Exploring the motivational factors on continuous usage intention of smartwatches among actual users

Nowadays, smart wearable technology comes up to different sectors and is gaining momentum to be implemented in everyday objects. Smartwatches are the most popular type of wearable devices. The current study attempts to understand the motivational factors of consumers’ continuous intention to use smartwatches. In particular, a netnography research has been conducted and consumers’ opinions on smartwatches on Amazon have been analysed. Eight key determinants of continuous usage intention of smartwatches have been identified. Some of them (healthology, complementary goods and enabling technologies) were not included in previous technology adoption models, highlighting that existing models need to be updated when it comes in the domain of continuous usage intention of wearable technologies.     

The story of socio-technical design: reflections on its successes, failures and potential

Abstract.  This paper traces the history of socio-technical design, emphasizing the set of values it embraces, the people espousing its theory and the organizations that practise it. Its role in the implementation of computer systems and its impact in a number of different countries are stressed. It also shows its relationship with action research, as a humanistic set of principles aimed at increasing human knowledge while improving practice in work situations. Its evolution in the 1960s and 1970s evidencing improved working practices and joint agreements between workers and management are contrasted with the much harsher economic climate of the 1980s and 1990s when such principled practices, with one or two notable exceptions, gave way to lean production, downsizing and cost cutting in a global economy, partly reflecting the impact of information and communications technology. Different future scenarios are discussed where socio-technical principles might return in a different guise to humanize the potential impact of technology in a world of work where consistent organizational and economic change are the norm.     

Ecological interface design and emergent users: Designing for small-scale trucking ecology in India

Effective on-road safety requires proper maintenance of vehicles. In the trucking sector in India, there is a need for supporting predictive maintenance to decrease downtime and improve safety. Improving maintenance in this sector involves certain challenges. First, most trucks are owned by small-scale fleet owners (trucks < 5). Second, maintenance is often handled by small-scale mechanic workshops. The fault diagnosis is very often limited to recognition by the driver and later reassessed by the mechanic by relying on the feel or the sound of the vehicle. Third, a majority of stakeholders in this sector—drivers, mechanics, and owners—have low levels of education. Despite these challenges, with the increase in the rate of digitalization, in the future, it will be easier to monitor the health of the parts of a truck. In addition, there is a developing trend of mobile phone and internet penetration in India that has leapfrogged a majority of Indians into becoming “emergent users” of information technology. Therefore, this article shows that sociotechnical approaches such as ecological interface design can be used to develop mobile interfaces for supporting predictive maintenance through health and usage monitoring of trucks for small-scale fleet owners in India. To develop the interface, a field study was conducted at several sites in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. The insights were used to develop scenarios and the abstraction hierarchy, which were later used creatively to develop the interface design for emergent users.     

Where to put the creases? Interactions between hand length,task, screen size,and folding method on the suitability of hand-held foldable display devices

Limited information is available regarding ergonomic foldable display device forms. This two-stage study involving young South Koreans (divided into three hand-length groups) was conducted to determine ergonomic forms for hand-held foldable display devices considering folding/unfolding comfort and preference. Stage I obtained the suitability of three screen sizes for five tasks. Stage II evaluated 14 different bi- and tri-folding methods considering screen size, folding direction, and folding time. The effects of hand length were all non-significant. Screen size preferences were task-dependent; small screens were preferred for making calls, and medium screens for web searching and gaming. Folding methods affected folding/unfolding comfort and preference; outward screen and Z-shape screen folding were the most preferred bi- and tri-fold concepts, respectively. Screen protection and access appeared to be competing factors in the user preference determination process. Foldable screen size and folding method should be determined by considering tasks, folding/unfolding comfort, and user preferences.

Practitioner summary: A 13.5?cm screen was preferred for making calls, whereas a 17.5?cm screen was best for web searching and gaming. An outward bi-fold screen concept with a 17.5?cm screen and Z-shape tri-fold screen concept with a 22.9?cm screen were preferred. Overall, the Z-shape concept was most preferred.

