Deciding if an online entity is trustworthy can be challenging. How do you decide if you can go into business with an unknown company, offering an enticing product? This thesis project aimed to enhance consumer trust in Insify, a starting business insurance company operating in a competitive market. The objective was to identify trust indicators and evaluate their impact on conversion rates, ultimately seeking ways to improve consumer trust. Insify is an InsurTech company aiming to simplify and digitize insurance processes. They offer disability, property & casualty, and health insurance directly to customers, targeting self-employed entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized enterprises. However, they face competition from established insurers and challenges associated with digitalization in a crowded market. In the e-commerce realm, building consumer trust is challenging but crucial. Early UX designers incorporated trust-building elements into online spaces. However, during the past decade, deceptive design practices emerged, complicating the trust-building process and increasing consumer skepticism towards the online provision of personal information. The project follows the Double Diamond design method, involving literature research, expert interviews, customer surveys, and A/B testing to redefine trust indicators and enhance the customer journey. In the final section of the design phase a strategic roadmap is presented, highlighting future opportunities for Insify. The research findings revealed that customers value personal contact and support. The customer survey indicated the significance of insurance premiums and coverage for business insurance customers. Trust-building was identified as a multifaceted process that extends beyond competence, integrity, and benevolence, indicating a need for a connected set of trust indicators throughout the customer journey. However, the research project faced limitations, such as difficulties in translating trust indicators into design components and defining precise methods to measure consumer trust. Based on the findings, recommendations were made for Insify to showcase customer testimonials and use cases to demonstrate positive experiences, conduct A/B tests with more significant variations, and focus on addressing the desire for personal contact among customers. In a broader sense, the financial industry should recognize the impact of information asymmetry and prioritize conversations over fully automated application processes and questionnaires. Furthermore, the industry should prepare for disruptive transitions, such as the integration of AI. While the specific design components tested did not significantly impact conversion rates, the research process contributed to a deeper understanding of trust indicators and their role in consumer trust. The recommendations provided can guide Insify and the financial industry in enhancing consumer trust and improving the customer journey. Further research is encouraged to address the identified limitations and explore trust-building topics in more depth. Building trusting relationships with consumers should remain a primary goal, emphasizing the trust-building potential of each touchpoint in the customer journey.

User-centric design practice rely on journey maps and personas as a way to communicate user needs to the design team (Lanius et al., 2021). However, journey maps in practice have been found to lack a dimension that could inform designers about intrinsic cognitive needs of the user. This research project aims to address this gap by exploring ways to make human cognitive data designer-friendly. Through multi-study approach, including the Research through Design (RtD) (Godin & Zahedi, 2014) method, the study investigates dimensions of the relationship between designers and cognitive user data to make it easy-to-approach in future. Following the context exploration studies, designers' perspectives and practices regarding cognitive user data are delved into. Findings from exploratory interviews reveal varied interpretations of cognitive data, challenges in accessing and visualizing data, and a keen interest in its potential benefits for design processes. Designers identify time constraints as a major hurdle but express enthusiasm for the posterity and revisiting advantages of effective cognitive data visualization. The RtD method helps in investigating a way of presenting holistic data to designer that merges intrinsic and extrinsic factors of the user. Designers favor clarity, interactive exploration, and reliability in data presentation. The study provides a comprehensive list of neurophysiological measures that can aid designers in decision-making. Additionally, insights into designers' thinking styles, distinguishing between big-picture and detail-oriented thinkers, add a nuanced layer to understanding their affinity with cognitive data. The report acknowledges limitations, including biases in the Research-through-Design method, reliance on self-reported data, and the controlled environment of prototype evaluations. Future research is encouraged to address these limitations and enhance the ecological validity of findings. In conclusion, this research offers valuable insights into integrating cognitive user data within designer practices and establishes a way of integrating observational data with user journey maps. The findings provide a foundation for developing tools and approaches that align with designers' preferences, ultimately enriching the design process through meaningful integration of cognitive insights.

