TUMCAT overview

Innovative products and services are characterized by an increased complexity in technology and functionality (see e.g. product development and research in areas like personal networks, intelligent home environments, mobile context-aware services, etc). This increased complexity in technology and functionality has resulted in a shift in User Centered Design (UCD) and research interests. ICT products and services now aim to support much more than just specific user tasks or specific user goals, ICT is applied more flexibly supporting many different aspects of everyday life in highly complex and changing environments (e.g. mobile context-aware services), thereby automatically introducing new research interests like the user experience and variables indicating or influencing this experience (e.g. the user's context, behavior, feelings/emotions, etc). Current UCD and research methods only partially provide the desired insight in these new research interests and many limitations and problems are acknowledged. 

User experience
User experience is a new, broadly defined concept for which there is no standard definition yet, though a lot of research is done on this subject. Designing and measuring a user experience goes beyond researching ICT in terms of usability, task support, task performance, usage characteristics, etc. User experience is the complete experience of a user before, during or after the use of a product or service, directly caused by this product or service, or in the case of an already existing user experience, changed by the usage of the product or service. There are many aspects influencing the user experience. Some aspects are preconditions to create a meaningful user experience, e.g. fulfillment of user needs and desires, usability aspects, etc. Some other aspects give an extra dimension to the user experience (e.g. aesthetics).
Ideally a user experience testbed measures this set of parameters. In order to implement a testbed it is important to define a large number of relevant parameters one may want to measure considering a broad range of mobile and context-aware services and applications.

The Lab environment of TNO, Noldus and SPING and extensions to implement

TNO's ID-Lab is a technical environment that contains several building blocks or modules to quickly realize, implement and provide mobile context aware services and applications. Different building blocks or modules can be combined through e.g. web-sphere interfaces to form service oriented architectures. Modules currently provided by IDLab and available as building blocks for mobile context aware services are: Voice over IP (TTC), Location based services (MILO), RF ID, messaging and notifying (SPING), and different telecom services (click to dial, VPN connections, etc.) provided by the Webtel platform (GnTel). TUMCAT modules integrated in the ID-Lab environment aim to support logging and sensing measurements that are mainly network and application-server oriented. These TUMCAT modules are new building blocks easily integrated in new and existing mobile context aware services through standardized interfaces. They provide data gathering, combining and analysis tools over a multitude of network, application-server and other data sources.

New innovative services of SPING like Push-To-Talk (IMfree), and location based PDA services (IMhere) are building blocks that will be made available for TUMCAT user experience environment. IMfree makes direct voice communication and multiple user interaction with large groups possible and is currently embedded in PNP2008. IMhere and MILO enable location based measurements on mobile devices are possible for the user experience in the natural environment. Click to dial functionality from GnTel's Webtel platform also offers user experience measurement possibilities.

Noldus Information Technology's The Observer XT platform supports human behavior and experience research in (usability) lab environments, and to a limited extent field research (e.g. Pocket The Observer). The Observer XT will be extended with different TUMCAT modules (hardware and software) to better support (new) in situ measurements for user experience through logging and sensing on mobile devices. TUMCAT modules integrated in The Observer XT mainly aim at measuring individual usage of mobile devices and applications, user measurements (physical measurements) and context measurements.  The current implementation of The Observer XT allows researchers to measure a variety of aspects of human activity, behavior and experience. However, this requires a human observer to enter the data. The Observer software supports the design of coding schemes, keyboard or mouse-based data entry, synchronization with audio and video media, and data analysis. Furthermore, researchers can import external event data and continuous signals, e.g. physiological parameters (heart rate, galvanic skin resistance, etc.) or contextual variables (temperature, noise level, etc.), for multimodal visualization and analysis. In the TUMCAT project, new software modules will be developed for automatic logging and sensing of user behavior and experience without the need of a human observer.

Other tools provided by TUMCAT enable the researcher to further filter, combine, analyze and report or visualize data from one or multiple sources. The IDLab will provide the necessary webservices connectivity between IDLab TUMCAT modules and The Observer XT TUMCAT modules for the needed data integration from different sources.