| Sampling and Reconstructing User Experience | |
| Journal: International Journal of Handheld Computing Research (IJHCR) Abstract: The Experience Sampling and Reconstruction (ESRM) method is a research method suitable for user studies conducted in situ that are needed for the design and evaluation of ambient intelligence technologies. ESRM is a diary method supported by a distributed application, Reconexp, which runs on a mobile device and a website, enabling us to survey user attitudes, experiences, and requirements in field studies. ESRM combines aspects of the Experience Sampling Method and the Day Reconstruction Method aiming to reduce data loss, improve data quality and reduce burden put upon participants. We present a case study of using this method in the context of a study of communication needs of working parents with young children. Requirements for future developments of the tool and the method are discussed. | |
| Evaluation of a pervasive awareness system designed for busy parents | |
| Journal: Pervasive and mobile computing, Elsevier Abstract: Does pervasive technology have a role to play in supporting the communication of busy couples? Especially when they are already living together and already have a high degree of awareness of each other's rhythms of daily life, their whereabouts and needs? A two weeks long field study of an awareness system allowed eight working couples to automatically exchange place, activity and calendar information as well as messages and photos. Data analysis provides both qualitative and quantitative evidence which suggest strongly that such a system can provide support for availability, coordination, reassurance and affection for this group. Findings which inform the design of such systems are: the need of transitions in places instead of location information to support coordination, the two tracks of daily communication of busy parents (reassurance and emergency) and usability barriers in current mobile applications which prevent this group in engaging in photo sharing. The contexts and unexpected uses which participants found in the system are described in detail. [DOI] | |
| Features for the future Experience Sampling Tool | |
| Conference: MobileHCI '09 15.09.09, Bonn, Germany Abstract: Based on our experiences with Reconexp, a distributed application which partly runs on a mobile device and partly on a website, and a review of tools developed to help researchers survey user attitudes, experiences and requirements in field studies we present a list of requirements for future experience sampling tools. | |
| An Experience Sampling Study into Awareness Needs of Busy Families | |
| Conference: IEEE HSI '09 21.05.09, Catania, Italy Abstract: We report an investigation into the communication needs of working parents pertaining to awareness of each other's whereabouts and activities. Twenty working parents took part in an experience sampling study for a period of one week and in follow up interviews. Analysis of participant responses shows that working parents can benefit from automatically updated information relating to availability of each other through the day, support for micro-coordination especially surrounding dinner time and children's activities and getting reassurance regarding the well being of the family. Analyzing the situational variations of information needs we find that parents seek their partner's communication availability during the day, require information to coordinate evening tasks and are prone to exchange information at home than at work. | |
| Busy families' awareness needs | |
| Journal: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.09.006 Abstract: This work examines how Awareness Systems, a class of technologies that support sustained and effortless communication between individuals and groups, can support family communication. Going beyond the evaluation of specific design concepts, this paper reports on three studies that aimed to answer the following research questions: (a) Do families want to be aware of each other through the day? Or, would they perhaps rather not know more about each other's activities and whereabouts than they already do? (b) If they do wish to have some awareness, what should they be aware of? The research involved in-depth interviews with 20 participants, a field trial of an awareness system connecting five "busy" parents with their children and a survey of 69 participants conducted over the web. Triangulation of the results of the three studies leads to the following conclusions: (a) Some busy parents want to automatically exchange awareness information during the day while others do not. (b) Availability of partner for coordinating family activities, daily activities in new family situations, activity, and location information of dependent children are salient awareness information needs for this group. (c) Awareness information needs to vary with contexts, suggesting the need for flexible mechanisms to manage the sharing of such information. [PDF] | |
| Reconexp: A way to reduce the data loss of the Experiencing Sampling Method | |
| Conference: MobileHCI '08 04.08.08, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Abstract: This paper presents Reconexp, a diary method supported by a distributed application, which partly runs on a mobile device and partly on a website, enabling us to survey user attitudes, experiences and requirements in field studies. Reconexp combines aspects of the Experience Sampling Method and the Day Reconstruction Method aiming to reduce data loss, improve data quality and reduce burden put upon participants. We discuss our first experiences of using this method in the context of a study of communication needs of working parents with young children. | |
| Pervasive Awareness (Demonstration) | |
| Conference: MobileHCI '08 03.08.08, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Abstract: We are interested in systems that support awareness between individuals, by exchanging information that is automatically captured and presenting it to members of their social network. Here we demonstrate a principle for the operation of these systems which we describe as pervasive awareness: awareness information is aggregated opportunistically as mobile devices carrying some information migrate across space and cluster dynamically. We present a minimal demonstration of the principle where qualitative location information is used to select information offered by context capture devices (for the demonstration these are cameras). | |
| Evaluating Ubiquitous Systems with Users (Workshop Summary) | |
