Users access information services with a variety of devices and with different interaction modes that depend on personal characteristics (including disabilities) and on the context of usage. With the appearance of mobile devices, the industry has focused its efforts on the standardization of device characteristics, thus giving to information providers some content adaptation facilities. However, little attention has been paid to the standardization of user profiles that will allow further customization and adaptation capabilities in mainstream services. This paper will present the authors' experiences in outlining and implementing user profiles, as well as possible integration paths with device characteristics.
Personalisation is widely considered as a critical element of contemporary electronic businesses. However, despite the wealth of scientific work on personalisation, the definition of the term remains blurred with as consequence a lack of clarity as to what to design or evaluate when it comes to this area of an e-business. E-business stakeholders, including designers, managers and customers, need to understand the significance of personalisation features for many reasons including: guidance for design and evaluation, user appeal and implications for e-business functionality. The paper introduces a descriptive framework for personalisation aspects of e-businesses, in business-to-consumer (B2C) situations, that is related to typical e-business functionality. The proposed framework classifies previous research and extends it to provide e-commerce stakeholders with a vocabulary for analysing e-businesses, for comparing personalisation features, and for explaining e-business commerce evaluation results. The framework is applied to the evaluation of the personalisation features of contemporary clothing e-businesses, and conclusions are drawn for the readiness of this sector to adopt personalisation requirements.
The paper is concerned with the design of virtual environments for collaborative design (VECD) -a particular class of collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) that focus on supporting design activities. VECD are becoming essential collaboration platforms for many designers and their clients, in a wide range of design domains including product, interior, architectural, automotive design, etc. However, the contemporary design considerations of VECD are mainly driven by systematic approaches that do not reflect upon knowledge regarding requirements that stem out of everyday collaborative design activities. A consequence is that they do not yield methodical guidance to designers of VECD applications. This paper takes a social action standpoint for the purposeful identification and organisation of collaborative design activities; proposes guidelines at multiple levels of abstraction for the design of VECD; and, finally, applies these to a case study development of a specific VECD for interior space design. The paper provides practical aids to designers of VECD so that they incorporate requirements about collaborative design early in the development lifecycle.
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