User-centred design and evaluation of ubiquitous services

Theoretical and technological progress has revived the interest in the design of services for the support of co-located human-human communication and collaboration, witnessing the start of several large-scale projects over the last few years. Most of these projects focus on meetings and/or lecture situations. However, user-centred design and evaluation frameworks for co-located communication and collaboration are a major concern. In this paper, we summarise the prevalent approaches towards user-centred design and evaluation, and we develop two different services. In one service, participants in a small-group meeting receive real-time feedback about observable properties of the meeting that are directly related to the social dynamics, such as individual amount of speaking time or eye-gaze patterns. In the other service, teachers in a classroom receive real-time feedback about the activities and attention level of participants in the lecture. We also propose ways to address the different dimensions that are relevant to the design and evaluation of these services (the individual, the social and the organisational dimension), bringing together methods from different disciplines.