Juan David Hincapié-Ramos
Aurélien Tabard
Jakob Bardram
ABSTRACT
Infrastructure awareness systems reveal invisible aspects of infrastructures to their existing or potential users. Designing such systems is challenging as it requires making visible the hidden activity of infrastructures while providing information of interest to the users. To address this challenge we introduce the AMC technique (for Awareness Model Cards). This technique relies conceptually on awareness model's concepts of nimbus and focus. The main objective is to match the users' interests to the information the infrastructure awareness systems can provide, through the use of card matching. This technique provides three benefits: 1) evaluate how relevant is the information displayed by infrastructure awareness systems; 2) identify which of users' interests infrastructure awareness systems do not take into account; 3) identify elements of re-design in the infrastructures themselves, so to improve their adoption.
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Index Terms
- Designing for the invisible: user-centered design of infrastructure awareness systems
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Reviews
Egon L. van den Broek
Aiming to develop an infrastructure awareness system, Hincapié-Ramos, Tabard, and Bardram apply card sorting for assessing users' ideas on infrastructures. They relate awareness model cards (AMC)-their method-to Halskov and Dalsg?rd's inspiration cards [1], but the origin can easily be placed more than a half-century earlier. Card sorting is an appealing research paradigm; its simplicity is probably its biggest strength. Since its introduction in the late 1940s, it has shown its usefulness in a number of fields, such as psychology, computer science, and design [2]. Card sorting is used to assess several characteristics of people; in most cases, they have associations as a common denominator. The authors propose two types of cards: focus-that is, users' interests-and nimbus-that is, the information an object projects about itself [3]. The extent to which users' interests and system characteristics map to each other can then be assessed. This is illustrated in a pilot study, but only some qualitative characteristics of this study are provided. Overall, the paper introduces an interesting method founded on existing research paradigms. Its introduction is timely, as it enables the assessment of users' awareness of ambient (invisible) technology. However, validation studies are needed to confirm its usefulness in practice. Online Computing Reviews Service
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