Abstract |
Intelligent Environments (IE) have attracted a lot of research interest in the recent years
and are gradually becoming integral part of people's daily lives. Various environments
such as classrooms, meeting rooms, living rooms and kitchens are being enriched with
interactive displays, smart devices and sensors of various kinds, able to identify multiple
users and their activities. As a result, the need to design and implement applications for
IEs has dramatically increased. Nevertheless, unlike traditional applications, which mainly
focus on a single device, interactive applications targeting IEs are expected to be
distributed across various devices in the surrounding space, while numerous factors
influence their behavior, such as implicit or explicit user actions, and the state of the
environment (which might also be affected by user actions). These peculiarities highlight
the necessity for designers to be able to evaluate the overall User Experience early in the
design process, so as to identify potential shortcomings of their application.
Existing interactive prototyping tools assist designers on building their applications for a
single device, offering limited support towards creating distributed interfaces which can be
used simultaneously through multiple devices, while they do not take advantage of the
intelligent environments and their facilities (e.g. smart devices). The handful of studies
addressing this issue either require users to have advanced technical knowledge (e.g.
programming skills) or focus mainly in the very early stages of the design process, which
eventually limits their practicality.
The purpose of this Thesis is to fill this gap by introducing the 'Wizard of AmI', an online
platform for desktops and mobile devices, which supports the design process of
applications for IEs by enabling the creation of interactive, prototype-based, scenarios.
The 'Wizard of AmI' targets designers of interactive context-sensitive (e.g. sensors, smart
services) applications for Intelligent Environments, which can be used via multiple displays
at the same time. Initially, through the system, the designers create the desired user
scenarios by mapping a series of mockups to the environment (i.e. select where and what
to be presented). Next, through a novel graph-inspired interface, they define the flow and
interactivity of the scenario (i.e. when to be presented), while at the end, they can execute
the scenario (a) either virtually or (b) on-site in order to assess the overall User
Experience. During on-site scenario enactment, following the established ‘Wizard of Oz’
technique, the mobile companion app allows designers to control its execution flow on
demand
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