Abbreviations: SD: standard deviation; ANOVA: analysis of variance; H: Height; W: Width; T: Thickness     

Ecological interface design and computer network management: The effects of network size and fault frequency

This article describes an experiment investigating the impact of ecological interface design (EID) on human performance in computer network management. This work domain is more dynamic than those previously studied under EID because there is a constant potential for the addition and removal of devices, as well as changing configurations, making it important to study the generalizability of the framework. Two interfaces were created for the University of Toronto campus network consisting of 220 nodes: a P interface based on existing design practices which presented primarily physical information and a P+F interface based on EID which presented both physical and functional information identified by an abstraction hierarchy analysis. Participants used one of the two interfaces to detect and diagnose faults or disturbances in the simulated network in real-time. Network size and fault frequency were both manipulated as within-participants variables. The P+F interface led to faster detection times overall, as well as improved fault detection rate and more accurate fault diagnosis under higher fault loads. These results suggest that the EID framework may lead to more robust monitoring performance in computer network management compared to existing interfaces.     

What users want in e-commerce design: effects of age,education and income

Preferences for certain characteristics of an online shopping experience may be related to demographic data. This paper discusses the characteristics of that experience, demographic data and preferences by demographic group. The results of an online survey of 488 individuals in the United States indicate that respondents are generally satisfied with their online shopping experiences, with security, information quality and information quantity ranking first in importance overall. The sensory impact of a site ranked last overall of the seven characteristics measured. Preferences for these characteristics in e-commerce sites were differentiated by age, education and income. The sensory impact of sites became less important as respondents increased in age, income or education. As the income of respondents increased, the importance of the reputation of the vendor rose. Web site designers may incorporate these findings into the design of e-commerce sites in an attempt to increase the shopping satisfaction of their users. Results from the customer relationship management portion of the survey suggest that current push technologies and site personalization are not an effective means of achieving user satisfaction.     

What users want in e-commerce design: effects of age,education and income

Preferences for certain characteristics of an online shopping experience may be related to demographic data. This paper discusses the characteristics of that experience, demographic data and preferences by demographic group. The results of an online survey of 488 individuals in the United States indicate that respondents are generally satisfied with their online shopping experiences, with security, information quality and information quantity ranking first in importance overall. The sensory impact of a site ranked last overall of the seven characteristics measured. Preferences for these characteristics in e-commerce sites were differentiated by age, education and income. The sensory impact of sites became less important as respondents increased in age, income or education. As the income of respondents increased, the importance of the reputation of the vendor rose. Web site designers may incorporate these findings into the design of e-commerce sites in an attempt to increase the shopping satisfaction of their users. Results from the customer relationship management portion of the survey suggest that current push technologies and site personalization are not an effective means of achieving user satisfaction.     

Layered learning design: Towards an integration of learning design and learning object perspectives

The use of ICT to enhance teaching and learning depends on effective design, which operates at many levels of granularity from the small to the very large. This reflects the range of educational problems from course design down to the design of activities focused on specific learning objectives. For maximum impact these layers of design need to be co-ordinated effectively. This paper delineates a reference model of ‘layered learning design’ where designs at one layer should use and incorporate designs from lower (more specific) layers in elegant and powerful ways. This would allow different designers, or tutors, to focus on different levels of abstraction in the learning design process, and to collaborate in combining designs to make a substantial impact on practice.     

