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Pervasive 2007 - Improved Mobile User Experience

http://www.hiit.fi/imux

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Observation: Many of the issues Adam Greenfield mentions in his keynote talk are issues that came up in our workshop discussions

The results of the workshop were presented as a poster. The conclusions listed on the poster are:

• Users should feel in control; we should explain understandably what the device does. Contrasts with machine intelligence: accurate methods are often difficult to explain
• Difficult to model users. People are unpredictable and all users are not alike. We need a better understanding of cultural, age group, educational background etc. differences and how to generalise over user groups
• Evaluating user experience is challenging. Technical issues need to be separated from application behaviour and we have to ensure that the evaluation is significant both in terms of user base and contexts
• Users are not stupid: better to rely on user’s own reasoning than to use excessive machine intelligence and proactivity
• Need for development tools that work on multiple platforms, hide technical obstacles and provide graceful error recovery
• Need for common, freely available real, multi-dimensional data sets for evaluating and comparing context analysis algorithms
• Make ubicomp sexy and useful: develop showcases that assist people that really need assistance (e.g., visually impaired), but at the same time have business potential
• Incremental improvements: no “killer application,” but applications that overcome technical difficulties, provide assistance and new means for (social) interaction are promising
• Limited resources, closed platforms, malfunctioning software and equipment are obstacles to development
• Difficult to gather, prioritise and interpret context
• Unobtrusiveness
• Privacy and legal concerns, bureaucratic obstacles

Researchers doing very relevant work

• Eric Paulos, Intel Research, Berkeley
  • Urban Experience project Urban Atmosphere
  • "Objects of Wonderments"
  • His colleague Allision Woodruff does research in domestic applications. She has a presentation at Pervasive 2007.
• Jane McGonagle
  • Urban games

Research Questions?

• How can we collect multi-modal data sets that capture "soft" behavior in addition to numbers/figures?
• How do we convey underlying functionality to the user?
• How do you evaluate user experience?
  • time consuming
  • data explosion
• How do we generalize personal preferences
• It's Too hard to know how users interact with technology
• How do we take underlying technologies into account?
  • Buffer user from implementation details
  • Design lower layer to maximize mobile experience.
• What is the balance point for multi-model interfaces
• How do we figure out what users want? do they even know?
  • SMS is much more popular than expected
• How do we predict how context changes, how do we select modality?
• How can we explore the whole contextual situation
  • what's more important? can vary based on time, place, situation
  • lots of variables.
• How do we avoid surprising the user in a bad way?
  • let the system explain why it did what it did so that the user can give feedback.
• What are solutions to help the user overcome technical difficulties.
  • (for example, direction to stronger signal areas)
• What concerns with privacy/security/control?
  • privacy
  • authentication/trust
  • security
  • cultural differences
  • unobtrusiveness
• What are obstacles to the ubicom research?
  • Closed platforms
  • Limited availability of rich data
  • Lack of resources (monetary and human)
  • Lack of experience
  • Non-working (or improperly working) hardware and software
• What will be the first "killer app"?
  • There is no killer app.
  • "Life" or social networking?
  • Incremental steps are important
    • cars can't drive themselves, but they can now park themselves
• What is the role of industry vis-a-vis academia?
  • Industry has lots more money and resources!
  • What is an acceptable and moral agreement for donation of resources? What should be asked in return from academia?