Browsing by Author "Sarvas, Risto"

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Adaptive algorithms in testing and training of cognitive inhibition
(2022-01-25) Rehn, Maximilian
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Digital therapeutics is a relatively new field combining technology and cognitive sciences. The value proposition is that we are better able to train humans cognitively using software technologies. Akili Interactive is one company spearheading this development. They recently received FDA-approval for their cognitive video game aimed at helping patients with ADHD. In the Department of Neuroscience at Aalto University, a similar game is being tested, which focuses on patients with depression. This thesis was created after having worked with the development of that game’s adaptive system. Adaptive algorithms are a general definition which in this case is used to find the optimal difficulty level for all players. The difficulty level needs to be suitable for all individuals, regardless of their background. Several adaptive algorithms are described, and one is applied in a specific task dealing with cognitive inhibition. Cognitive inhibition is the ability to stop a reaction or thought even when one is tempted to react. It is a way to avoid off goal information from having access to working memory when one tries to focus. The adaptive algorithm that is applied and tested, is a variant of the staircase adaptive algorithm. There, the difficulty increases or decreases in a staircase type manner, based on the individual player’s performance. The research questions are: how does adaptation algorithm step size affect adaptation? What step size is optimal in the specific case task presented? Three different variants of the staircase step size are tested. Out of the three variants, the 10% step size was conclusively optimal based on the test results. The adaptive speed was somewhat slower than the larger step sizes - but the adaptation stability was clearly superior. However, a combination of the different step sizes could be an optimal solution for future development.
Agile requirements engineering with interactive prototyping: Case study
(2013) Käpyaho, Marja
School of Science | Master's thesis
The rise of agile methodologies in software development has led to abandonment of many traditional tools. Especially requirements engineering is in a state of confusion as the more traditional model isn't applicable as it is but new models are only just being developed. The area of agile requirements engineering is lacking concrete models of doing things and needs more research. In this thesis I investigated how the challenges of agile requirements engineering can be met with interactive prototyping. To research this I first tried to find the biggest challenges faced when doing requirements engineering in agile projects and then looked into how interactive prototyping could help in solving these problems. To investigate the research questions I looked into previous literature as well as carried out a case study based on an agile project and its practices during a year. As a result of both methods I developed a model for doing requirements engineering in agile projects. The results of the research indicated that agile requirements engineering can be practiced with rather similar methods as more traditional requirements engineering but with emphasis more on continuous communication and less on documents. Some of the biggest requirements engineering challenges faced in agile projects were insufficient communication, lack of tangible plans, neglecting quality and architectural requirements and lack of understanding the big picture. Of these four challenge areas the former two benefit most from prototyping whereas the latter two can even be worse off because of too much emphasis on short term visible features. The results seem to indicate that prototyping can be beneficial for agile projects as long as it is used in conjunction with some other methods that complement it suitably. These other methods could include keeping track of quality requirements, reviewing the big picture at regular intervals and building acceptance tests based on prototypes.
Agile transformation in a large media company — perceptions and principles
(2020-08-18) Pesonen, Venla
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
The effective utilization of technology is becoming increasingly important for today’s organizations. Especially traditional organizations have to change their ways of working and thinking to respond to the increasing uncertainty and complexity of the surrounding business environment. This thesis studies the agile transformation journey of a large media company to give insights into their practical perceptions and principles. This empirical research was carried out with grounded theory approach. The data was mainly collected through semi-structured thematic interviews with 20 employees from the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). The results emerged from the interview data during the iterative analysis process. The results indicate that in such transformation, the new practices and ways of working are formed based on experimenting different tools and methodologies and improving them to suit the needs. A transformation done this way takes time, but the results are more lasting. Motivating employees to change their behaviour and learn the new ways of working requires systematic planning, since forcing anyone to change seldom leads to desired results. According to this research, improving the ways of thinking and working continuously seems to be the most recommended practice for organizations at the moment. It enables sensing changes in the environment and reacting fast to them. However, it also requires looking back to what has been done to see what has to be improved. This research contributes to the broader discussion on what principles and best practices guide organizational transformations in large companies. It takes a practical approach to how the change had proceeded at Yle and gives other companies the possibility to learn from Yle’s journey.
