Browsing by Author "Kurvinen, Esko"

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  • Boundary negotiating mock-ups
    (2011) Gentil, Thibault
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
    Designing usable smart products is a multidisciplinary effort that requires people with very diverse knowledge to collaborate. Collaboration is challenging because knowledge from various design stakeholders with different needs and constraints has to be integrated in a design. Design mock-ups are used by designers to facilitate the collaboration. Design mock-ups help integrate different perspectives because they evoke different things to different stakeholders and help them negotiate the limits within which they can agree on a design. Literature suggests the analytical boundary object concept as a theory to explain how mock-ups support the integration of knowledge in design collaboration. I review the literature on the boundary object concept and iterate it with the data collected from a one year ethnographic study of a multidisciplinary product development project to design a smart usable device.I discuss that the boundary object concept fails to conceptualize how mock-ups support negotiation and suggest the concept of dynamic boundary objects as a more appropriate concept for the role of mockups in design collaboration. Design mock-ups iteratively support the boundary negotiation activities of self-explanation, inclusion, compilation and structuring. They act as a scaffold for the creation of a shared understanding.
  • Co-design with children: A new mobile financial service concept
    (2015-06-11) Berg, Annika
     Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
    Increasingly younger children own a smartphone with an application store and in-app purchasing possibilities. Consequently, they encounter digital currency even before cash. However, there is no service on the Finnish market that would enhance children’s learning and understanding of digital currency. The current practice is that children acquire their weekly allowance as cash. The aim of this thesis was to plan and execute a user-centered co-design concept design process with children in the context of mobile payment. The methods were suitable co-design methods for children based on literature review implemented in a concept creation project. The target group is children aged 7 to 14 years. The empirical study was conducted in a primary school with a school class of eight sixth graders and fourteen second graders. In addition, moodboard interviews were conducted with four families. The results of this thesis are threefold: (1) description of children’s needs relating to mobile payments, (2) a suggestion and illustrations for a new financial mobile concept, (3) evaluation of the chosen methods and a recommendation for the co-design practice with children. Young children seem to have difficulties in understanding the concept of money; for example, they make accidental in-app purchases. Children desire to make online and mobile purchases, but they mainly have only cash. In addition, saving and games are important to children in the context of payments. However, it was found that second graders and sixth graders have rather different needs for the financial mobile concept, and families differ in their practices related to money. The developed concept reflects the presented results. The chosen co-methods were suitable for the process. This thesis suggests considering the age and role of the child in the process, orienting the children to the activities with their own examples, and interpreting the results with great caution. In addition, flexibility is needed from the researcher. Nonetheless, children are creative and talented designers, especially in the mobile field.
  • Designing a content filtering mechanism for a mobile push messaging service
    (2010) Luusua, Vesa
     School of Science | Master's thesis
    Because of the recent development in mobile devices new emergent patterns have been spotted in the consumption of news and social media. People are connected to their favourite services almost all the time and this has introduced a new breed of ubiquitous services such as Foursquare and Brightkite. They are location aware services that allow people to interact with their surroundings. However, news services that truly adapt the ubiquitous nature of mobile devices need to offer personalized content. This thesis takes a closer look to the recommender systems that can help to filter out relevant information in mobile context. The current range of filtering mechanisms that work in mobile environment is limited to location aware services and items that have coordinates attached to them. However, in this study, the target service is a news alert service that uses mobile push messaging. There are existing services in this area, but they do not offer personalized content. There are two widely used approaches to build a recommendation engine: content-based filtering and collaborative filtering. In addition, this study reviews also the possibility to use social networks for filtering purposes as well as possibility to use context-based filtering. As a result, this study proposes an approach, which is a hybrid filtering mechanism. It is mainly based on social network filtering, but takes into an account user's contextual information. The possibility to use content-based techniques is also considered - text content analysis can be used for searching location information. The proposed solution is a rating algorithm that contains three components: the proximity or closeness of social object (e.g. status update) in question, the overall buzz it has created in user's social network and time decay factor.
