Wolfgang Beer

User experience monitoring is essential for enhancing the usability and performance of your mobile native app. How are your customers using your product? Which features do they prefer? How can you spot trouble before it adversely affects your product? This O’Reilly report provides an overview of several metrics you can apply, based on different use-cases.

In mechatronics engineering the execution of experiments and tests is an important activity during development of new products and maintenance of released products. Planning and execution of experiments and tests is an essential cost and time factor. To keep the development time short it is necessary to have well-managed processes in the test department and to plan, organize, source out or execute, and document tests and experiments in an efficient and effective way. This paper contains the… Show more

In mechatronics engineering the execution of experiments and tests is an important activity during development of new products and maintenance of released products. Planning and execution of experiments and tests is an essential cost and time factor. To keep the development time short it is necessary to have well-managed processes in the test department and to plan, organize, source out or execute, and document tests and experiments in an efficient and effective way. This paper contains the results of a general survey identifying existing practices, used methods and tools in industry concerning testing and piloting. Seven large-scale companies situated in Upper-Austria took part in this survey. The survey concentrates on established test processes and practices, usage of publicly available test methods, and (re)use of self-developed tests methods. Furthermore, applied practices for documentation of test results, test setup data, and used software/tools for test planning, execution, documentation, and storage were investigated in the survey. The results of the survey show established practices and possible improvement areas for test departments in industrial mechatronics engineering context. Show less

Modern e-commerce systems offer a multitude of products and services in global marketplaces. The modern consumer is therefore overwhelmed by millions of options, variants and choices of products and services. With the rise of global marketplaces with their huge amount of items, recommendation systems became the basis for modern ecommerce systems. The traditional approaches for implementing recommendation engines, such as content and collaborative filtering, solve the challenge of calculating a… Show more

Modern e-commerce systems offer a multitude of products and services in global marketplaces. The modern consumer is therefore overwhelmed by millions of options, variants and choices of products and services. With the rise of global marketplaces with their huge amount of items, recommendation systems became the basis for modern ecommerce systems. The traditional approaches for implementing recommendation engines, such as content and collaborative filtering, solve the challenge of calculating a recommendation set of items for a given user. While these traditional approaches cope well with large sets of static user and item information, they lack a general approach for including highly dynamic context-information. As the e-commerce market swiftly changes to mobile computing platforms, such as smartphones and tablets, the use of context-information for generating item recommendations is of great interest. In this work, we propose a concept for a general framework for the implementation of such context-aware recommendation engines, specifically for mobile platforms. Show less

In our modern ubiquitously connected world the amount of ever available product and service information within our daily lives is exploding. Powerful client devices, such as smartphones and tablets allow the users to get access to an unlimited amount of information on every product or service available. As the amount of available information on products by far exceeds the users time to examine and filter detailed pieces of information in every situation, we expect that client-centric and… Show more

In our modern ubiquitously connected world the amount of ever available product and service information within our daily lives is exploding. Powerful client devices, such as smartphones and tablets allow the users to get access to an unlimited amount of information on every product or service available. As the amount of available information on products by far exceeds the users time to examine and filter detailed pieces of information in every situation, we expect that client-centric and context-aware information filtering is one of the thriving topics within the next years. A popular approach is to combine context-awareness with traditional recommendation engines in order to evaluate the relevance of a large amount of items for a given user situation. The goal is to proactively evaluate the situation of a user in order to automatically propose relevant products. Within this work we describe a general approach and the implementation of a software framework that combines traditional recommendation methods with a variable number of context dimensions, such as location or social context. The main contribution of this work is to show how to use a MapReduce programming model for aggregating the necessary information for calculating fast context-aware recommendations as well as how to overcome a typical cold start problem. The use-case at the end of this work evaluates the practical benefit of our general framework to introduce a client-centric, MapReducebased recommendation engine for real-time recommending music events and festivals. Show less

Within this work we present an architectural approach for abstracting industrial application models on top of a dynamic and modular runtime framework (OSGi) and a flexible application platform (Eclipse). This approach allows to add functionality at runtime as well as to adapt the rendering of the UI to various technologies.

Effective multitouch interaction does not reduce itself to a simple tracking of five fingers, there are several emerging effects that could prevent intuitive interaction in industrial appliances. This use-case describes practical challenges that were documented during the design and implementation of a holistic user interaction design in the domain of high-end audio equipments. The engineering process had to combine tangible user interface controls with state-of-the-art multitouch software… Show more

Effective multitouch interaction does not reduce itself to a simple tracking of five fingers, there are several emerging effects that could prevent intuitive interaction in industrial appliances. This use-case describes practical challenges that were documented during the design and implementation of a holistic user interaction design in the domain of high-end audio equipments. The engineering process had to combine tangible user interface controls with state-of-the-art multitouch software fader panels in an intuitive way. This work also gives some background information about complex distributed audio routing equipment and user interaction along with technology and usability issues that appear during the design of a multitouch appliance. Several experiments were implemented in order to gain empiric data to substantiate our practical findings. Show less