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Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice
by Susan Albers Mohrman Edward E. Lawler IIIThis collection examines how useful research can be achieved and argues that in order to keep organizational research relevant to theory and practice, the approach must deviate from the orthodoxy of positivistic, pure research approaches. The contributing authors were selected for their demonstrated ability to conduct useful research, and they bring their unique professional experience to their chapters by describing the choices they make and the tactics they employ. The core message of this book is that in order to conduct research that is useful, researchers must learn from practice and intentionally position their work so that it finds a pathway to practice. While each chapter can stand alone, the book is crafted to provide multiple complementary perspectives on the topic of useful research. It does an outstanding job of describing what it takes to bridge the gap between theory and practice. It goes beyond advocacy, theoretical debate, and restatements of the problem to focus on the types of research methods that produce useful research. Topics include crafting research programs to yield useful knowledge, academic careers that yield useful knowledge, pathways to practice, institutional agents such as MBA programs and journals.
User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts
by Robert R. JohnsonPresents a theoretical model for examining technology through a user perspective. Begins with a historical overview of the problem of technology use through the lens of rhetoric theory, and defines central areas of user-centered theory, such as user knowledge, human-technology interaction, and technological determinism. Draws also from human factors engineering, history, philosophy, and sociology to discuss ideological presuppositions of technology design and technological determinism. Ideas are applied in academic and nonacademic contexts. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
User-Centred Engineering
by Michael Richter Markus FlückigerA new product can be easy or difficult to use, it can be efficient or cumbersome, engaging or dispiriting, it can support the way we work and think - or not. What options are available for systematically addressing such parameters and provide users with an appropriate functionality, usability and experience? In the last decades, several fields have evolved that encompass a user-centred approach to create better products for the people who use them. This book provides a comprehensible introduction to the subject. It is aimed first and foremost at people involved in software and product development - product managers, project managers, consultants and analysts, who face the major challenge of developing highly useful and usable products. Topics include: The most important user-centred techniques and their alignment in the development process Planning examples of user-centred activities for projects User-oriented approaches for organisations Real-life case studies Checklists, tips and a lot of background information provide help for practitioners
User Engagement Research and Practice (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services)
by Heather O'BrienThis book presents a holistic overview of user engagement, which has become an increasingly important subject for a variety of industry and academic fields, including engineering, computer science, and information science. The author begins with a definition of user engagement and an explanation of the theoretical background of the topic. The book then covers methodological approaches and examines some of the broader factors that influence user engagement. The author explains methods for measuring user engagement and evaluates the efficacy of each one. The book includes examples from recent research studies throughout, describing user engagement in different settings with a variety of digital information systems.
User Error: Resisting Computer Culture
by Ellen RoseUser Error explodes the myth of computer technology as juggernaut. Multimedia educator Ellen Rose shows that there is no bandwagon, no out-of-control dynamo, no titanic conspiracy to overwhelm us. Instead, there is our own desire to join the fraternity of users, a fraternity that confers legitimacy and power on those who enter the brave new world. Rose exposes how we surrender decision-making power in personal and workplace computing situations. As users we willingly grant authority to the creators of software, support materials, and the seductive infrastructure of technocracy. “Smart” users are rewarded; reluctant users are pathologized. User identity is deliberately constructed at the crossroads of industry, consumer demand, and complicity. User Error sounds a timely alarm, calling on all of us who use the new technologies to recognize how we are being co-opted. With awareness we can reassert our own responsibility and power in this increasingly important interaction. Savvy, accessible, and up-to-date, User Error offers insight, inspiration, and strategies of resistance to general readers, technology professionals, students, and scholars alike.
User Experience + Artificial Intelligence: Assessing the Qualities of AI-infused Systems (SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology)
by Davide Spallazzo Martina Sciannamè Mauro CeconelloThis open access book addresses the thriving trend of embedding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities in products and services reaching the lay public, focusing on the user experience (UX) they prompt from a designerly perspective. It offers a UX evaluation method designed explicitly for AI-infused systems to answer one of the core problems affecting the relationship and interactions people have with such artefacts. The work investigates how people perceive and make sense of systems integrating AI capabilities, trying to understand how their meaning and significance can affect the experience of such products and what design challenges may arise. Given the fundamental premise that current UX methods cannot address AI-infused artefacts, it introduces the results of Meet-AI, a research project exploring specific ways to tackle these problems. The book then presents a comprehensive analysis of current UX methods, and a literature review focused on detecting possible gaps and the most suitable qualities to describe AI-infused systems, and summarizes the findings from all previous investigations into a UX evaluation scale: AIXE (AI user eXperience Evaluation). The book also portrays how the tool has been validated and expanded to become a more comprehensive method. It further describes how the scale has been applied to a comparative study of domestic smart speakers, and introduces a reversed interpretation of the outcomes, framing them as heuristics to inform the early phases of the design process and paving the way for future experimentations in the meta-design dimension.
