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 Pattern A12 – 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 Patterns2 pairs No Patterns3 pairs2 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: – –Any feedback appreciated –Help us evolve them!