User centric design

The risk of New Product Development (NPD) investments is that
they are wasted if users and customers do not accept their results. Living Labs
set out to involve users early on in the process to reduce this risk. The paper
tells the story of how Coliquio discusses the contribution of Living Labs to
NPD. User acceptance is a well-known performance indicator for new product
success and user-involvement an indicator of development process maturity.
As the story suggests, the nature of Living Labs as innovation intermediary is
coordination of NPD processes in open-network settings. The paper provides a
framework of Living Lab capabilities including team mobilisation and idea
scouting, match making, product development, user validation and market
positioning, project financing and venturing for future growth. Their concurrent
coordination is a capability by itself. Living Labs are entrepreneurship
capabilities.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have made radical progress through the past decade, affecting all fields of science and expanding knowledge and opportunities in ways that were once impossible to imagine. Amongst others, ICTs have had a slow, but steady impact on the way we conceive and move within built space, as well as the way we tend to design urban spaces, enhancing them with digital functions. Workspaces have become information intensive clusters and homes have become nodes of social and commercial connectivity. Transportation, once a decisive factor for the form of the urban environment, thanks to sophisticated monitoring systems is now much more flexible and predictable, whereas public spaces are augmented with wireless technologies and information nodes, giving new meanings to leisure and social contact. This complex situation of augmented information flow leads us to user oriented and responsive urban environments, where boundaries between public and private, or between home, work, consuming, services, and vacation sites tend to lose their original meaning. Finally, it raises a question of how the human environment should be addressed in the future by professionals.

In this paper, we present MAP2OWL, a software tool that allows the development of OWL ontologies as concept maps. MAP2OWL uses existing OWL constructs to represent conceptual maps; in this way, domain experts develop ontolologies in a graphical conceptual way, not having to be aware of syntactic matters, or issues related to interfaces that were designed for knowledge engineers. MAP2OWL facilitates the transitions form concepts to classes as well as relations to properties���as specified by OWL. ...

Media industries and other rapidly evolving, complex, uncertain markets have a hard time to survive if they do not optimize or radically change their business models. This paper analyses the potential of involving all relevant stakeholders of the value network in the development of a business model by means of a panel based multi-method Living Lab approach. Using an in-depth case study analysis, a critical analysis of both the potential value and the weaknesses of such an approach are being assessed. Although some difficulties exist, opening this innovation process and involving external actors in a structural way has the potential to increase the value creation and sustainability of the business model. This paper also stresses the importance of multidisciplinary research on multi-stakeholder involvement in business model innovation.

study Purpose of this paper—To describe the need for and realization of a new kind of interface for searching and obtaining library materials, an interface designed around user needs and decoupled from, though interoperating with, current library systems. Design/methodology/approach—The paper describes a product that was released in May 2007—the Primo ® system from Ex Libris—as an example of a new solution for the discovery and delivery of library collections. The paper deals with the issues involved in the design of the product, the way in which the product was built to address the needs of both information seekers and libraries, and the use of usability studies to affirm the overall design and help shape fine points of the interface. User experience in the library: a case study Page 1 of 36 Tamar Sadeh, Ex Libris Findings—The paper demonstrates how users ’ expectations, which emanate from the everyday experience on the Internet, can be addressed by library software in a way that c...

User Experience (UX) design relates to the creation of models that affect user experiences during interaction with a system, while the incorporation of cognitive factors in the personalization process of Web systems might provide a more user-centric approach. This paper explores the influence specific cognitive factors may have on UX qualities to be used as adaptivity factors for personalizing and improving users’ experiences in commercial Web-sites. A user experience evaluation was conducted where 96 students navigated in an existing commercial Web-site for a problem-based task. A user experience measurement was performed so as to assess users’ perceptions regarding the pragmatic, hedonic and attraction qualities of the environment. It has been observed that specific cognitive factors have considerable influence on specific qualities of user experience. To this end, such findings are encouraging for further investigation of the possible impact of cognitive factors in terms of enhan...

In this paper, we present MAP2OWL, a software tool that allows the development of OWL ontologies as concept maps. MAP2OWL uses existing OWL constructs to represent conceptual maps; in this way, domain experts develop ontolologies in a graphical conceptual way, not having to be aware of syntactic matters, or issues related to interfaces that were designed for knowledge engineers. MAP2OWL facilitates the transitions form concepts to classes as well as relations to properties���as specified by OWL. ...

In this paper, we present MAP2OWL, a software tool that allows the development of OWL ontologies as concept maps. MAP2OWL uses existing OWL constructs to represent conceptual maps; in this way, domain experts develop ontolologies in a graphical conceptual way, not having to be aware of syntactic matters, or issues related to interfaces that were designed for knowledge engineers. MAP2OWL facilitates the transitions form concepts to classes as well as relations to properties���as specified by OWL. ...