Prototypes in the Wild: Lessons Learned from Evaluating Three Ubicomp Systems

The study of Ubicomp is concerned with enabling a future in which the most useful Ubicomp applications are feasible to build and pleasing to use. But what is useful? What is usable? What do people actually need? These questions are only beginning to be answered partly because Ubicomp systems more difficult to evaluate than desktop applications. This difficulty is due to issues like scale and a tendency to apply Ubicomp in ongoing, daily life settings unlike task and work oriented desktop systems. This paper presents a case study of three Ubicomp systems that were evaluated at multiple stages of their design. In each case, we describe the application and evaluation. We then present a set of lessons that we learned regarding the evaluation techniques we used. Our goal is to better understand how evaluation techniques need to evolve for the Ubicomp domain.