This paper presents design patterns for ubiquitous computing in order to speed up "the diffusion of new interaction techniques and evaluation results from researchers." The design patterns are intended to capture and share design knowledge between practitioners by identifying reoccurring design problems and providing specific solutions.
The authors of this paper created pre-patterns (since design patterns are still emerging) and conducted a study of the pre-patterns in order to learn how designers used the patterns, "in terms of learning about a new domain, communicating with one another, evaluating existing designs and generating designs."
The evaluation of the design patterns consisted of nine pairs of designers (18 in total) and two tasks. The first task consisted of the pairs conducting a heuristic review of a location-aware system. The second task involved users designing a different location-aware system. The nine pairs of designers were divided into two groups; one group had access to the design patterns while the second group did not. Based on the study, the authors observed the following themes:
- Patterns helped novice designers
- Patterns helped designers unfamiliar with the domain
- Patterns helped designers communicate ideas
- Patterns helped designers avoid some design problems
- Patterns did not help with privacy issues
- Designers generally liked the patterns
The authors conducted a second study (with slightly different variables) to compare the results to the first study.
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