Applying machine learning approaches to characterize #socialdistancing tweets
(2020-12-15) Paukkeri, Akseli
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Applying Natural Language Processing techniques to analyze HIV-related discussions on Social Media
(2020-06-16) Angi, Antonino
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Nowadays social media are being used to monitor the progress of viruses and share important prevention and treatment information. This has also allowed the creation of a community of people united by the same disease, to give themselves strength, comfort and advice. The objective of this work is to extract and understand discussions about HIV on a popular social media platform: Twitter, a micro-blogging application. Tweets with the hashtag #HIV were collected in the date range of one year, starting from November 12th 2018 to November 12th 2019. They were then filtered and cleaned using NLP techniques, which allowed the removal of duplicates, non-english texts and useless information, such as tweets only containing urls, mentions or hashtags. After the cleaning phase, the main analyzes carried out were sentiment analysis and content analysis which, using data mining and text mining algorithms were able to reveal their emotions and the most influential topics written about HIV. This study illustrates the potential of using social media to analyse the spread of viruses and health conditions using two types of analyses for the same topic and dataset: sentimental analysis and content analysis. HIV-related messages were used by organisations and credible sources to disseminate information about treatment and prevention, but also by individual users to share their thoughts, emotions and experiences of living with HIV. Twitter is also used by celebrities and health authorities to respond to public concerns. This work shows that many tweets are written for the purpose of giving information and emotional support with assistance from the online community and also for health care professionals who support individuals living with HIV/AIDS. The algorithms and notions covered in this work can subsequently be used by the public health community or data scientists to analyze tweets regarding other viruses or diseases, showing how social media can be used to identify, detect and study outbreaks in a specific geographical area and in a specific period of time.
Arvonluonnin ja tunne-elämän risteyskohdassa: Tinderin merkitys Z-sukupolven seuranhakutottumuksissa
(2021-08-31) Huhtanen, Kiri
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Bachelor's thesis
Asynkronisten etäkäytettävyysmenetelmien hyödyntäminen ylläpidossa
(2012-11-23) Peltola, Satu
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Bachelor's thesis
Bridging capture and enjoyment; Removing the transfer phase from the photography workflow
(2010) Saarinen, Ville
Informaatio- ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta | Master's thesis
With the advent of digital photography and the proliferation of cell phone cameras, photography has become an everyday activity, leading to a dramatic increase in the amount of photos that people take. Even though the photo capturing technology has improved, the methods and tools with which consumers handle this increase in photo volume have not improved fast enough. Many consumers find moving photos from device to device to be unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming. For this thesis, we built a prototype of a service using existing technologies that automated the transferral of photos from a capture device - a Nokia N900 cell phone - to an online service that the users could use to browse and share their photos. The prototype was deployed to a group of test users for a trial period. Their experiences and feedback were collected with the help of interviews. Based on our results, we concluded that there is a demand for such a service. The prototype that we built did not have enough functionality as to being a viable commercial service, but with improvements users would generally have been willing to pay for it. Giving end-users control over their photos and building their trust are central themes that are critical for such a service.
Challenges Faced by Startups Preparing for Growth – an Ethnographic Approach
(2020-08-18) Leskinen, Sini
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
The high failure rate of startups is well-recognized, and creates a continuous interest to understand the factors affecting a startup’s success. This thesis examines the connection of organization design with startup success, and draws attention especially on startups preparing for growth. The aim of the study is to identify the challenges startups face when designing the organization structure and culture itself. This research applied a qualitative approach, and studied the phenomenon in one case startup by ethnographic methods, to create a deep understanding of the topic. The data was collected through participant-observation, contextual inquiry, secondary data and 11 semi-structured interviews. The results of this study identified that the challenges of the phase of preparing for growth are strongly related to the growing number of employees, internal teams and new customers. Thus, in the phase of preparing for growth, a startup has to reflect how the increasing number of people and interactions will affect the individual-, group- and organization-level behavior. The results indicate that there are three main challenges related to organization design to be addressed during the stage of preparing for growth: (1) how to sustain the culture, values and purpose, (2) how to build alignment and maintain focus, and (3) how to structure communication and knowledge sharing processes in an unpredictable environment, with a growing number of people and interactions. This thesis suggests leaders to make use of (1) co- creation, (2) OKRs, and (3) experiments to address these identified challenges. This research contributes to the prevailing discussion on startup failure from a less discussed angle. This thesis offers a qualitative perspective on the relevance of successful organization design before a startup begins its growth.
