Development and Evaluation of Emerging Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing, presented at DIS2004

Development and Evaluation of Emerging Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing

Eric Chung Carnegie Mellon

Jason Hong Carnegie Mellon

Madhu Prabaker

University of California, Berkeley

James Landay University of Washington

Alan Liu University of Washington

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

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

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?

Talk Outline

Overview Method for Creating the Patterns Evaluating the Patterns Future Work

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

Example PatternA12 – Enabling Mobile Commerce

Example PatternA12 – Enabling Mobile Commerce

Some More Example Patterns

D – Fluid InteractionsC – Techniques for PrivacyB – Physical / Virtual SpacesA – Application Genres

Bus Stops for Relating Patterns

Talk Outline

Overview Method for Creating the Patterns Evaluating the Patterns Future Work

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

High Exp (6+ yrs)

Low Exp

Patterns 2 pairs 2 pairs

No Patterns 3 pairs 2 pairs

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

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.”

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

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…

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

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!