Dementia is an umbrella term for progressive loss of cognitive abilities, which mainly affects elderly- affecting relationships, feelings and behaviour. A person living with dementia (PLWD) might forget the names of their grandchildren, the face of their loved ones, important places and life events. Due to the rising population growth with more than 55 million people living with dementia (8.1 % of women and 5.4% of men over 65 years) and increasing life expectancies, dementia is already recognized by the WHO (World Health Organization) as a public health priority, and it is now the 7th leading cause of death (WHO, 2021). The population pressure that care homes are currently under cannot be easily remedied without significant monetary investment into the manpower of the industry. Therefore it would be more fruitful to enable PLWD to function more independently from the help of their carers. VR technology has seen immense growth in the last 10 years especially within the field of child and elderly care. Although dementia has been understood since 700BCE, the decrease in stigma has allowed the current era of dementia care to flourish using music, art and drama therapy- amongst other person-centred care techniques. Combining these reminiscence therapy techniques with the booming technology of VR is therefore the next logical step in improving immersion. To this end, VR offers control and consistency in testing virtual environments that guarantee safety. However, a key obstacle in the uptake of VR for PLWD is the risk of behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia- negative behaviours. To reduce these behaviours, a balance must be struck between stimulation and overload- namely stress. Emotion classification models were established using the valence-arousal circumplex model before identifying the physiological embodiments of such emotion. Of the stress sensing technology surveyed, electromyography was the only technology reviewed that showed evidence of accurate, low-latency, sensation of arousal and valence by way of measuring contractions in the trapezius and zygomaticus muscles respectively. To design a conducive VR environment, overarching goals for reminiscence in VR were identified as presence, occupation, comfort, inclusion and novelty. The method of reminiscence therapy was broken down into three forms- place, object and interaction based. The parameters of brightness, volume and non-player character movement were established to be adapted in VR for stress reduction over the course of a 10 minute exploration test. Results of the study showed a 26% decrease in average stress experienced during the three modulation stages over the control stage. Volume modulation was identified as the most effective parameter showing a 32% stress reduction. Participants reported that the presentation of familiar environments in VR did in fact promote feelings of nostalgia and reported moments of reminiscence. Future work opportunities call for more studies with PLWD, multi-modal & multi-channel stress sensing and concurrent parameter modulation. Technology improvements such as integrating all peripherals into a standalone system as well as utilising more convenient and ergonomic sensors that could be applied semi-permanently to form a more holistic data overview for PLWD outside experimental conditions.

Trust plays an important role in the implementation of chatbot technology. This study was also focusing on user trust in chatbots, particularly focusing on the role of response delay and explanation-driven driven subjective transparency. This research includes a pretest and a main test. In the pretest, we selected one explanation that was perceived by the participants that can raise the most social presence feeling as well as the subjective transparency of the chatbot. In the main test, a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment was designed and conducted to test the hypotheses. First, the findings revealed that while response delay did not significantly influence trust or social presence, clear explanations, especially in the context of instant delays, positively impacted subjective transparency and trust. Second, the study reinforced the positive correlation between social presence and trust, subjective transparency, and trust. From a practical perspective, the research offers insights for chatbot design, emphasizing the importance of improving subjective transparency and rendering a more natural and human-like interaction.

Behavioural data that shows how and what people do could help designers unlock new ideas and perspectives about their users. However, collecting this data is expensive and time-consuming, and ethical concerns inevitably arise because the data often contains personal information. Ortega presents designerly data donation as an efficient and ethical approach that encourages the active participation of users to obtain contextualised data (Ortega et al., 2021). This subtle switch of attitude towards data collection will help designers reduce concerns about budget or invasion of privacy. Designers can build up proper triggers to inspire users to donate their data and provide enough information to enable donors to autonomously participate in their control and choice. While its potential has been defined, there are a few challenges to further integrating this concept in practice. In particular, designers must understand the whole system to plan the right strategies to call for donors, taking the right action at the right time. With this in mind, the main focus of this project was how to deliver the concept of designerly data donation as a design method for designers in practice. A design challenge and related activities were conducted with UX designers of The Valley and the data-centric design lab at TU delft, after which I proposed the initial shape of the DDD toolkit that can be used in practice as a result of this project.

This report outlines the key challenges faced by customers when purchasing smart lighting products through different online presentations. With the user-centered approach and the report serves as an initial step in exploring the design aspects of online retailing pages for light products. By focusing on the user and light experience, this report aims to provide valuable insights into enhancing the design of these pages to better meet the needs and expectations of customers. This project is guided by the following research questions: (1) Which aspects and how affect the use online experience? (2) How do they influence? (3) How to better present smart light products online? In a quest to answer the above questions, this project conducted different user tests and studies and ended with a guidance. Based on the difference between the online and offline lighting scene presentation, the researcher invited 10 participants and started the first user test in which the following questions were studied: How does the experience with the hue online representation differ from the real-world experience (regarding lighting and overall user experience)? Which aspects affect the user’s perception of online and offline experience? Images’ style, quality, interaction way or other aspects? From the first user test, the researcher learned that the difference between offline and offline experience is that offline can show more light levels and provide users with a sense of more control. According to the results of the questionnaire and interviews, users also put forward their requirements in terms of content, interaction and light experience. Based on the first user test, the researcher developed four hypotheses to explore how different factors affect the experience and how design can be used to enhance the online product exhibit experience. After receiving 20 valid results, in a second user study it was found that (a)higher interactivity of the prototype, better user and light experience, (b) abstraction stimulate the user's imagination of the product use scenario. Based on user testing and analysis, the researcher summarized guidance that help designers have design direction when they start designing, or review existing designs. The guidance focuses on these three directions:Better visual content
Interactive, product display, Immersive light vibe