Choosing user-centered design methodology in agile software subcontracting
(2013) Pulli, Pekka
School of Science | Master's thesis
This thesis aimed at finding a way to support decision making in choosing user entered design methodology in agile subcontracting with help of a retrospective case study of four Futurice Ltd.'s projects. The research questions were ''What factors go into selecting user-centered design methodology in an agile software project vendor's projects?" and "Can we form these factors into a tool for choosing user-centered design methodology in a project?" Based on the case projects' settings, developments and methodology decisions a set of factors in making user-centered design decisions was gathered. With this set of factors and by analysing user-centered methodology, a tool called "project mixer" was created. The four case projects plus an additional project with another designer were evaluated with the tool to validate it. The tool was deemed successful in both giving ideas for choosing user-centered design methods and helping in customer communication.
Combining service design and blended learning
(2015-12-13) Myllylä, Nelli
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Bachelor's thesis
Comparison of the usage of different learning strategies in an online learning experience
(2022-06-14) Saanio, Salla-Mari
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
A Comprehensive framework for evaluating strategic safety and security actions in the city of Tampere
(2023-01-25) Reijonen, Satu
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
The objective in this study is to formulate a comprehensive framework for evaluating strategic safety and security actions and use the framework to identify how the existing strategy and safety plan of the City of Tampere support the holistic development of safety and security. This thesis is a qualitative case study, which dives into the strategic safety-related documents of the case organization, the City of Tampere, providing insights about the comprehensiveness of Tampere’s strategic safety and security actions. The first part of the thesis is a systematic literature review of 13 documents which formulates a framework for evaluation. In the second part, the case organization’s central safety and security documents are evaluated based on the framework by using qualitative content analysis. The results demonstrate that the strategy of the City of Tampere promotes predicting, investing, and securing the physical environment while safety plan promotes securing the environment, and collaborating with multidisciplinary stakeholders. Inclusive design in the strategy, and environmental security in the safety plan require the most additions in the future. On the other hand, education was mentioned over 40 times in the studied documents. Therefore, it is suggested to be added to the framework as its own action to ensure safe city development. Decision-makers must be bold when designing future scenarios which aim at proactively tackling and mitigating safety and security threats. Co-creating the future is the most effective way to maximize resilience.
Conceptualizing and developing a photo book service
(2007) Vihonen, Mikko
Helsinki University of Technology | Master's thesis
Diplomityö oli osa isompaa Immortalidad-tutkimushanketta, jossa tutkittiin ihmisten mediankäyttöä. Diplomityössä keskityttiin konseptoimaan ja toteuttamaan web-pohjaisen valokuvakirjapalvelun prototyyppi, joka toimii yhdessä yhteisöllisen kuvanjakopalvelun, Kuvaboxin, kanssa. Työn aikana toteutettiin prototyyppi, joka mahdollisti kuvakirjojen tekemisen Kuvaboxissa olevista digikuvista sekä niihin liittyvästä yhteisöllisestä kommentoinnista. Prototyyppiä testattiin käyttäjäkokein, joissa pyrittiin määrittelemään diplomityön kannalta prototyypin puutteita ja lmmortalidad-projektin puitteissa kartoittamaan, miten ihmiset tekisivät kuvakirjoja. Ongelmakentän purkaminen aloitettiin tutkimalla ensin yleisesti kuvakirjoja ja niiden tarinankerrontaa. Tarinankerronnan teorian