May 2012: ACM SIGCHI CHI Conference Course and TUWien IGW Summercamp

5-10 May 2012, Katarzyna Wac is teaching a course on Methodology for Evaluating Experience of Mobile Applications Used in Different Contexts of Daily Life at the ACM SIGCHI CHI conference in Austin, Texas, USA. A shorter version of the course has been also taught at the Human-Computer Interaction group of Vienna University of Technology, Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, (IGW Summercamp), Vienna, Austria, 3-5 June 2012.

Objectives: Participants of this course will benefit by learning how to conduct study to evaluate an experience of mobile service users in different contexts of their life. The methodology is based on a mixed methods approach: qualitative and quantitative methods. This tutorial first presents a generic methodology for measurements-based performance evaluation of a mobile communication system and its service(s), and for evaluation of user experience, and second, it presents two case studies of application of this methodology. The performance evaluation aims at analysis of, for example, mobile system bottleneck or scalability characteristics or at analysis of its application response time, where all metrics contribute to the overall experience of the mobile service use. The presented methodology has been derived from previous studies on performance of communication networks and QoE/QoS evaluation in a large-scale user studies using Experience Sampling Method and Day Reconstruction Methods. The methodology is outlined to perform (practical) measurements in different context of daily life of a mobile user, as opposite to (theoretical) simulations or modeling. The methodology includes detailed steps for objectives determination, system instrumentation, and measurements execution and performance evaluation activities. The tutorial illustrates use of the methodology for performance evaluation of MobiHealth system and its vital sign tele-monitoring service provided to a mobile patient wearing a Wireless Body Area Network and entertainment, information and communication applications evaluated in an large-scale Android users study.