Dag Svanaes
Has also published under the name of:
"Dag Svanæs"
Dag Svanaes is a professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Svanaes is also adjunct professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark
He has been teaching and doing research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since the late 1980s. His main areas of interest are mobile and ubiquitous computing, usability evaluation methodology, user-centered design, and the philosophy of interaction. He is currently involved in a national research initiative on medical informatics (NSEP), and have built up a usability lab for health ICT at NSEP.
Publications by Dag Svanaes (bibliography)
Svanaes, Dag (2011). Encyclopedia chapter titled "Page title suppressed - page not yet published". Retrieved 16 December 2011 from Interaction-Design.org: [URL suppressed - page not yet published]
Das, Anita, Faxvaag, Arild and Svanaes, Dag (2011): Interaction design for cancer patients: do we need to take into account the effects of illness and medication?. In: Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems 2011. pp. 21-24.
“In this paper we explore how having cancer and receiving therapy influences upon patients' ability to use an online healthcare system. The motivation is that no empirically based design guidelines are available concerning this user group. Ignoring possible effects of illness and therapy can result in systems with poor usability and user acceptance. A case-control usability test with 14 cancer patients and 14 matched controls revealed that the cancer patients experienced significantly more difficulties compared with the healthy controls using a web-based online healthcare system. We conclude that designers of online healthcare systems need to take into consideration the unique challenges of being ill and/or using medication.”
© All rights reserved Das et al. and/or ACM Press
Dahl, Yngve, Alsos, Ole A. and Svanaes, Dag (2010): Fidelity Considerations for Simulation-Based Usability Assessments of Mobile ICT for Hospitals. In International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 26 (5) pp. 445-476.
“Controlled laboratory-based usability assessments of mobile information and communications technologies (ICT) for hospitals have been conducted. As part of these assessments, clinicians have acted out mobile work scenarios and used the systems to solve related tasks. The evaluations show that relevant usability issues go beyond those of graphical user interfaces. Many of these usability issues only show up when the real-world context of use is replicated in the laboratory to a high degree of fidelity. The complexity of the context of use for mobile ICT in hospitals has motivated us to explore training simulation fidelity theories. Based on a review of the training simulation literature, a set of fidelity dimensions through which training simulations are often adjusted to meet specific goals are identified. It is argued that the same mechanisms can be used in usability assessments of mobile ICT for hospitals. Our argument is substantiated by using the identified set of fidelity dimensions in a retrospective analysis of two usability assessments. The analysis explains how the configuration of fidelity dimensions, each reflecting various degrees of realism vis-à-vis the actual performance context, contributed to the identification of relevant usability issues.”
© All rights reserved Dahl et al. and/or Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Svanaes, Dag, Alsos, Ole Andreas and Dahl, Yngve (2010): Usability testing of mobile ICT for clinical settings: Methodological and practical challenges. In I. J. Medical Informatics, 79 (4) pp. 24-34.
Dahl, Yngve and Svanaes, Dag (2008): A comparison of location and token-based interaction techniques for point-of-care access to medical information. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12 (6) pp. 459-478.
Svanaes, Dag and Gulliksen, Jan (2008): Understanding the context of design: towards tactical user centered design. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2008. pp. 353-362.
“It is widely recognized that system usability requires active involvement of end-users in all phases of software development, and there is currently a broad consensus among researchers and practitioners in the field as to what constitutes a good user-centered design process. Despite this, many systems development projects still fail when it comes to addressing usability issues and appropriately involving users in the design process. We find that a project's boundary conditions are becoming increasingly important for the potential impact of user-centered design activities, and hence the success of the end result of the project. We propose and define "context of design" as a concept to embrace the socio-technical system in which user-centered design takes place. The context of design includes, but is not limited to, the internal structure of the developer and the client organizations, contractual and tender issues, software engineering tools, and stakeholder agendas and relations. We illustrate the reasoning with various cases in which user-centered design has been constrained by factors in the context of design. We recommend that user-centered-design projects give priority to an early identification of factors in the context of design that pose risks to end-product usability. By analyzing the context of design for each project, we may be able to better tailor user-centered design activities to reach the goal of building a more usable end-result.”
© All rights reserved Svanaes and Gulliksen and/or their publisher
Rømen, Dagfinn and Svanaes, Dag (2008): Evaluating web site accessibility: validating the WAI guidelines through usability testing with disabled users. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2008. pp. 535-538.
“The purpose of the reported study has been to validate empirically the usefulness of using the WAI accessibility guidelines WCAG 1.0 as a heuristic for website accessibility. Through controlled usability tests of two websites with disabled users (N=7) and a control group (N=6) we found that only 27% of the identified website accessibility problems could have been identified through the use of WCAG. We conclude from this that in its current version, the application of WCAG alone is not sufficient to guarantee website accessibility. WCAG has a large potential for improvement, and our data point to some problem areas that we suggest should be included. We recommend that future versions of accessibility guidelines should be based on empirical data and validated empirically.”
© All rights reserved Rømen and Svanaes and/or their publisher
Svanaes, Dag, Das, Anita and Alsos, Ole Andreas (2008): The Contextual Nature of Usability and its Relevance to Medical Informatics. In: Andersen, Stig Kjær, Klein, Gunnar O., Schulz, Stefan and Aarts, Jos (eds.) Proceedings of MIE2008 - The XXIst International Congress of the European Federation for Medical Informatics May 25-28, 2008, Göteborg, Sweden. pp. 541-546.