pohjalta tehdyt havainnot osoittautuivat isoksi vaikuttimeksi palvelun konseptoinnissa. Kuvakirjapalvelun kehittämistyöhön lähdettiin analysoimalla jo olemassa olevia kuvakirjojen tekoon tarkoitettuja työkaluja. Tällainen kilpailevien tuotteiden analysointi helpotti prototyypin suunnittelua, sillä käytössä oli yhden testiprototyypin sijasta viisi. Olemassa olevien tuotteiden käytettävyyttä arvioitiin heuristisin menetelmin. Työn kirjallisuusosassa kuvakirjoja analysoitiin myös dokumentteina ja havaittiin, että kuvakirjat ovat vahvasti layout-vetoisia. Kuvakirjapalvelun toteuttamisvaiheen suurena haasteena oli löytää sopiva teknologiapaletti, jolla palvelu voitaisiin toteuttaa, Palvelun toteuttamiseen havaittiin vahvimmaksi ohjelmointikieleksi Java, jolla on vahva tuki sekä web-sovelluksille että XML:IIe. Palvelu toteutettiin hyödyntämällä avoimen lähdekoodin komponentteja, kuten Spring Frameworkia ja Apache FOP:ia. Toteuttamiseen valitut komponentit ja palvelun toteutus todettiin toimiviksi käyttäjäkokeissa, joissa kaikki käyttäjät onnistuivat tuottamaan kirjan valokuvistaan. Käyttäjäkokeissa kuvakirjasovellusta testattiin 30-50-vuotiailla naisilla, jotka ovat sekä aktiivinen ryhmä Kuvaboxin kuvatuotteiden tilaajina että kirjallisen tutkimuksen perusteella valokuvien kuluttajina. Tärkeimmät havainnot käyttäjäkokeissa kuvakirjan tekemisen osalta liittyivät tekemiseen käytettyyn aikaan ja odotuksiin kuvakirjoista. Kuvakirjojen tekeminen koettiin pitkäaikaiseksi prosessiksi, johon käytetään aikaa ehkä 1-2 tuntia päivässä ja jonka pariin halutaan palata useamman päivän aikana. Käyttäjäkokeissa kävi myös ilmi, että kuvakirja ei ole aivan selvä käsite, joten kuvakirjapalvelun tulee pystyä antamaan kuva, miltä valmis kirja näyttäisi. Koehenkilöt suhtautuivat painettuihin kirjoihin positiivisesti ja painettu kirja tuntui ylittävän odotukset. Koehenkilöt olivat myös yhtä mieltä siitä, että kuvakirjaa ei tehdä kotona printterillä, vaan se tulee kirjapainosta sidottuna.
Käsityö 2.0 - sosiaalisen median käsityöpalvelut
(2011) Tiilikainen, Mira
School of Science | Master's thesis
Making crafts is by nature a social activity. That's why some hobbyist handcrafters use social media as a natural part of their crafting process. Crafts blogs and other social media web services are used to share handcrafting knowledge and experiences. The goal of this thesis is to consider how social media promotes amateur handcrafting and builds a sense of a handcrafting community. Three methods were used in this study: familiarization with craft blogs, interviews and a web questionnaire. The familiarization revealed that there are many different types of handcrafting blogs, yet strict classification by type is impossible. The role of quality pictures in crafts blogs is significant. They reveal details and ideas of the handcrafted products. The largest amount of data in this thesis was gathered from interviewing nine hobbyists, with varying activity in social media for crafters. Interviews showed that essential web services were crafts blogs and a knit and crochet community Ravelry. However, crafting knowledge in other sites is also used, often via links in Ravelry or blogs. Handcrafting as a hobby is mainly influenced by virtual communities through sharing of creative ideas. This discovery was also verified by the web questionnaire. The questionnaire received 120 responses and was directed to crafts bloggers and Ravelry users. The conclusions of this study reflect the building of communities in Ravelry and crafts blogs to eight common heuristics for supporting social interaction. These general principles of social media also increase the possibility of a virtual crafting community to emerge. Special questions for crafts services are the majority of women as users and the importance of visual content. The heart and meaningfulness of a sense of a craft community are built on promotion of the crafting process. Virtual crafting communities are built widely in different web services and they are entwined within real life craft communities.
