In just a short time, mobile devices have revolutionized the way we access information and interact with each other. With an ever expanding list of sensors and features, these devices are also capable of reshaping our experiences with physical systems. Prior efforts to explore this potential of mobile devices have often considered traditional user…

Usability heuristics have been established for different uses and applications as general guidelines for user interfaces. These can affect the implementation of industry solutions and play a significant role regarding cost reduction and process efficiency. The area of electronic workflow document management (EWDM) solutions, also known as…

Today's modern mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets) present great potential for growth of many novel, powerful, but also highly demanding applications. However, most mobile devices/users operate in isolation from one another, i.e., they are not aware of the presence of other devices in their proximity. There are numerous situations…

Reading activities in the classroom and workplace occur predominantly on paper. Since existing electronic devices do not support these reading activities as well as paper, users have difficulty taking full advantage of the affordances of electronic documents. This dissertation makes three main contributions toward supporting active reading…

Using touch screens presents a number of usability and accessibility challenges for blind people. Most touch screen-based user interfaces are optimized for visual interaction, and are therefore difficult or impossible to use without vision. This dissertation presents an approach to redesigning gesture-based user interfaces to enable blind people…