Usability assessment for ubiquitous services: Quantification of the interactivity in inter-personal services

Abstract

For a ubiquitous systems to be widely used, interactions between ubiquitous services and users became critical. Complexity of contents provided to users through ubiquitous service is suggested as the core problem of interactivity. The main objective of this study is to propose an assessment metric for evaluating the usability of u-services. To assess the concept of interactivity with an empirical model, this study suggested a quantitative metric for user testing classifying the interactivity characteristics into four core factors such as contextualization; ubiquity; user experience; and service capability. As a validation study, the suggested assessment metric was utilized to evaluate a u - Home service in South Korea. Priority weighting of each assessment metric was modeled using a statistical technique.