27 May 14:00 Kasper Løvborg Jensen: Tapping into Reality: Smartphones Enabling new Methods for Evaluating the Usability and User

Kasper Løvborg Jensen is a final year PhD candidate in the section for Multimedia Information and Signal Processing at the Department of Electronic systems at Aalborg University, Denmark.

He will visit HIIT during week 22 and gives a guest talk 27.5. at 14 in Kumpula, Exactum C222.

Title:
Tapping into Reality: Smartphones Enabling new Methods for Evaluating the Usability and User Experience of Mobile and Ubiquitous Applications

Abstract:
Evaluating the usability and user experience of mobile and ubiquitous applications is a challenging task. They are becoming increasingly complex and tightly interwoven into the fabric of everyday life and thus cannot easily be taken out of context and evaluated in controlled experimental settings. Evaluating in the field constitutes a range of problems and new methods and tools must be added to the arsenals of researchers and practitioners to enable them to properly investigate how users interact with such applications “in reality”. The talk will examine the key problems with existing evaluation methods based on the properties of emerging mobile and ubiquitous applications, e.g. the importance of context to the user experience.

Within recent years tools have started to emerge that utilize the processing, storage and sensing powers of personal mobile devices (such as smartphones) to facilitate new methods and types of studies that compliment existing practices. The talk will be based on experiences from developing and investigating such a tool, RECON, which enables researchers and practitioners to conduct large scale remote studies of mobile and ubiquitous applications in real contexts. It facilitates automated capture of general usage and application-specific interaction augmented with information about the context in which it occurs. Two case studies of mobile and ubiquitous applications will be used to exemplify and discuss such field evaluations:
• DiasNet Mobile: A mobile diabetes management and advisory service using a server-based expert system • µCARS: A mobile multimodal (stylus/speech) car rental application using distributed speech recognition (DSR)