Evaluation Of Early Prototypes For Social Mobile And Pervasive Computing With Scripted Role-Play

As mobile and social computing is integrated with pervasive computing, new potentials for dynamic social and community interactions and sharing of data and services across real and virtual spaces emerge. Whilst including end users in the design, development and evaluation of such complex socio-technical systems is widely recognised as valuable, reliable methods for managing evaluations of medium fidelity prototypes for dynamic pervasive community services are not yet established. Traditional usability evaluation approaches may be insufficient, or too timeconsuming, for user evaluation of these services since the functioning of such complex socio-technical human computer environment ecosystems is dependent on rich data sets, and multiple users engaging in multiple different activities. This paper reports on the use of role play as an experimental approach used in a mixed methods evaluation of early prototypes of enterprise networking services for dynamic pervasive communities in a conference scenario. Evaluation of these medium fidelity conference services with a small set of workshop participants in a short space of time posed a challenge in attempting to define interactions that would ensure users could experience and understand the novel features of the services. We observed that participatory role-play facilitated deeper user engagement with, exploration of, and discussion about, mobile social and pervasive community services for evaluation purposes than would have been possible with traditional usability approaches under our timeconstrained conditions.