Computer aided observations of complex mobile situations

Abstract

Designing mobile and wearable applications is a challenge. The context of use is more important than ever and traditional methodologies for elicitation and specification reach their limits. This paper investigates the challenge of creating and communicating information about the user's primary task with regards to its fine grained temporal structure. TaskObserver is a TabletPC software that allows real-time logging of events during observations of complex mobile scenarios. The results are communicated to other team members using task trace graphs of the events observed.

Web based evaluation of proactive user interfaces

“…Once these technical problems are solved, there is the organizational problem of finding enough test subjects to obtain valid results. During the actual test sessions the interactions of the test subjects need to be observed which is also difficult and bears its own problems [9]. Finally, the gathered data has to be analyzed using statistical methods.…”

Modeling temporal dependencies between observed activities

“…Figure 1 visualizes the time intervals of 20 activities which constitute a medical examination. This data can be gathered with tools like the TaskObserver [8]. Each obervation becomes one example of the scenario.…”

“…we can look for outliers or use additional data for plausibility checks. For manual data correction visualisations like the one in Figure 4 can be used to discuss the observations with domain experts and correct them [8]. …”