Utilising psychophysical techniques to investigate the effects of age,typeface design,size and display polarity on glance legibility

Psychophysical research on text legibility has historically investigated factors such as size, colour and contrast, but there has been relatively little direct empirical evaluation of typographic design itself, particularly in the emerging context of glance reading. In the present study, participants performed a lexical decision task controlled by an adaptive staircase method. Two typefaces, a ‘humanist’ and ‘square grotesque’ style, were tested. Study I examined positive and negative polarities, while Study II examined two text sizes. Stimulus duration thresholds were sensitive to differences between typefaces, polarities and sizes. Typeface also interacted significantly with age, particularly for conditions with higher legibility thresholds. These results are consistent with previous research assessing the impact of the same typefaces on interface demand in a simulated driving environment. This simplified methodology of assessing legibility differences can be adapted to investigate a wide array of questions relevant to typographic and interface designs.

Practitioner Summary: A method is described for rapidly investigating relative legibility of different typographical features. Results indicate that during glance-like reading induced by the psychophysical technique and under the lighting conditions considered, humanist-style type is significantly more legible than a square grotesque style, and that black-on-white text is significantly more legible than white-on-black.     

Balance with the interactive size effects of display,target, and key spacing in tablet tapping,dragging, and typing tasks

This study aimed to expand the current demonstration of display size effects from pointing tasks to dragging and tap‐typing tasks to investigate the effects of influential factors on the performance of touchscreen tablets. From 7‐ to 11‐in. displays, the index of difficulty was kept constant by increasing the target amplitudes and widths (6.0–9.5 mm) proportionally, and the key spacing were, respectively, 13.5 × 7.3–21.5 × 11.5 mm with 0‐mm key gaps. The results demonstrated that simple task types (complexities) reinforced the display size effects and that the effects interacted with target sizes (including amplitude/width scaling) and key spacing to reflect increasing efficiency and usability with increasing sizes. Gender effects were only significant in subjective assessments. Display sizes approaching 10 in., target sizes not less than 7 mm (optimal 9–10 mm) and key spacing larger than 17.5 mm induced the effects of motor scale (the scale of the upper limb joint coordination) and interacted with one another to result in the optimal performance and usability.     

符合伦理的人工智能应用的价值敏感设计:现状与展望

价值敏感设计是一种将伦理嵌入人工智能设计的高效方法,尤其是其独特的三方方法为人工智能应用提供了规避伦理问题和道德风险的手段,因此有着广阔的应用前景.本文系统地介绍了价值敏感设计的内涵、原理和方法;详细描述了价值敏感设计在国内外的研究现状,并对典型研究内容进行了对比分析;总结了近年来价值敏感设计在智能机器人、智能运载工具...     

The effects of group size and task complexity on deadline reactivity

In contemporary organizations, people are often required to work and learn under increasing time pressures as organizations set deadlines in order to respond to stiffer competition. Human behavioral patterns in the presence of deadlines have been studied quantitatively to show that relatively little time is devoted to tasks early on and that most work is performed in close time proximity to a deadline. This phenomenon, called deadline rush, can be explained by a hyperbolic behavioral model. By employing a decision-making task based on an Anti-Air Warfare Coordinator (AAWC) simulator, the experiment had two group size levels (individuals and teams) and two task complexity levels (low and high). The experimental results showed that deadline reactivity is greater for individuals than teams on low-complexity tasks and task complexity is negatively related to deadline reactivity. The results of this study suggest that different group sizes and task types have a significant impact on production performance and that the setting of deadlines, to the degree possible, may be a relevant means towards managing or improving system performance.     

The effects of container size, frequency and extended horizontal reach on maximum acceptable weights of lifting for female industrial workers