Cooking is an essential part of most people’s day-to-day lives. It is a dynamic activity that involves multitasking, timing of tasks, and flexibility. However, the available instruction methods for cooks who wish to follow recipes are quite rigid and linear. This project aims to create a design solution that provides instructions in a way that is in better accordance with natural cooking behaviours. The scope of the project is to deliver a conceptual instruction-based cooking tool that utilizes Artificial Intelligence. While designing the solution, speculative design methods are considered in order to design for the near future. It is designed for a future where tasks in recipe instructions can be used more flexibly in digital products and Human Activity Recognition can accurately recognize complex cooking actions with mobile devices. The design solution has been created for a company called Verdify. Verdify is a food tech company with products that aim to allow users to achieve fully personalized nutrition. Swapmeals is their recipe platform that allows users to swap ingredients to fit their dietary needs while adjusting instructions accordingly and maintaining flavour profiles. The design solution aims to ultimately live on this recipe platform. The project is executed with a User-centered Design approach which involves end-users in the design process in order for them to have an impact on their final product. The users were observed while cooking with instructions in order to understand the pain points that should be designed for. The most prevalent and significant themes that emerged from the study were that users experience cognitive overload while cooking and often experience uncertainty in the cooking process. Academic design solutions and commercial products for hands-free instruction-based cooking were reviewed to understand which issues, discovered in the context research, have not been designed for. This gap is used to specify design requirements. The requirements specify that the design solution should allow home-cooks to use recipe instructions in a way that is hands-free, non-linear, informative, and that minimally interrupts the cooking flow along with reducing their cognitive load and the associated negative emotions. The solution is also required to allow the user to mainly focus on the task at hand; the device should manage the remaining responsibilities. Lastly, the research discovered that the design solution should create the experience of cooking a new recipe similarly to how one would cook a familiar recipe. Solutions were explored that meet the specified requirements. The exploration led to 2 contrasting concepts that aim to improve instruction-based cooking in a familiar textual manner and an innovative experiential manner. These 2 concepts were tested with users in order to compare the newly defined interaction methods and understand which interactions are desired in the various moments of the cooking process. The results generated an iterated list of requirements to be applied to the final design. Lastly, a conceptual instruction-based cooking design solution was introduced; a user interface that utilizes Human Activity Recognition for user-to-product communication. The tool adopts the cognitive load from its users by managing timing and their progression while adjusting to the user’s autonomous adaptations to the recipe. The design solution is an interactive, hands-free, and informative recipe instruction solution. It allows home-cooks to let go of keeping an overview of the cooking process and instead solely focus on the task at hand, allowing cooking to be a worry-free and enjoyable activity for even the tensest home-cooks.

Our understanding of mental workload (MWL) is still limited compared to well-known physiological data like blood pressure and heart rate. MWL measures the cognitive resources required for tasks against what's available. Innovative technologies offer more comprehensive and objective cognitive data, but their impact on individuals and their tracking needs requires exploration, including how to establish continuous self-tracking behavior. Therefore, this research aims to understand people's perceptions and thoughts on MWL and explore meaningful MWL self-tracking behavior. It follows three phases: exploratory, validation, and reflection. In the exploratory phase, literature is reviewed to define MWL and promote self-tracking. Interviews explore users' understanding, motivations, and needs, highlighting issues like data interpretation bias, mistrust, lack of visibility, connection, and use timing. Validation involves co-design activities, including user tests and surveys. Before user tests, the literature is reviewed for potential solutions. A rapid prototype is designed based on insights and existing metrics from EMOTIV, facilitating discussions with co-designers. Offline surveys track users' workload and stress levels to understand how they record it in their way and their perceptions and confusion between workload and stress. Reflection combines literature review and validation insights to discuss research findings and propose future design recommendations. Overall, this research found several barriers and negative attitudes among users toward self-tracking MWL. The main issues include difficulties and misconceptions in understanding MWL, as well as the inability to see the impact of tracking cognitive data. These challenges make it difficult for users to trust MWL data and incorporate MWL tracking into their daily lives. Additionally, this research identifies unique user perceptions of cognitive data compared to physiological metrics like blood pressure and heart rate, informing future design considerations. Ultimately, the research concludes all the insights from the literature review and research to propose several avenues for future design and research.