Involvement of end-users - approaches and experiences

John KrogstieWireless Trondheim Living Lab

Professor in Information Systems, NTNU, Trondheim Norway

Research and ”Business”Wireless

Trondheim Access WiFi open air network, with roaming (handover)

and location service. A shared physical infrastructure that can be used by multiple service

providers (ISPs)

Wireless Trondheim Laboratories

Service LabMobile and Locations Based

Services

Network Lab Wireless Access and Network Techn.

Intelligent Transport Systems

Different user-oriented tasks

• Providing user stories • Idea and concept generation • Evaluation of solutions of different levels of

fidelidity

Solution/actor fidelitySolution \

actor- fidelityDeveloper -

testFew proxy

usersFew actual

usersMany proxy

usersMany actual

usersScenario Idea-

generationIdea-

generationPaper

prototypeNA Idea-

generationAcceptance

feedback?Idea-

generationTechnical

mock up Proof-of-

concept prototyping

Functional mock up

Acceptance feedback

Simulated device

Part of development/Heuristic evaluation

Idea generation

Real device in controlled environment

Technical test/heuristic evaluation

Usability test Usability test

Real device in real environment

Technical test/heursitic evaluation

Usability test Usability test Statistical test of acceptance

Mobile shopping assistance using personalization

Acceptance feedback with use of existing user pools

• 200 persons were recruited to perform a TAM (technology acceptance) evaluation.

• A randomly selection of persons, and the persons we selected were in the range of 20-40 years old, and had a 50/50 distribution of male and females.

• The selection were chosen from a Norstat panel and the experiment was run in Norstat’s survey solution.

• Some other personal traits was asked about, including the affinity to ecological food, and to perceived importance of buying healthy food.

• Our personalisation ideas for the experiment were presented as two videos• For each video the participants had to give their opinion using a likert-scale in a

questionnaire that had 13 questions per video • When 200 persons had answered the questions, we got the results from

Norstat, with no identifying information whatsoever, thus not having own issues with privacy (but neither the possibility to follow-up).

MSIS – Mobile Student Information System

Evaluation MSIS

• Recruited student (40-50) by direct contact + ’ads’

• Using real system on devices doing predetermined tasks

• Renumeration by ”lottery”• (alternative used in other cases, recruitment

through student organizations, they are paid per respondent)

• From MSIS to Campus Guide

User-driven innovation of mobile services in Trondheim– example; FindMyFriends-FindPerAnton-FriendRadar

• Mobile social software application • Autumn 2007 during bi-annual student festival• Location tagging of students at the student society, 1661

registered users/tags• Accenture, Sonitor (ultrasound positioning), IBM, NTNU

(follow-up research)• Spring 2008, similar idea tested in Wireless Trondheim with

different outdoor positioning facilities (e.g. wlan positioning)• Secondary school-class as users/testers

Smart City Trondheim

• Collaboration between Trondheim Municipality, Siemens and Bellona

• + 1/10 of the households have signed up, and developed simple energy plans (for how to save on energy usage)

• Involvement of school-children and kindergardens through involvement of the municipality

• http://www.trondheimsmartcity.no/

Summary

• Solution/actor-fidelity• Always a challenge to get involvement of the right

type of users• Use existing services for user-recruitment if possible

(and economically feasible)• Alliances with partners with legitimate contact and

goodwill among users• Needs from research often co-incide with needs from

innovation (but must be though of up front)• Privacy issues