Data-driven wayfinding guidance at Helsinki Airport
(2017-11-07) Landtman, Edward
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Design integration in university-based accelerators – A case study on how to embed design into the service offering of Aalto Startup Center
(2019) Vavrinova, Agnesa
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
Besides providing higher education and granting academic degrees, universities are institutions that enable research and innovation. It is here that students have favorable conditions to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset, and often make their first steps towards creating new ventures – founding startups. In respect to that, it is the role of university-based incubators and accelerators to support the development of entrepreneurial skills and provide support for early-stage, high-growth businesses originating from university research. Design is increasingly seen as a beneficial method for developing new business ideas as well as novel approaches. Hence, it has been recognized and acknowledged across popular and academic publications as a resource that brings value and competitive advantage to businesses of all sizes - startups included. However, in order for startups to fully benefit from design, investment in design outsourcing alone is not enough. It is crucial to grow the internal competence of a company to use design. An early integration of design with core company functions appears to be critical, as it becomes later on more difficult and the impact lowers. Thus, it is crucial that organizations such as university-based incubators and accelerators provide a structure which is primarily focused on the educational component, and only secondarily on big financial returns. To the author’s best knowledge, little investigation has been done on how business incubators and accelerators support early stage startups in fostering design competence. ‘Design Integration in University-based Accelerators’ thus explores how startups can benefit from design and learn to foster design competence. The objective of this work is to investigate the service offering of an accelerator for design integration opportunities. In addition, this study aims to shed light on effective use of resources available from the networks of university ecosystem to support early stage startups originating from research. To meet the objective of this thesis three sets of empirical data were collected. Action research through workshops with advisors from the university-based accelerator Aalto Startup Center was carried out to inform the background of the case study, and to provide a framework for solution finding within the topic of design integration. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews with the executives of five technology-driven startups comprised the second dataset for this thesis. The goal of the interviews was to gain a detailed understanding of the development process each startup endured up until the point of the interview. Included was a hands-on task which resulted in journeys to pinpoint the most important steps along the path towards successful growth, perceived through the lens of design. The third set of empirical data was collected through in-depth, unstructured interviews with ten design and entrepreneurship experts. The main goal of these interviews was to provide additional support to the primary data set collected through the startup journey mapping. Details of teaching practices and beliefs rooted in their domain expertise were demonstrated, to add the perspective of a crucial expert stakeholder group, educators and serial entrepreneurs from the ecosystem. All interviewees were from the Aalto University ecosystem. Business Generator Model – a visualisation of themes in the studied acceleration program, was utilised as a framework to ensure a point of reference and help structure the findings of this research. The analysis of the collected data resulted in the following findings. Themes traditionally tackled in early stage startup development, such as Team, IPR, Funding or Partnering can be supported by design through the use of methods of collaboration and co-creation. More significantly, design can be beneficial for early stage startup development by offering capabilities for the purpose of User Research, Design Strategy, Concepting, Communication & Marketing, and lastly Product & Service Development. Respectively, the teams can utilize the help of design to humanize technology through needfinding, bridge the gap between design and business, give shape and function to ideas, raise finances and communicate with stakeholders, and lastly develop products and services through iterative prototyping. A user-centric accelerator program for startups is holistic, with an open and flexible system of services. Due to a variety of customer needs, the program works best when tailored to specific needs determined through an in-depth examination upon acceptance into the program. Unless a startup team has a designer integrated on the core team early on, the goal is to first educate the startups on the role and value of design. According to the stage of each given startup team, trainings, mentors and design outsourcing options should be suggested in order to enable the growth of design competency. This can ideally be achieved with a design manager in the role of an advisor, or executive leader. A design manager can determine the level of design competency, and set the strategy for design integration and design implementation, while utilizing the intangible resources such as know-how available from the university ecosystem. Implications for design practitioners could be drawn in that the practitioners should be encouraged to find opportunities within the accelerator environment, to introduce Design Thinking to early stage startups. Such opportunities may take the form of mentorship or hosted lectures and workshops. In this way, the practitioner would expand his or her professional network while strengthening the business ecosystem. In turn, this should create an expanded demand for Design related skills and services, nurturing the symbiotic relationship between design and business. Lastly, students possessing the advertised design capabilities should be made available for outsourcing to the Business Accelerator and Startup community. This way design needs can be successfully connected with talents.