User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth
by Satyam KantamneniIgniting business growth through UX In an increasingly digital world, users are rewarding products and services that provide them with a good experience and punishing those that don’t — with their wallets. Organizations realize they need to adapt quickly but don’t know how or where to start. In User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth, UXReactor co-Founder Satyam Kantamneni distills 25 years of industry experience into a pragmatic approach to help organizations advance in the highly competitive and rapidly changing digital world. You’ll discover: Why putting users at the center of strategy leads to an almost unfair competitive advantage Ways to build an organizational system that delivers a superior user experience that is replicable, consistent, and scalable Common shortfalls that prevent organizations from reaping the value of experience design 27 proven “plays” from the UXReactor playbook to put concepts into practice Game planning examples to execute at different levels of an organization A comprehensive and practical book for everyone involved in the transformation — business leaders, design leaders, product managers, engineers, and designers — User Experience Design: A Practical Playbook to Fuel Business Growth is also an ideal blueprint for current and prospective UX practitioners seeking to improve their skills and further their careers.
User Experience for Serious Games in Virtual Reality (T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services)
by Tanja KojićThe book presents research in understanding how to make Virtual Reality (VR) applications more enjoyable and realistic. The author studies this in relation not just to VR games for entertainment, but also for other applications such as serious games, which are used for education and training. To make VR games better, the work examines topics like the content in the game, the context in which it's played, and human factors like one’s age, and previous experience with VR. By understanding these factors, the author creates guidelines to make VR games more engaging and user-friendly. The primary purpose of this work is to evaluate and identify different influences on User Experience (UX) for VR serious games, intending to narrow the research gap between Influencing Factors (IFs), UX, and design guidelines for VR serious games. With eight user studies and five different VR serious games developed, different influences and links between those factors and UX components are investigated.
User Experience Methods and Tools in Human-Computer Interaction
by Gavriel Salvendy Constantine StephanidisThis book covers user experience methods and tools in designing user‑friendly products and servicesby encompassing widely utilized successful methods, including elicitation, analysis and establishment of requirements, collaborative idea generation with design teams and intended users, prototype testing and evaluation of the user experience through empirical and non‑empirical means.This book• Provides methods and tools tailored for each stage of the design process.• Discusses methods for the active involvement of users in the human‑centered design process.• Equips readers with an effective toolset for use throughout the design process, ensuring that what is created aligns with user needs and desires.• Covers a wide array of research and evaluation methods employed in HCI, from the initiation of the human‑centered development cycle to its culmination.This book is a fascinating read for individuals interested in Human-Computer Interaction research and applications.
User Innovation in Healthcare: How Patients and Caregivers React Creatively to Illness (SpringerBriefs in Health Care Management and Economics)
by Francesco SchiavoneThis book explores in depth the phenomenon of user innovation in healthcare. In particular, the book sheds light on patient innovation, whereby patients and/or caregivers proactively develop and diffuse new products and services that provide health and quality of life benefits by addressing gaps in existing market offerings. The aim is to clarify the key characteristics of these innovative processes and to offer practitioners and policymakers tangible bottom-up evidence, solutions, and ideas that will assist in improving health systems, organizations, and practices. A number of important and interesting research questions are addressed, casting light on the types of products and services that tend to be developed by patient innovators, the typical profile of these innovators, the role played by firms, institutions, and health professionals, and the ways in which digital technologies support the dissemination of innovations among patient communities and within the industry. Beyond academic scholars and policymakers, the book will be of high value for students on master’s programs in both medical sciences and business and economics.
