Author(s):

Holmquist, Lars Erik

Title:

Evaluating the Comprehension of Ambient Displays

Publication:

Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Keywords:

ambient displays; awareness; comprehension; discount evaluations; heuristic evaluation

Paper Summary:

The authors introduce an evaluation framework for ambient displays with three levels of comprehension.

Since little work has been done to evaluate ambient displays, the author believes an evaluation framework is needed. Identifying comprehension (how well a user understands) as one important aspect of ambient displays, the author introduces three levels of comprehension:

1. That the information is visualized
2. What kind of information is visualized
3. How the information is visualized

Each stage is a pre-requisite of the next. The author points out that a user must understand that a display contains information, determine what information is provided and identify how to use the system. A user must progress through each stage in order to use a system. With the belief that most design teams assume that users will realize that a display contains information (#1) and understand what information is included (#2), the author believes that design teams need to look more closely as the process of comprehension.

The author concludes that this framework should be used to formulate hypotheses and express results during evaluation of ambient displays.

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