Designing platform gravity – Attracting producers to multi-sided online platforms
(2016) Baumann, Christian
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate” (Goodwin, 2015). In his recognized article The Battle Is For The Customer Interface, Goodwin points to a major economic development of the recent years: Multi-sided online platforms, marketplaces that match two or more distinct groups of participants, while utilising their participants assets, are on the rise. In this context, Parker et al. (2016, ix) describe the rise of the platform as business model therefore as “[...] one of the most important economic and social developments of our time”. Designing multi-sided online platforms is far from trivial and many fail as consequence of poor design as Roth (2015) emphasises. This thesis represents a basis for platform design research and thereby addresses an identified gap in academic research. Furthermore, it aims to provide guiding theory for practitioners to design successful platforms. The research focused on the attraction of producers to multi-sided online platforms through de- sign. Design is hereby relating to a strategic application of User Experience design with a focus on the User Experience elements of strategy, scope and structure as introduced by Garrett (2000). The thesis aimed to address the main research question how strategic experience design could support platform owners in attracting and retaining producers to multi-sided online platforms. It was answered through the development of a platform design framework. Furthermore, the identification of common practices for the design of the platform offering towards producers completes the results. The developed results are based on an interdisciplinary literature research and the analysis of 13 established platforms across industries. The approach and structuring of the findings enabled the identification of replicable design principles as well as an iterative frame-work development. Within the developed framework, Information, Tools, Services and Rules were identified as Design Elements. The elements are applied to form the platform Design System. Said system consists of the spheres Core-Interaction Benefits, Trust, Safety and Added Benefits. Combined they shape the overall platform Interaction Experience which comprises the Connection Process and the Core Interaction Flow, a cycle of five interaction segments.
Designing user-centric metadata for digital snapshot photography
(2006-12-15) Sarvas, Risto
Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
With digital cameras, camera phones, and camcorders connected to personal computers and the Internet, people are capturing, sharing, and storing more and more media created by themselves. This has created the organizing challenge called media management problem: how to browse and find media from the growing personal media collections. Metadata is seen as one of the most promising technologies to address this problem. Previous work on metadata design has focused on public or commercially produced media – not on media created by consumers for themselves or their social networks. Taking snapshot photography as a starting point, this dissertation looks into the media management problem from a user-centric design perspective. In this work, three consecutive systems were designed: MMM-1, MobShare, and PhotosToFriends. Each of these systems was evaluated in extensive user trials. The objective of the user trials was to provide a better understanding of the uses people have for mobile photos and metadata. The results gained from constructing the systems and the associated user trials are divided into three. First, they contribute to understanding social uses for mobile photographs: what was photographed, with whom were the photos shared, and what kind of social activity emerged. Second, the results can be applied into designing systems for photo sharing: the use of galleries, control over sharing, support for discussions, and social awareness and notifications. Third, what are the implications for metadata that the social uses and system design have. The main implications are the inherent problem of personal photo information being contextual, dynamic, and highly semantic, and the strong coupling of metadata and its application. To address these problems we propose the concept of social metadata, which takes advantage of the social activity in photo sharing systems. The user-centric design approach also brings forth that content metadata generation should be approached from several angles – social metadata, user tagging and contextual information – in addition to the more traditional content-based analysis.
Designing Voting Advice Applications: The Finnish Case
(2020) Isotalo, Veikko
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Voting advice applications (VAAs) have become a part of electoral campaigns in many European countries. There is evidence that the usage of VAAs have real political consequences, as the usage has been linked to effects on political knowledge, turnout and vote choice. However, several methodological and normative issues have been pointed out regarding VAAs. The thesis follows design science research strategy, which identifies and proposes solutions to issues related to five Finnish voting advice applications that were developed for the 2019 parliamentary election. Based on the identified issues, a new overall VAA design is envisioned along with a novel way to visualize VAA results. The research data consisted of news articles about the VAAs and data collected from the VAAs, including VAA statements and candidate responses. To identify issues directly from the VAAs, content analysis along with expert evaluation was performed. Additionally, an interactive web application was developed with R programming language to visualize VAA output. The results showed that the Finnish VAAs lacked transparency, user interactivity and visualizations that would allow for candidate comparisons. Moreover, the VAAs also had algorithmic issues and problems with VAA statement structures. A novel network-based approach comparing candidate to candidate closeness was developed and it also proved to be suitable for detecting possible strategic behavior of parties in guiding their candidates’ VAA answers. Based on these findings a new VAA design was envisioned, which consisted of two phases. The suggested design aimed to give users more power over VAA designers in the process and improve the quality of the voting advice. It is left for future research to implement and test the suggested design. The goal of this thesis is to provide guidance to VAA developers and encourage for more innovative VAA designs.