In the development of our present manual materials handling (MMH) guidelines (Snook, S.H., Ciriello, V.M., 1991. The design of manual tasks: revised tables of maximum acceptable weights and forces. Ergonomics 34, 1197-1213), the assumption was made that the effects of frequency on maximum acceptable weights (MAWs) of lifting with a large box (hand distance, 38 cm from chest) were similar to that of lifting with a small box (hand distance, 17 cm from chest). The first purpose of the present experiment was to investigate this assumption with female industrial workers. The second purpose was to study the effects of extended horizontal reach lifting (hand distance, 44.6 cm from chest) on MAWs as a confirmation of the results of a previous studies on this variable with males (Ciriello, V.M., Snook, S.H., Hughes, G.J., 1993. Further studies of psychophysically determined maximum acceptable weights and forces. Hum. Factors 35(1), 175-186; Ciriello, V.M., 2003. The effects of box size, frequency, and extended horizontal reach on maximum acceptable weights of lifting. Int. J. Ind. Ergon. 32, 115-120). Lastly, we studied the effects of high frequency (20 lifts/min) on MAWs of lifting. Ten female industrial workers performed 15 variations of lifting using our psychophysical methodology whereby the subjects were asked to select a workload they could sustain for 8h without "straining themselves or without becoming unusually tired weakened, overheated or out of breath". The results confirmed that MAWs of lifting with the large box was significantly effected by frequency. The frequency factor pattern in this study was similar to the frequency pattern from a previous study using the small box (Ciriello, V.M., Snook, S.H., 1983. A study of size distance height, and frequency effects on manual handling tasks. Hum. Factors 25(5), 473-483) for all fast frequencies down to one lift every 2 min with deviations of 7%, 15%, and 13% for the one lift every 5 and 30 min tasks and the one lift in 8h task, respectively. The effects of lifting with an extended horizontal reach decreased MAW 22% and 18% for the mid and center lift and the effects of the 20 lifts/min frequency resulted in a MAW that was 47% of a 1 lift/min MAW. Incorporating these results in future guidelines should improve the design of MMH tasks for female workers.     

Data-driven modeling of product crystal size distribution and optimal input design for batch cooling crystallization processes

In this paper, a novel data-driven model building method is proposed for predicting one-dimensional product crystal size distribution (CSD) or chord length distribution (CLD) of batch cooling crystallization processes, based on only batch run data. The proposed model relating the manipulated variable of cooling rate to the product CSD are constructed by two classes of basis functions, one is the wavelet basis function for reshaping the CSD and the other is the polynomial basis function for weighting the chosen wavelet basis functions to reflect the nonlinear relationship between the input and the density of individual crystal size among the product crystals. Correspondingly, a double-layer least-squares algorithm is established to estimate the model parameters, along with an adaptive strategy to determine the location and number of wavelet basis functions. By introducing an objective function that combines the information entropy of product CSD and the sample deviation of product crystals in each batch with respect to the target crystal size, the optimal input design of cooling rate for the desired product CSD is carried out by using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the non-convex optimization problem with the established CSD model. Simulation tests on the hen-egg-white lysozyme crystallization process along with experiments on the L-glutamic acid cooling crystallization process are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed method.     

Civilian pepper spray for self defense: Understanding user perception and impact of design on user performance

Pepper spray is widely used in the US, and is marketed as an effective self-defense device. While pepper spray can be useful in deterring an attacker, many pepper spray owners do not have any experience using it. There is a dearth of published studies that focus on civilian pepper-spray use, not to mention first time pepper-spray users. A study to analyze pepper-spray designs with first-time users, to see how the design, specifically the safety mechanism, affects response time and overall performance would be helpful. The study was conducted in 2 parts – a survey to understand user perception, and a lab experiment using a 2 × 2 randomized block design with two designs of pepper sprays (side-slide safety and flip-top safety) and the two starting locations for the pepper spray (purse or pocket) as the manipulated factors. Results revealed a significant difference in response times between the flip-top pepper-spray and the side-slide pepper-spray. There was also a significant difference in response times between using the index or thumb as the trigger finger but no significant difference in response times when the pepper-spray for location (purse or pocket). Overall, participants rated the side-slide device as the most effective self-defense device.Relevance to industryBecause there is no other research in the area of first-time pepper-spray users, let alone civilian pepper-spray users, much can be learned about how well people use these devices in a real-world situation, and when there is a highly stressful situation how well does pepper-spray allow an individual to protect him or herself. This study starts the discussion on some of these topics.     