User Integration in Sustainable Product Development: Organisational Learning through Boundary-Spanning Processes
by Esther HoffmannChanges in production and consumption patterns are a crucial element in advancing the sustainability agenda. Many companies are now contributing to such efforts through a focus on sustainable innovation when developing new products and services. However, problematically, many such products fail as consumers reject them in the marketplace. User integration in product development is a well-suited approach to increase the usability and the marketability of new products. This book asks the following question: under what conditions can companies trigger sustainability-oriented organizational learning processes by integrating consumers in product development? The author analyses this question by studying a new approach called INNOCOPE (Innovating through consumer-integrated product development). The analysis is based on a process model of organizational learning, distinguishing different learning phases and related boundary-spanning activities. The case study shows that boundary spanning and communication with external actors may directly affect almost all phases of the organizational learning process. Depending on the organizational learning phase, specific boundary-spanning activities are identified that can be characterized as outside-in, inside-in or inside-out directed processes. Moreover, the book describes supportive conditions for user integration with regard to the company, the product, the users involved and the communication process, and provides managerial recommendations. User Integration in Sustainable Product Development sheds new light on the interaction between companies and users in innovation processes and how they relate to sustainable product development. Its focus on organizational learning at and across the boundaries of companies is original, stimulating, improves our understanding of user–producer interactions and distinguishes the book from other publications on the market. The book provides a hugely comprehensive overview of user integration in innovation processes: its advantages, problems and weaknesses, and the methods in which it is currently applied. This, along with a systematic analysis of organisational learning provides the reader with a complete understanding of what has to be considered when studying user-producer interactions from a company perspective and provides the basis for further improvements and company strategies to advance the take-up of sustainable products. The book will be essential reading for academics and practitioners involved with organizational learning, innovation studies, sustainable design and product development, and marketing.
User Localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown: Biometric in Ghana’s Elections
by Isidore Kafui DorpenyoThis book examines Ghana’s use of the fingerprint biometric technology in order to further conversations about localization championed by technical communication scholars. Localization, in this case, refers to the extent to which users demonstrate their knowledge of use by subverting and reconfiguring the purpose of technology to solve local problems. Dorpenyo argues that the success of a technology depends on how it meets the users’ needs and the creative efforts users put into use situations. In User Localization Strategies in the Face of Technological Breakdown, Dorpenyo advocates studying how users of technological systems construct knowledge about the technology and develop local strategies to solve technological breakdowns. By analyzing technical documents and interview transcripts, the author identifies and advances three user localization strategies: linguistic localization, subversive localization, and user-heuristic experience localization, and considers how biometric systems can become a tool of marginalization.
User Tested: How the World's Top Companies Use Human Insight to Create Great Experiences
by Janelle Estes Andy MacMillanAn insightful discussion and practical guide on how to put customers back into the center of your business model With so many digital experiences touching our lives—and businesses—it’s understandable to feel like you’re drowning in data. There’s a dashboard or chart for just about everything, but data alone can’t help you understand and empathize with your customers. No amount of it will take you inside their heads, help you see the world through their eyes, or let you experience what it’s really like to be your customer. Only human insight from real people can do that. User Tested gives both individual contributors and executives an approachable, pragmatic playbook for stepping beyond standard business metrics and infusing real human insight into every business decision, design, and experience. In this book, you’ll: Learn how businesses became obsessed with data—but disconnected from their customers—and why that’s not sustainable Get the basics about how to capture human insight through user testing, including how to find the right people, ask the right questions, and make sense of and act on all the insights you uncover Dive into a detailed playbook that shares real-world examples of how you can collect and scale human insight across the teams in your organization—from marketing to product, and beyond Learn how to evangelize the power of human insight throughout your organization, so every department can create a culture of customer empathy and share a firsthand understanding of customer needs Find out how companies like Microsoft, AAA Club Alliance, HelloFresh, and Notre Dame’s IDEA Center solidly connect with and elicit meaningful feedback from customers in friendlier, faster, and more direct ways Perfect for any industry, User Tested: How the World's Top Companies Use Human Insight to Create Great Experiences was co-authored by the chief insights officer and the CEO of UserTesting—a SaaS company fundamentally changing the way both B2B and consumer brands find out what real people think and feel. The book reflects the authors’ commitment to helping you position the customer squarely in the center of your business model by weaving their true voices throughout your company’s decision making.
