ESTUDIO DE USUARIOS(AS) DE LAS COMUNIDADES JARDINES 1 Y JARDINES 2 QUE ATIENDE LA BIBLIOTECA INFANTIL “MIRIAM ÁLVAREZ BRENES” Heredia, Costa Rica

Este documento describe el proceso que se llevó a cabo para conocer las necesidades de información de los(as) usuarios(as) reales y potenciales de las comunidades Jardines Universitarios 1 y Jardines Universitarios 2 que atiende la Biblioteca Infantil “Miriam Álvarez Brenes” de la Universidad Nacional. Además presenta las conclusiones y recomendaciones generadas por el estudio de usuarios(as), así como la caracterización actualizada de las comunidades meta contempladas en el estudio. 

A Visual Analytics Approach to Comparing Cohorts of Event Sequences

Sequences of timestamped events are currently being generated across nearly every domain of data analytics, from e-commerce web logging to electronic health records used by doctors and medical researchers. Every day, this data type is reviewed by humans who apply statistical tests, hoping to learn everything they can about how these processes work, why they break, and how they can be improved upon. To further uncover how these processes work the way they do, researchers often compare two groups, or cohorts, of event sequences to find the differences and similarities between outcomes and processes. With temporal event sequence data, this task is complex because of the variety of ways single events and sequences of events can differ between the two cohorts of records: the structure of the event sequences (e.g., event order, co-occurring events, or frequencies of events), the attributes about the events and records (e.g., gender of a patient), or metrics about the timestamps themselves (e.g., duration of an event). Running statistical tests to cover all these cases and determining which results are significant becomes cumbersome. Current visual analytics tools for comparing groups of event sequences emphasize a purely statistical or purely visual approach for comparison. Visual analytics tools leverage humans' ability to easily see patterns and anomalies that they were not expecting, but is limited by uncertainty in findings. Statistical tools emphasize finding significant differences in the data, but often requires researchers have a concrete question and doesn't facilitate more general exploration of the data. Combining visual analytics tools with statistical methods leverages the benefits of both approaches for quicker and easier insight discovery. Integrating statistics into a visualization tool presents many challenges on the frontend (e.g., displaying the results of many different metrics concisely) and in the backend (e.g., scalability challenges with running various metrics on multi-dimensional data at once). I begin by exploring the problem of comparing cohorts of event sequences and understanding the questions that analysts commonly ask in this task. From there, I demonstrate that combining automated statistics with an interactive user interface amplifies the benefits of both types of tools, thereby enabling analysts to conduct quicker and easier data exploration, hypothesis generation, and insight discovery. The direct contributions of this dissertation are: (1) a taxonomy of metrics for comparing cohorts of temporal event sequences, (2) a statistical framework for exploratory data analysis with a method I refer to as high-volume hypothesis testing (HVHT), (3) a family of visualizations and guidelines for interaction techniques that are useful for understanding and parsing the results, and (4) a user study, five long-term case studies, and five short-term case studies which demonstrate the utility and impact of these methods in various domains: four in the medical domain, one in web log analysis, two in education, and one each in social networks, sports analytics, and security. My dissertation contributes an understanding of how cohorts of temporal event sequences are commonly compared and the difficulties associated with applying and parsing the results of these metrics. It also contributes a set of visualizations, algorithms, and design guidelines for balancing automated statistics with user-driven analysis to guide users to significant, distinguishing features between cohorts. This work opens avenues for future research in comparing two or more groups of temporal event sequences, opening traditional machine learning and data mining techniques to user interaction, and extending the principles found in this dissertation to data types beyond temporal event sequences.

Estudio de Usuarios Biblioteca del Colegio La Salle

Resumen de la práctica realizada por las alumnas: Damaris Aguilar, Marita Fallas y Gaby Rodríguez en el curso: El lector y sus necesidad informativas impartido por la Prof. Gilda Chacón R.En el Capítulo I. se enfatizó el quehacer del bibliotecario escolar en relación con el programa de enseñanza de la Institución.El Capítulo II analiza la planta física de la biblioteca, su material bibliográfico y equipo en relación con las condiciones que ésta posee para desarrollar una buena labor bibliotecaria.Por considerar de importancia el estudio de usuarios realizados, los Capítulos III y IV lo mismo que las recomendaciones finales se transcribirán en forma textual.

