CS124: Investigation 7
Ubiquitous Computing
Due: Monday, December 3, 1:15pm on Sakai
This is a pair investigation.
You should not work with anyone who you have partnered with on an
Investigation in the past.
(Finding a partner is getting tricky, huh? :)) I'll verify
in class on Wednesday that everyone has a partner, but if you can't
find a partner let me know ASAP.
Goals
The goals of this Investigation are:
- To apply ethographic methods to the design of ubiquitous computing interfaces
- To consider the following in the design of a ubiquitous interface:
- Automation vs. command
- How to incorporate context
- How to provide feedback
- How to prevent and handle errors
Before you Begin
You are ready to go on this investigation. Please get started right away!
Assignment
In this assignment you will design (but not implement) a ubiquitous
user interface for the domain of your choosing. Your task is to
study the way in which this task is currently performed, and then to
design a ubiquitous interface based on your observation. In your
design, you will be asked to consider how various factors such as user
intention, system/sensor ambiguity and error, context and feedback.
Part 1: Choose your application area
Select an application area in which a user potentially would be
aided by a ubiquitous user interface. In selecting your scenario,
consider the types of activities that ubicomp interfaces are designed
to support that we discussed in class, including natural input, context
awareness and data capture and review.
Your task area needs to be something that you can actually observe
people doing, so this will greatly restrict your choice (but hopefully
not too much!). Some ideas to get you started include domains we
have already looked at such as teachers and students in a classroom,
grocery shoppers, students studying (in their rooms, in the library, in
the lab), a professor working in their office (although it may be hard
to get a prof to let you watch them, but if you can this could be
cool). You are not limited to these ideas. Feel free to
choose a different domain.
Part 2: Observing your potential users
After you have chosen your application area, you should each separately observe different
people engaged in the activity that your interface will support.
You should each observe your potential users for at least an
hour, using the ethnographic methods you practiced in Investigation 2.
This time, however, you can be a little more focused in your
observations. Pay attention to how natural input, data capture
and retrieval, and context could aid the user in their tasks.
Take notes as you did in your previous investigation. You
will use those notes when you get together with your partner to design
your interface.
Part 3: Designing your interface
Design a ubiquitous user interface to support the activity or activities you observed. You don't have to support everything you saw the user doing; you can select a subset of these activities, but you should justify how you selected this subset.
In designing your interface, keep in mind the following questions:
- How much attention does the user need to give to the interface?
Is this appropriate for the task? (e.g., You might choose
to make some components of the interface require explicit instruction
from the user and others simply happen in the background. How do
you choose?)
- How is context used to enhance the user experience (if at all)?
- Will sensor uncertainty lead to errors? How will you handle these errors?
- Does the interface provide feedback to the user? If so,
how? Is your feedback mechanism (or lack thereof) appropriate?
- What metaphor is your interface relying on (if any)? Is this appropriate?
- Will you incorporate tangible or ambient interfaces in your system?
- How is privacy a concern? How will it be handled?
Part 4: Design Writeup
Your writeup should include the following:
- An introduction to your application domain, including scenario
descriptions to illustrate the range of tasks/activities your interface
is designed to handle
- An overview of your design, including a description of what the
components do, in what way they are ubiquitous (addressing some or all
of the three core aspects [Natural Interfaces, Context Awareness and
Data Capture and Access] of a ubicomp interface), and how they fit
together. You may wish to include sketches or drawings here.
- A design justification based on your observations and any or our class discussions or readings
- A discussion of which parts of the interface operate in the
background and which require user control, how you made these
decisions, and how these two types of interaction styles fit together.
- A discussion that specifically addresses how uncertainty and
error correction is dealt with in the interface and what impact errors
will have on usability.
Your writeup need not address these points in separate sections or in
that order, but it should be clear to the reader that you have
addressed them all.
What to Hand In
- You only need to hand in your writeup from part 4
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