User Unfriendly: Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers
by Joseph J. CornWe’ve all been there. Seduced by the sleek designs and smart capabilities of the newest gadgets, we end up stumped by their complicated set-up instructions and exasperating error messages. In this fascinating history, Joseph J. Corn maps two centuries of consumer frustration and struggle with personal technologies.Aggravation with the new machines people adopt and live with is as old as the industrial revolution. Clocks, sewing machines, cameras, lawn mowers, bicycles, electric lights, cars, and computers: all can empower and exhilarate, but they can also exact a form of servitude. Adopters puzzle over which type and model to buy and then how to operate the device, diagnose its troubles, and meet its insatiable appetite for accessories, replacement parts, or upgrades. It intrigues Corn that we put up with the frustrations our technology thrusts upon us, battling with the unfamiliar and climbing the steep learning curves. It is this ongoing struggle, more than the uses to which we ultimately put our machines, that animates this thought-provoking study.Having extensively researched owner’s manuals, computer user-group newsletters, and how-to literature, Corn brings a fresh, consumer-oriented approach to the history of technology. User Unfriendly will be valuable to historians of technology, students of American culture, and anyone interested in our modern dependence on machines and gadgets.
Uses and Abuses of Psychology
by Dr H. J. EysenckThis first book by German-born psychologist Hans Jürgen Eysenck's is considered a classic amongst scholars and professionals of psychology. It describes the pitfalls of psychology, and the remedies that can be applied. A strong dependence on statistics and the experimental method is emphasized as essential to good psychology.The book is divided into four sections: Intelligence Testing, Vocational Psychology, Abnormal Behaviour, and Social Attitudes. Can an intelligence test administered to an eight year old predict adult performance? Is interviewing a good way of selecting the best applicant for a job? Is there such a thing as 'normal' behaviour? Can surveys such as the Gallup poll be of assistance to psychologists? Eysenck answers these and other questions.A book not to be missed by anyone interested in psychology.
The Uses Of Autobiography
by Julia SwindellsFirst Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The Uses of Digital Literacy (Creative Economy + Innovation Culture Ser.)
by John HartleyAt the heart of this book lies a reappraisal of humanities research and its use in understanding the conditions of a consumer-led society. This is an open, investigative, critical, scientific task as well as an opportunity to engage with creative enterprise and culture. Now that every user is a publisher, consumption needs to be rethought as action not behavior, and media consumption as a mode of literacy.Online social networks and participatory media are often still ignored by professionals, denounced in the press and banned in schools. But the potential of digital literacy should not be underestimated. Fifty years after Richard Hoggart's pioneering The Uses of Literacy reshaped the educational response to popular culture, John Hartley extends Hoggart's argument into digital media. Media evolution has made possible the realism of the modern age journalism, the novel and science not to mention mass entertainment on a global scale.Hartley reassesses the historical and global context, commercial and cultural dynamics and the potential of popular productivity through analysis of the use of digital media in various domains, including creative industries, digital storytelling, YouTube, journalism, and mediated fashion. Encouraging mass participation in the evolutionary growth of knowledge, The Uses of Digital Literacy shows how today's teenage fad may become tomorrow's scientific method. Hartley claims the time has come for education to catch up with entertainment and for the professionals to learn from popular culture. This book will stimulate the imagination and stir further research.
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
by Richard Sennett"[Sennett] has ended up writing the best available contemporary defense of anarchism. . . . The issues [he] raises are fundamental and profound. His book is utopian in the best sense--it tries to define a radically different future and to show that it could be constructed from the materials at hand." -Kenneth Keniston, New York Times Book Review The distinguished social critic Richard Sennett here shows how the excessively ordered community freezes adults--both the young idealists and their security-oriented parents--into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle classes that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. And he proposes a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and deal with the challenges of life.
The Uses of Literacy: Aspects Of Working-lass Life (Classics In Communication And Mass Culture Ser.)
by Richard HoggartThis pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.