An assisted navigation method for telepresence robots

Telepresence robots have emerged as a new means of interaction in remote environments. However, the use of such robots is still limited due to safety and usability issues when operating in human-like environments. This work addresses these issues by enhancing the robot navigation through a collaborative control method that assists the user to negotiate obstacles. The method has been implemented in a commercial telepresence robot and a user study has been conducted in order to test the suitability of our approach.

Lightweight user modeling – a case study

In the context of previous publications, we propose a new lightweight UM process, intended to work as a tourism recommender system in a commercial environment. The new process tackles issues like cold start, gray sheep and over specialization through a rich user model and the application of a gradual forgetting function to the collected user action history. Also, significant performance improvements were achieved regarding the previously proposed UM process.

Avatar modeling: a telepresence study with natural user interface

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Evaluation of an eLearning pilot course based on user experiences: corporate case study

Diplomityön tavoitteena oli arvioida sähköisen oppimisen soveltuvuutta kohdeyrityksessä ja selvittää, voidaanko luokkahuonekoulutusta korvata sähköisen oppimisen kursseilla. Tietojärjestelmän raportoinnista tehtiin sähköisen oppimisen kurssi, joka oli koekäytössä. Koekäytön jälkeen tehtiin käyttäjäkysely, kerättiin käyttötietoja kurssista ja tehtiin haastatteluja. Koekäyttäjien kokemuksista tehdyn arvioinnin perusteella sähköinen oppiminen soveltuu käytettäväksi selkeiden asioiden koulutukseen kohdeyrityksessä, mutta se ei voi kokonaan korvata luokkahuonekoulutusta. Luokkahuonekoulutuksessa tulisi keskittyä monimutkaisempiin asioihin ja ongelmanratkaisuun. Positiivisten tulosten perusteella sähköisen oppimisen kehittämistä päätettiin jatkaa yrityksessä. Sähköisen oppimisen kurssin avulla saadaan kustannussäästöjä kohdeyrityksessä, kun käyttäjämäärä on suurempi kuin 66. Jos koko koekäytössä olleen kurssin kohdeyleisö suorittaa kurssin sähköisesti, ovat kustannukset vain noin 15% vastaavista kustannuksista luokkahuoneessa järjestettynä. Lisäksi sähköisen oppimisen tehokkuutta tutkittiin ja koekäytössä olleen kurssin arvioitiin olevan positiivinen työssä kehitetyn Consensus-mallin mukaan.

Hacking User Experience in a Repository Service: ScholarSphere as a Case Study

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

An examination of factors influencing ERP key-user satisfaction: A qualitative case study

Several companies are trying to improve their operation efficiency by implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that makes it possible to control the resources of the company in real time. However, the success of the implementation project is not a foregone conclusion; a significant part of these projects end in a failure, one way or another. Therefore it is important to investigate ERP system implementation more closely in order to increase understanding about factors influencing ERP system success and to improve the probability of a successful ERP implementation project. Consequently, this study was initiated because a manufacturing case company wanted to review the success of their ERP implementation project. To be exact, the case company hoped to gain both information about the success of the project and insight for future implementation improvement. This study investigated ERP success specifically by examining factors that influence ERP key-user satisfaction. User satisfaction is one of the most commonly applied indicators of information system success. The research data was mainly collected by conducting theme interviews. The subjects of the interviews were six key-users of the newly implemented ERP system. The interviewees were closely involved in the implementation project. Furthermore, they act as representative users that utilize the new system in everyday business processes. The collected data was analyzed by thematizing. Both data collection and analysis were guided by a theoretical frame of reference. This frame was based on previous research on the subject. The results of the study aligned with the theoretical framework to large extent. The four principal factors influencing key-user satisfaction were change management, contractor service, key-user’s system knowledge and characteristics of the ERP product itself. One of the most significant contributions of the research is that it confirmed the existence of a connection between change management and ERP key-user satisfaction. Furthermore, it discovered two new sub-factors influencing contractor service related key-user satisfaction. In addition, the research findings indicated that in order to improve the current level of key-user satisfaction, the case company should pay special attention to system functionality improvement and enhancement of the key-users’ knowledge. During similar implementation projects in the future, it would be important to assure the success of change management and contractor service related processes.

