Development and Evaluation of Emerging Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing

1. Development and Evaluation of Emerging Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing

2. What Are Design Patterns? • Design patterns communicate common design problems and good solutions in a compact form • Started in architecture, recently for user interfaces • Ex. Navigation Bar

3. Design Patterns for Ubicomp? • Ubicomp pushes computing into physical world • Wireless networking, sensors, devices • Still in early phases of ubicomp, so why create a pattern language now? • Speed up diffusion of interaction techniques and evaluation results • Help us see links between ideas, see what’s missing • Like first periodic table • Help designers avoid bad standards • Avoid blue links and poor privacy

4. Our Work on Ubicomp Design Patterns • Developed 45 patterns for ubicomp • Evaluation with sixteen pairs of designers (32 total) • 9 pairs in first round of eval, 7 pairs in second round • Compared the design of a location-enhanced app with and without patterns • Better communication? Novices and experts? Privacy?

5. Talk Outline • Overview • Method for Creating the Patterns • Evaluating the Patterns • Future Work

6. Method for Creating the Patterns • Iterative process over three months • Literature review to extract ideas • Tried to do top-bottom, too hard • Bottom-up much easier, card sorting to organize into groups • 80 pattern candidates, focusing on interaction design • 2 pages each • Critiqued by four other researchers • Cut to 45 patterns for the first evaluation

7. Example PatternA12 – Enabling Mobile Commerce

8. Example PatternA12 – Enabling Mobile Commerce

9. Some More Example Patterns A – Application Genres B – Physical / Virtual Spaces C – Techniques for Privacy D – Fluid Interactions

10. Bus Stops for Relating Patterns

11. Talk Outline • Overview • Method for Creating the Patterns • Evaluating the Patterns • Future Work

12. First Round of Evaluation • Nine pairs of designers • Prototype a location-enhanced guide for shopping mall • Gave each pair a set of general goals to support • Could add any reasonable features, use any reasonable technologies • 80 minutes to prototype, 10 minute presentation to “client” • Will focus on qualitative results • Had judges rate designs quantitatively, statistics hard though

13. Observations from First Round Eval • Patterns helped novice designers • Novices without patterns struggled with tech, features • Novices with patterns fared better, patterns useful for getting ideas and explaining concepts to one another • Patterns helped experts with an unfamiliar domain • Skim thru patterns to get ideas, see range of possibilities • Patterns helped designers communicate ideas • Expected designers to adopt names (unrealistic in retrospect) • Common to see designers point at pictures • Many design pairs leveraged a web pattern language • Navigation Bar, pages, cookies, bookmarks

14. Observations from First Round Eval • Patterns helped designers avoid some design problems • Most teams came up with similar solutions in both conditions • But teams w/o patterns had to re-visit solutions more often • Had to re-invent wheel and re-learn mistakes • Patterns did not help with privacy • Most design teams identified privacy as a problem • But the teams didn’t use our patterns… • Designers generally liked the idea of patterns • “Good idea to identify design patterns for ubicomp” • But… “Too many patterns to digest” • “If we had more time, I’m sure that we would be able to use these patterns to tailor them to our own ideas.”

15. Second Round of Evaluation • Reduced to 30 patterns • Edited some content, added more links • Seven pairs of designers • Six pairs had patterns, one did not • Already knew what non-pattern condition results were • Same task • Same amount of time

16. Observations from Second Round Eval • 9 of 12 thought patterns helped with design task • 11 of 12 thought patterns would help with future designs • “These patterns are almost like a checklist. You can cover all of your bases.” • Patterns used more often to communicate ideas • Some patterns used to inspire designs • D5: Serendipity in Exploration, app “should not be a pushy salesperson but allow for free roaming.” • One pair used patterns to annotate ideas • B1: Active Map next to the sketched UI • But only one group used the privacy patterns…

17. Future Work • Continued evolution and evaluation of the patterns • Why didn’t privacy patterns work as we expected? • Unclear format? Too abstract? Too specific? • Not enough links? Too many patterns? • Important b/c we want to avoid expected privacy problems • Landay and Prabaker working on ubicomp patterns for the home at Intel Research Seattle • 20 new patterns for the home • 22 pairs of designers, half with patterns, half without • Data analysis in progress

18. Summary • Design patterns for ubicomp • 30 patterns in current set • Evaluation with 16 pairs of designers • Generally useful in design task for generating and communicating design ideas • Still didn’t use privacy patterns • Our patterns can be downloaded at: • http://guir.berkeley.edu/patterns • Any feedback appreciated • Help us evolve them!