| Conference: AmI-07, European Conference on Ambient Intelligence, 07.11.07, Darmstadt, Germany Abstract: Evaluating ubiquitous systems with users can be a challenge, and the goal of this workshop was to take stock of current issues and novel approaches to address this challenge. In this paper, we report on the discussions we had during several plenary and small-group sessions. We first briefly review those evaluation methods that we identified as being used in ubiquitous computing, and then discuss several issues and research questions that emerged during the discussion. These issues include: data sources used for evaluation, comparing ubiquitous systems, interdisciplinary evaluation, multi-method evaluation, factoring in context and disengaged users. | |
| Expected information needs of parents for pervasive awareness systems | |
| Conference: AmI-07, European Conference on Ambient Intelligence, 07.11.07, Darmstadt, Germany Abstract: This paper examines the communication needs of busy parents that can be served by awareness systems: systems supporting a continuous and semi-automated flow of information about the activities of communicating individuals. We report an online survey involving 69 participants. This survey focused on whether the types of information offered by awareness systems as these are introduced in current research literature are appreciated by busy parents. The results show a) that information items that allow personalization and expressing intentionality are more desired than those than low granularity and automatically sensed information that is easy to collect automatically b) the attitudes regarding the information that people wish to share about themselves is almost identical to what they wish to know of their partners and c) survey methods focusing on information do not need to differentiate between the direction of information flow or whether this is symmetric, since people report almost identical preferences. | |
| Combining the Experience Sampling Method with the Day Reconstruction Method | |
| Conference: 11th CHI Nederland conference, "HCI-methods: way to go?" 21.06.07, Eindhoven, the Netherlands Abstract: This paper discusses the methodology of a survey of communication needs that aims to inform the design of innovative technologies to support family communication. Following a series of studies that relied on traditional methods: interviews, questionnaires and a field trial of a prototype, we have come to realize that we need a strongly contextualized survey of user needs. The method we adopt and which we discuss relies on a combination of: the Experience Sampling (ESM) and the Day Reconstruction (DRM). | |
| On the role of awareness systems for supporting parent involvement in young children's schooling | |
| Conference: Home/ Community Oriented ICT for the Next Billion (HOIT 2007), 22.08.07, Chennai, India Abstract: This paper reports on an investigation of how Awareness Systems can support communication between busy parents and young children at school. The study involved the deployment and test of a rudimentary awareness system so that surveying opinions and wishes regarding this type of technology would be grounded upon concrete experiences. The prototype was installed in a classroom for two weeks and connected five families with their children. Overall, parents appreciated receiving awareness information and did not experience it as an undesirable distraction. Both they and their children did not experience privacy problems. They raised concerns about the possibility of children becoming more dependent upon their parents from such technology and stated they would not want to receive information that they would not be able to react upon. | |
| Intra-family communication needs; how can Awareness Systems provide support? | |
| Conference: 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE06), 05.07.06, Athens, Greece Abstract: This paper presents the concept of Ambient Awareness that pertains to using Ambient Intelligence technologies for the purposes of sustaining awareness between individuals or groups of people, over sustained periods of time. The first explorations of this concept are conducted within the context of supporting awareness for busy parents having young children. We sketch the requirements drawn from an interview study, involving 20 interviews with working parents and we identify unmet communication needs that this type of technology may support. | |
| Managing users and services using an LDAP web-application | |
| Conference: IASTED Applied Informatics (AI2003), 10.02.03, Innsbruck, Austria Abstract: This paper describes the design and implementation of an open and adaptive environment for managing LDAP databases. Our work was mainly focused on the administrative needs of the Greek Schools Network. Albeit we applied considerable effort in order to construct an application that would not be bound on limitations arisen by the specific characteristics of the Greek Schools Network. Such limitations are the directory technology used and the directory schema applied. The result of this effort is a design which is extensible, adaptive to a great variety of LDAP structures and which provides the necessary flexibility to perform even the most demanding administrative tasks. | |
| e-DEDALUS: A dynamic tool for data publishing on the web | |
| Conference: 2000 International Conference on Information Society in the 21st Century (IS2000), 5.11.00, Aizu-Wakamatsu City, Fukushima, Japan Abstract: The World Wide Web (WWW) provides a great opportunity for companies and individuals to publish their ideas, products and everything they would like other people to view. Since the Internet community and the Web are expanding every day the demand for user friendly Web publishing applications is rising. The procedures that could be followed by Internet users in order to publish content on the web till now, were to either buy and read some books on HTML and have some basic knowledge on Web Servers, or pay an ISP a quite substantial amount of money to do it for them. In this paper we first justify the necessity of the existence of an alternative method for online web publishing. We then describe the method and a tool, called e-DEDALUS, which can be used by many diverse Internet user groups. An Internet user that has no previous experience in programming, or even desktop design, will be able to create his/hers own Web site, online. The e-DEDALUS tool that will be described in this paper aims at offering simplicity, customisability and multilingual support to a substantial number of WWW users. | |