Influencing Perceived Agency: A Study into User Experiences in Digital Interactive Storytelling

User experience is a crucial element in interactive storytelling, and as such it is important to recognize the different aspects of a positive user experience in an interactive story. Towards that goal, in the first half of this thesis, we will go through the different elements that make up the user experience, with a strong focus on agency. Agency can be understood as the user’s ability to affect the story or the world in which the story is told with interesting and satisfying choices. The freedoms granted by agency are not completely compatible with traditional storytelling, and as such we will also go through some of the issues of agency-centric design philosophies and explore alternate schools of thought. The core purpose of this thesis is to determine the most important aspects of agency with regards to a positive user experience and attempt to find ways for authors to improve the overall quality of user experience in interactive stories. The latter half of this thesis deals with the research conducted on this matter. This research was carried out by analyzing data from an online survey coupled with data gathered by the interactive storytelling system specifically made for this research (Regicide). The most important aspects of this research deal with influencing perceived agency and facilitating an illusion of agency in different ways, and comparing user experiences in these different test environments. The most important findings based on this research include the importance of context-controlled and focused agency and settings in which the agency takes place and the importance of ensuring user-competency within an interactive storytelling system. Another essential conclusion to this research boils down to communication between the user and the system; the goal of influencing perceived agency should primarily be to ensure that the user is aware of all the theoretical agency they possess.

A study of information-seeking behavior and user perceptions of academic researchers

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information-seeking behavior of science and social science research scholars, including service effectiveness, satisfaction level on different type of sources and various methods adopted by the scholars for keeping up to dateData were gathered using a questionnaire survey of 200, randomly selected, PhD students of science and social science departments of four universities in Kerala, IndiaAlthough similarities exist between social science and science PhD students with regard to information-seeking behavior, there are significant differences as well. There is a significant difference between science and social science scholars on the perception of the adequacy of print journals and database collection which are very relevant to the research purposes. There is no significant difference between science and social science scholars on the perception of the adequacy of e-journals, the most used source for keeping up to date. The study proved that scholars of both the fields are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the library in keeping them up to date with latest developments

Computer User Self-Efficacy Scale ??? Cuse : a preliminary study and adaptation to portuguese population

Resumen basado en el de la publicaci??n

A study of hearing aid user satisfaction based on the hearing aid performance inventory

This paper discusses a study to determine the effectiveness of the Hearing Aid Performance Inventory (HAPI) on hearing aid outcomes.

iTrench: a study of user reactions to the use of information technology in field archaeology

This article describes work undertaken by the VERA project to investigate how archaeologists work with information technology (IT) on excavation sites. We used a diary study to research the usual patterns of behaviour of archaeologists digging the Silchester Roman town site during the summer of 2007. Although recording had previously been undertaken using pen and paper, during the 2007 season a part of the dig was dedicated to trials of IT and archaeologists used digital pens and paper and Nokia N800 handheld PDAs to record their work. The goal of the trial was to see whether it was possible to record data from the dig whilst still on site, rather than waiting until after the excavation to enter it into the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB) and to determine whether the archaeologists found the new technology helpful. The digital pens were a success, however, the N800s were not successful given the extreme conditions on site. Our findings confirmed that it was important that technology should fit in well with the work being undertaken rather than being used for its own sake, and should respect established work flows. We also found that the quality of data being entered was a recurrent concern as was the reliability of the infrastructure and equipment.