User-centered Evaluations of Ubicomp Applications

As more evaluations of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) applications are being undertaken, researchers are finding that the evaluations are more difficult than those for typical desktop computing applications. In this paper, we discuss some aspects of ubicomp that make these evaluations challenging. We present some properties unique to ubiquitous computing applications and suggest metrics to evaluate them. Several case studies of ubicomp evaluations are discussed with respect to these properties.