of citizens' requirements have led to a number of critical usability problems on the government websites. Hitherto, there has been no systematic attempt to analyse the way in which theory of User-Centred Design (UCD) can contribute to address the usability issues of government websites. This research seeks to fill this gap by synthesising perspectives drawn from the study of UCD and examining them based on the empirical data derived from case study of the Scottish Executive (SE) website. The research employs a qualitative approach in the collection and analysis of data. The triangulated analysis of the findings reveals that e-government web designers take commercial development approach and focus only on technical implementations, which lead to websites that do not meet citizens' expectations. The research identifies that e-government practitioners can overcome web usability issues by transferring the theory of UCD to practice. © Copyright 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Developing a dashboard for real-time data stream composition and visualization

Technological advances have led to an influx of affordable hardware that supports sensing, computation and communication. This hardware is increasingly deployed in public and private spaces, tracking and aggregating a wealth of real-time environmental data. Although these technologies are the focus of several research areas, there is a lack of research dealing with the problem of making these capabilities accessible to everyday users. This thesis represents a first step towards developing systems that will allow users to leverage the available infrastructure and create custom tailored solutions. It explores how this notion can be utilized in the context of energy monitoring to improve conventional approaches. The project adopted a user-centered design process to inform the development of a flexible system for real-time data stream composition and visualization. This system features an extensible architecture and defines a unified API for heterogeneous data streams. Rather than displaying the data in a predetermined fashion, it makes this information available as building blocks that can be combined and shared. It is based on the insight that individual users have diverse information needs and presentation preferences. Therefore, it allows users to compose rich information displays, incorporating personally relevant data from an extensive information ecosystem. The prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to observe its natural use in a real-world setting, gathering empirical usage statistics and conducting semi-structured interviews. The results show that a high degree of customization does not warrant sustained usage. Other factors were identified, yielding recommendations for increasing the impact on energy consumption.

FixVegas : facilitating multi-directional communication between government officials and citizens to support urban planning in the city of Brisbane

The goal of this project was to develop a mobile application for the iOS platform, that would support the partner of this project, the Brisbane City Council, in stronger engage citizens in participating in urban planning and development projects. The resulting application is an extended version of FixVegas, a system that allows citizens to report maintenance request to the Brisbane City Council through their smartphone. The new version of the system makes all incoming requests publicly available within the application, allows users to support, comment or disapprove of these. As an addition, the concept of the idea has been introduced. Citizens can submit suggestions for improving the city to the municipality, discuss them with other fellow citizens and, ideally, also with Council representatives. The city officials as well are provided with the ability of publishing development project as an idea and let citizens deliberate it. This way, bidirectional communication between these two parties is created. A web interface complements the iPhone application. The system has been developed after the principle of User Centered Design, by assessing user needs, creating and evaluating prototypes and conducting a user study. The study showed that FixVegas2 has been perceived as an enhancement compared to the previous version, and that the idea concept has been received on a positive note. Indepth questions, such as the influence the system could have on community dynamics or the public participation in urban planning projects could only hardly investigated. However, these findings can be achieved by the alternative study designs that have been proposed.

Supporting collaboration on very large-scale interactive wall surfaces

In this paper we describe CubIT, a multi-user presentation and collaboration system installed at the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Cube facility. The ‘Cube’ is an interactive visualisation facility made up of five very large-scale interactive multi-panel wall displays, each consisting of up to twelve 55-inch multi-touch screens (48 screens in total) and massive projected display screens situated above the display panels. The paper outlines the unique design challenges, features, implementation and evaluation of CubIT. The system was built to make the Cube facility accessible to QUT’s academic and student population. CubIT enables users to easily upload and share their own media content, and allows multiple users to simultaneously interact with the Cube’s wall displays. The features of CubIT were implemented via three user interfaces, a multi-touch interface working on the wall displays, a mobile phone and tablet application and a web-based content management system. Each of these interfaces plays a different role and offers different interaction mechanisms. Together they support a wide range of collaborative features including multi-user shared workspaces, drag and drop upload and sharing between users, session management and dynamic state control between different parts of the system. The results of our evaluation study showed that CubIT was successfully used for a variety of tasks, and highlighted challenges with regards to user expectations regarding functionality as well as issues arising from public use.

Day in the Lab : Urban Informatics Research Lab, Queensland University of Technology

The Urban Informatics Research Lab brings together a group of people who focus their research on interdisciplinary topics at the intersection of social, spatial, and technical research domains—that is, people, place, and technology. Those topics are spread across the breadth of urban life—its contemporary issues and its needs, as well as the design opportunities that we have as individuals, groups, communities, and as a whole society. The lab’s current research areas include urban planning and design, civic innovation, mobility and transportation, education and connected learning, environmental sustainability, and food and urban agriculture. The common denominator of the lab’s approach is user-centered design research directed toward understanding, conceptualizing, developing, and evaluating sociotechnical practices as well as the opportunities afforded by innovative digital technology in urban environments.

Life is too short to RTFM : how users relate to documentation and excess features in consumer products

This paper addresses two common problems that users of various products and interfaces encounter— over-featured interfaces and product documentation. Over-featured interfaces are seen as a problem as they can confuse and over-complicate everyday interactions. Researchers also often claim that users do not read product documentation, although they are often exhorted to ‘RTFM’(read the field manual).We conducted two sets of studies with users which looked at the issues of both manuals and excess features with common domestic and personal products. The quantitative set was a series of questionnaires administered to 170 people over 7 years. The qualitative set consisted of two 6-month longitudinal studies based on diaries and interviews with a total of 15 participants. We found that manuals are not read by the majority of people, and most do not use all the features of the products that they own and use regularly. Men are more likely to do both than women, and younger people are less likely to use manuals than middle-aged and older ones. More educated people are also less likely to read manuals. Over-featuring and being forced to consult manuals also appears to cause negative emotional experiences. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Consumers' emotional judgement of materials durability and disposal

The literature demonstrates that understanding relating to the use of materials in product design has been investigated from both engineering and design perspectives. However, none of these studies have explored the consumers’ concepts of the materials; rather they have focused on participants’ discussions of material samples. Consumers’ emotional reactions to the materials themselves or the consumers’ reaction to the durability of the materials have not been previously explored in depth. This research has investigated these issues and has found that consumers have very specific concepts about materials. Furthermore, the combinations of consumer concepts that are likely to elicit an emotional judgement by the consumer have also been identified. It was found that consumers are conscious of the durability of their products and the materials that they are made from. This knowledge contributes to the support of environmentally conscious design, as well as user-centered design knowledge and practice. An understanding of the emotion consumers attribute to the effect wear and aging had on the materials’ physical appearance has been achieved. This understanding of consumers’ emotional reactions to materials can contribute not only to design considerations but to knowledge regarding the promotion of prolonged product-user relationships.