Dahl, Yngve and Svanaes, Dag (2007): Visualizing Interaction in Digitally Augmented Spaces: Steps Toward a Formalism for Location-Aware and Token-Based Interactive Systems. In: Jacko, Julie A. (ed.) HCI International 2007 - 12th International Conference - Part II July 22-27, 2007, Beijing, China. pp. 569-578.
Alsos, Ole Andre and Svanaes, Dag (2006): Interaction techniques for using handhelds and PCs together in a clinical setting. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction 2006. pp. 125-134.
“In the present study we compare interaction techniques for using handheld devices together with stationary displays in a hospital setting. A set of prototype implementations were developed and tested for a pre-surgery scenario with pairs of physicians and patients. The participants were asked to rank the interaction techniques in order of preference. The results show highest ranking for a distributed user interface where the GUI elements reside on the handheld and where the stationary display is used for showing media content. An analysis of the factors affecting the usability shows that in addition to GUI usability, the interaction techniques were ranked based on ergonomic and social factors specific to the use situation. The latter include the physicality of the patient bed and how computing devices potentially interrupt the face-to-face communication between physician and patient. The study illustrates how the usability of interaction techniques for ubiquitous computing is affected by the ergonomic and social factors of each specific use context.”
© All rights reserved Alsos and Svanaes and/or ACM Press
Svanaes, Dag and Seland, Gry (2004): Putting the users center stage: role playing and low-fi prototyping enable end users to design mobile systems. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 479-486.
“This paper sums up lessons learned from a sequence of cooperative design workshops where end users were enabled to design mobile systems through scenario building, role playing, and low-fidelity prototyping. We present a resulting fixed workshop structure with well-chosen constraints that allows for end users to explore and design new technology and work practices. In these workshops, the systems developers get input to design from observing how users stage and act out current and future use scenarios and improvise new technology to fit their needs. A theoretical framework is presented to explain the creative processes involved and the workshop as a user-centered design method. Our findings encourage us to recommend the presented workshop structure for design projects involving mobility and computer-mediated communication, in particular project where the future use of the resulting products and services also needs to be designed.”
© All rights reserved Svanaes and Seland and/or ACM Press
Svanaes, Dag and Seland, Gry (2004): Putting the users center stage: role playing and low-fi prototyping enable end users to design mobile systems. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2004 April 24 - 29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 479-486.
Svanaes, Dag (2001): Context-Aware Technology: A Phenomenological Perspective. In Human-Computer Interaction, 16 (2) pp. 379-400.
“Context-aware systems are currently to a large extent designed from a systems perspective. Research on these technologies has so far mostly been focused on exploring what can be built and less on how it will show up in people's lives. The existing theory and practice in human-computer interaction has mainly evolved from work on graphical user interfaces, and additional theory is required to enable user-centered design of context-aware systems. Interaction with such systems is to a larger extent physical, and an appropriate theory consequently needs to account for the user's bodily nature. We have found the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to be a good starting point for the development of such theory. With its first-person focus on the lived body and its relation to the environment, it provides a conceptual framework well suited for understanding context-aware systems from the user's perspective. The perspective moves the focus from seeing a context-aware system as an artifact "sensing" information, to seeing it as an interactive system with a physical user interface. This makes the distinction between foreground and background interaction a property not of the system, but of the situation. A consequence of this philosophical standpoint is that context can never be a property of the world, but that context rather is the horizon within which the user makes sense of the world. The phenomenological perspective enables a systematic exploration of the design space for context-aware systems-as they appear to the user. It further enables an analysis of the requirements for a seamless integration between screen-based and context-aware systems. The essay ends by pointing to the need for making the technology available in a form that can be easily utilized by interaction designers.”
© All rights reserved Svanaes and/or Taylor and Francis
Svanaes, Dag (2000): Understanding Interactivity: Steps to a Phenomenology of Human-Computer Interaction. Trondheim, Norway, Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet (NTNU)
Cited on the following pages:
» Philosophy of Interaction: [Not yet published]
» Activity Theory: [Not yet published]
Svanaes, Dag and Verplank, William (2000): In search of metaphors for tangible user intefaces. In: Designing Augmented Reality Environments 2000 2000. pp. 121-129.
Svanaes, Dag (1993): Interaction is orthogonal to graphical form. In: Ashlund, Stacey, Mullet, Kevin, Henderson, Austin, Hollnagel, Erik and White, Ted N. (eds.) INTERACT 93 - IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - jointly organised with ACM Conference on Human Aspects in Computing Systems CHI93 24-29 April, 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 79-80.
Cited on the following page:
» Philosophy of Interaction: [Not yet published]
Svanaes, Dag (1993): COMSPEC: a software architecture for users with special needs. In: Ashlund, Stacey, Mullet, Kevin, Henderson, Austin, Hollnagel, Erik and White, Ted N. (eds.) INTERACT 93 - IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction - jointly organised with ACM Conference on Human Aspects in Computing Systems CHI93 24-29 April, 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 27-28.
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