User Study Techniques in the Design and Evaluation of a Ubicomp Environment

To be successful, ubicomp applications must be designed with their environment and users in mind and evaluated to confirm that they do not disrupt the users' natural workflow. Well-established techniques for understanding users and their environment exist, but are not specifically designed to assess how well the computing and physical task environments blend. We present strengths and weaknesses of several qualitative and quantitative user study techniques for ubicomp. We applied these techniques to the design and evaluation of a ubicomp application for cell biology laboratories (Labscape). We describe how these techniques helped identify design considerations that were crucial for Lab-scape's adoption and demonstrate their ability to measure how effectively applications blend into an environment.