A research and development (R&D) approach has been applied to video telephony (VT) in northern Finland since 1994 by broad consortia. The focus has been on the considerable involvement of ergonomics within the engineering and implementation of VT. This multidisciplinary participatory ergonomic R&D approach (PERDA) is described briefly, in general and through two cases. The user-centeredness sho...

Optimal usability assumes a consistently user-centered developmental process. This also entails an added emotional value which goes along with functional user-friendliness: the so-called “Joy of Use” arises from the emotional interaction between the user and the contents, features and functions of a website, and is a central image-boosting success factor. The present article will outline protot...

We observed that before initiating software development the objectives are minimally organized and developers introduce comparatively higher organization throughout the design process. To be able to formally capture this observation, a new communication channel representation system for software is developed in three stages a) set-theoretical representation of software design, b) mapping of sof...

The paper presents the application of augmented reality to support product design and development. The paper concentrates on a new engineering tool. By this reason design and its issues are presented in a very limited way. The goal of the research was to improve design process and reduce product development time. The presented system bases on CAD software which is integrated with an expert syst...

Capstone senior design projects provide students with a collaborative software design and development experience to reinforce learned material while allowing students latitude in developing real-world applications. Our two-semester capstone classes are required for all computer science majors. Students must have completed a software engineering course — capstone classes are typically taken duri...

The emotional value of products is deemed highly important by design researchers and practitioners in distinguishing a product from technically equivalent competitors (e.g., Chitturi, 2009; Desmet, Overbeeke, & Tax, 2001). Creating anthropomorphic features is one strategy in product design practice to accomplish emotional designs. This is reflected, for example, by a car designer’s concern for ...

The multimodal dimension of a user interface raises numerous problems that are not present in more traditional interfaces. In this paper, we briefly review the current approaches in software design and modality integration techniques for multimodal interaction. We then propose a simple framework for describing multimodal interaction designs and for combining sets of user inputs of different mod...