  • A Digital Society For All – Defining Accessibility Practices in Agile Software Development
    (2019-12-17) Hakala, Helinä
     Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
    Digital products and services have started to replace their physical counterparts during the last two decades. Meanwhile, more than 15 percent of the world’s population lives with some form of disability which has led to societal, industrial and academic interest to improve accessibility. Practical knowledge on accessibility implementation could support teams and software organisations in their accessibility aspirations and shed light on an under-researched but still current topic. The aim of this study is to define processes and practices that may promote accessibility realisation in the context of agile software development. This study is a combined embedded single-case study and constructive research. First, employees of the case company were interviewed (N=20) and observed, particular emphasis being on three product teams. Additionally, the accessibility of three digital products of the aforementioned teams was evaluated. Second, an accessibility improvement process was constructed and some of its first steps were evaluated. According to a combined literature review and empirical research, it appears that the current state of accessibility is weak and accessibility understanding varies greatly within digital practitioners. An existing empathy link to people with disabilities may have a significant impact on understanding the importance of accessibility and its consideration in work. The current challenges include lack of knowledge, understanding and resources as well as present practices. Organisations and practitioners could be motivated through economic, societal and professional and qualitative factors. Moreover, accessibility knowledge, understanding and resources as well as business and management support may enable accessibility realisation. The Accessibility Improvement Process is proposed to embed accessibility into routines of agile teams and organisations. After an organisation has found its motivation for accessibility implementation and the enablers for continuous accessibility have been ensured, a two-fold accessibility process cycle is recommended for sustainable implementation. This is a pioneering empirical study of developing accessibility processes and practices for teams and organisations.
  • Maintaining an experimentation culture in a telecom organization
    (2020-08-18) Berg, Cecilia
     Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
    Experimentation has become a popular way for organizations to test out innovations and to learn about their customers in order to gain competitive advantage. Current research shows that the most common challenge in creating an experimentation culture is fitting it with the traditional development processes of an organization. This can be alleviated with certain organizational structures and management principles. However, academic research on this topic is lacking and focuses on how to create an experimentation culture and provides little guidance on how to maintain it. This study aims to research how experimentation culture can be maintained after its initial creation, and what enablers and hindrances different levels of the organization encounter in their daily work. This is done through a qualitative study in the case company Elisa Oyj, a telecom company who started their journey towards an experimenting organization in 2009. The study entailed interviewing three levels of the organization: strategic, business, and experimenting levels. Analysis was done as a comparative analysis via open coding. All levels noted different symptoms of the same core hindrances for experimentation: lack of vision and knowledge sharing. They also praised similar enablers such as autonomy and leadership commitment. While the enablers were similar to the ones found in literature for creating an experimentation culture, there were some differences due to experimentation being perceived as a standard way of operating, instead of a completely new activity. This study proposes action points for similar organizations to enhance their experimentation culture and to overcome the experienced challenges.
  • Managing User Experience in a Software Update
    (2021-12-13) Hurri, Antti
     Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
  • Modeling navigation behavior in clickstream data
    (2018-12-10) Castrén, Julius
     Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
    Understanding user behavior is a key aspect when designing new features for websites. There are many approaches to gathering knowledge about how users behave depending on the particular aspect that is wanted to be modeled. Common idea is to try to model the behavior into mathematical form to be able to evaluate it numerically and not just empirically. This thesis tries to learn more about users behavior by modeling their actions in Elisa's new self service site with different modeling techniques. Adapting few different models from source material to test their viability in real world situations to try to develop a metric to asses the overall satisfaction of the users experience on the site. The goal is to then use this metrics to asses future design choices when comparing different designs. Data was gathered from users sessions on the website and connected to feedback they gave online. Machine learning approaches from linear regression to classification was used to try to predict that feedback score based on the features extracted from the session data. These models proved to be too inaccurate to be used as the intended metric. But dividing the users based on their experience level provided some results that indicated how their behavior changes when they learn to use the website better. From the results we learned some problems with the gathered feedback and its unsuitability as a target variable. There was no indication that it measured usability or user satisfaction as it was thought to measure.
  • Prototyping Social Action
    (2007) Kurvinen, Esko
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
    Information technology has made social interaction an increasingly important topic for interaction design and technology development. Today’s mobile technology provides for rich communication and awareness between people, regardless of their whereabouts. When people are gathered together, technology is also often present, influencing or even actively taking part in the social activity. Social action is the essence of many systems studied, developed and prototyped by the design and research community. The problem is that this is often done without proper methodological backing. There is no lack of methods, but a need for an adequate approach: how should circumstances for social action to happen be created, how should it be observed, how should systematic, detailed inferences about it be produced for the purposes of design, and what design-related activities does such research serve? Drawing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this study addresses social action and social prototypes in various settings: at a workplace, in the area of mobile multimedia and the domain of ubiquitous context-aware systems. The main contribution of this study is that it articulates how this framework can be brought into design studies. The cases in this study also demonstrate empirically that this approach works.
  • Suomalaisen kaivosyrityksen etabloitumismahdollisuuksista Meksikossa ja Perussa
    (1981) Kurvinen, Esko
     Helsinki University of Technology | Master's thesis