The Uses of Narrative: Explorations in Sociology, Psychology and Cultural Studies
by Shelley SclaterSocial scientists increasingly invoke "narrative" in their theory and research. This book explores the wide range of work in sociology, psychology and cultural studies in which narrative approaches have been used to study meaning, subjectivity, politics, and power in concrete contexts.The Uses of Narrative presents a range of case studies, including: Princess Diana's Panorama interview, media coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, memoirs of the wives of scientists who made the first atomic bomb, popular images of gay marriage, and the effect of the "Velvet Revolution" on writing autobiography.The book brings together contributions from European, Australian, and North American researchers, indicating the diversity and potential of narrative approaches. The editors adopt a distinctive and unique psychosocial approach to narrative, and set the individual chapters in the context of three broad themes: culture, life histories, and discourse. The Uses of Narrative complicates, challenges and stimulates--it will be of vital interest to sociologists, psychologists, social theorists, students of cultural studies, and others who are interested in the relationships between meaning, self and society.
The Uses of Schooling (Routledge Library Editions: Philosophy of Education #5)
by Harry S. BroudyThe Uses of Schooling, first published in 1988, proposes a radically different approach to the evaluation of education. Professor Broudy shows that the common criteria of school effectiveness – that is the ability to replicate the end-of-course performance on examinations or to apply such results – clearly demonstrates the ‘uselessness’ of much of the investment made in schooling. This is so because, unless constantly reinforced by repetition the ability to replace test performance is rapidly diminished after formal school ends. This study will be of interest to students of education.
The Uses of Social Research: Social Investigation in Public Policy-Making (Routledge Revivals)
by Martin BulmerThe growth and health of the social sciences owe a good deal to the generally held belief that they are socially useful, but is this really so? Do they deliver the goods they promise? In The Uses of Social Research, first published in 1982, Martin Bulmer answers these and other questions concerning the uses of empirical social science in the policy-making process, and provides an extended analysis of the main issues. This title provides a valuable introduction to the patterns of influence exercised by the social sciences on government. It shows how the results of social research feed into the political system and what models of the relationship between research and policy are most convincing. This book will be of interest to students of the social sciences.
Using a Positive Lens to Explore Social Change and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation (Organization and Management Series)
by Karen Golden-Biddle Jane E. DuttonHow can application of a positive lens to understanding social change and organizations enrich and elaborate theory and practice? This is the core question that inspired this book. It is a question that brought together a diverse and talented group of researchers interested in change and organizations in different problem domains (sustainability, healthcare, and poverty alleviation). The contributors to this book bring different theoretical lenses to the question of social change and organizations. Some are anchored in more macro accounts of how and why social change processes occur, while others approach the question from a more psychological or social psychological perspective. Many of the chapters in the book travel across levels of analyses, making their accounts of social change good examples of multi-level theorizing. Some scholars are practiced and immersed in thinking about organizational phenomena through a positive lens; for others it was a total adventure in trying on a new set of glasses. However, connecting all contributing authors was an excitement and willingness to explore new insights and new angles on how to explain and cultivate social change within or across organizations. This edited volume will be of interest to an international community who seek to understand how organizations and people can generate positive outcomes for society. Students and researchers in organizational behavior, management, positive psychology, leadership and corporate responsibility will find this book of interest.
Using African Epistemologies in Shaping Inclusive Education Knowledge
by Mbulaheni Obert Maguvhe Mfundo Mandla MasukuThis book thus explores the role of African epistemologies in addressing the myriad challenges posed by the inclusive education system in Africa and other contexts. In recent years, the shift from special education to inclusive education has had a significant impact on the provision of education and the education system as a whole in Africa. The impact has been felt in all institutions of learning from low to high, public and private, government, and across departments of education. Inclusive education, if shaped correctly by using African epistemologies, would empower learners to attain the relevant skills, knowledge, values, and attitudes for their own intellectual growth and personal development.
Using an ISA Mobile App for Professional Development
by Graham Passmore Julie PrescottBuilding on our prior ISA-based Palgrave pivot, the aims of the book are twofold. One, to showcase a newly developed App as a tool in the use of Identity Structure Analysis (ISA) for researchers interested in identity. Second, the book will focus on the use, of a counselling supervision ISA instrument in order to highlight the benefits of ISA for professional development (PD) for any profession. The idea is that any researcher interested in professional and or personal development would be able to use the proposed book to aid them in either a supervision style process of development or the more standard one-to-one annual/biannual approach to PD. Through using ISA in PD, the book and its attendant analyses will encourage discussion, facilitate openness, and highlight potential issues that may lead to burnout, mental health issues, leaving a profession or additional risks. That is, the book will be oriented to informing researchers as to the potential ISA, the App, and the supervision instrument hold for directing PD.