Retrieval of subpixel snow covered area, grain size, and albedo from MODIS

We describe and validate a model that retrieves fractional snow-covered area and the grain size and albedo of that snow from surface reflectance data (product MOD09GA) acquired by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The model analyzes the MODIS visible, near infrared, and shortwave infrared bands with multiple endmember spectral mixtures from a library of snow, vegetation, rock, and soil. We derive snow spectral endmembers of varying grain size from a radiative transfer model specific to a scene's illumination geometry; spectra for vegetation, rock, and soil were collected in the field and laboratory. We validate the model with fractional snow cover estimates from Landsat Thematic Mapper data, at 30 m resolution, for the Sierra Nevada, Rocky Mountains, high plains of Colorado, and Himalaya. Grain size measurements are validated with field measurements during the Cold Land Processes Experiment, and albedo retrievals are validated with in situ measurements in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. The pixel-weighted average RMS error for snow-covered area across 31 scenes is 5%, ranging from 1% to 13%. The mean absolute error for grain size was 51 µm and the mean absolute error for albedo was 4.2%. Fractional snow cover errors are relatively insensitive to solar zenith angle. Because MODSCAG is a physically based algorithm that accounts for the spatial and temporal variation in surface reflectances of snow and other surfaces, it is capable of global snow cover mapping in its more computationally efficient, operational mode.     

The design process of expert systems development: some concerns

Abstract: A discussion is presented of why some expert systems that organizations have developed are not successful. The concept of design process plays a very significant role at the outset of the expert system development process. This concept has not been the subject of much debate and attention in expert systems development. From the author's point of view, one of the main issues is how the designer (knowledge engineer) thinks about the design process. In general, the designer's process is influenced by the knowledge engineer's conception. This paper endeavors to disclose some of the main factors related to the knowledge engineer's conception of the design process and an attempt is made to put forward a conceptual model of the expert system design process. This conceptual model is an initial step towards a successful implementation of expert system projects.     

The design of information systems: parti, formats and sketching

In this article it is argued that an information system must be treated as an artefact with a format . We need to see information systems design as based on architectonic and not tectonic thinking. Design based on architectonic thinking emphasizes (1) the task of giving form to a design proposal, and (2) the task of creating an overall structure for the information system. These two activities are closely related because they both deal with the issue of seeing the idea or whole of systems, and the problem of how to give form to that whole . The paper begins with an exploration of the concept formative faculties in relation to 'given' and 'non-given' objects. The concepts of parti and format are then presented as a way to grasp the 'whole' of an information system. How formats can be used in information systems design is discussed as well as how this leads to the act of sketching as an important but neglected activity in information systems design. Sketching is promoted by introducing diathenic graphologue as the art of 'giving form to the unknown'. The paper ends by suggesting how formats and diathenic graphologue can be practised and included as important aspects of information systems design education and training.     

The study of perceived adverse effects of digital piracy and involvement: insights from adult computer users

In this study, we focus on two sets of expected negative consequences of engaging in digital piracy among the seldom studied adult computer users rather than student population. We delve into the role of perceived risk and moral intensity as drivers of consumers’ attitudes and behavioural intentions, and explore the rarely examined moderating effect of issue involvement on the relationship between the attitude and intention to pirate. The dominant attitude–behaviour theory is extended with an ethical decision-making theoretical perspective. The hypotheses are tested via mail survey data from a random sample of adult consumers using structural equations modelling. The results of this cross-sectional study show unfailing support for the relationships proposed in our model. Our findings suggest that, in addition to perceived risk, moral intensity (i.e. the expected consequences for others), has a particularly strong total effect on the intention to pirate, and that consumer involvement in illegally downloading files is a salient factor moderating the relationship between attitudes and behavioural intentions. Based on this pattern of results, we offer theoretical and practical implications.     

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public’s use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms.

Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how ‘civic tech’ platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services.