Avaliando a usabilidade de sistemas ubíquos : um estudo sobre os beacons

Abstract

The Ubiquitous Computing has as one of the main objectives, to allow the user to use any device, anytime, anywhere and with easy access to obtain information with quality and effectiveness. And beacons are devices that communicate through sound waves and send notifications to mobile devices, and there may be several purposes, whether for advertising, work or research. Through these new technologies, new challenges arise for the IHC (Human-Computer Interaction) evaluation in order to improve communication between the human being and the machine. And with this, this work seeks to explore the use of applications for beacon, collecting the opinion of people about the first contact with this technology. Two applications were created (University Restaurant (RU) Poll and SolidBits) to integrate into the beacon system and collect opinions about usage. Three evaluation methods (research, observation and inspection) were chosen to carry out this evaluation in order to find greater results on the users’ experience in using this technology. Each application used different methods, RU Poll was used the Heuristic Inspection and Solidbits was applied the Usability Test, only the interview was used in the two evaluations. The results of the evaluations are compared to verify if there were similarities or differences between the errors found. Finally, this work shows the conclusion about the experience that users had when connecting with the beacon device.