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 PatternA12 – Enabling Mobile Commerce
Example PatternA12 – 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
Patterns 2 pairs 2 pairs
No Patterns 3 pairs 2 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:– http://guir.berkeley.edu/patterns – Any feedback appreciated– Help us evolve them!
Top Related