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Abstract: Context-awareness is becoming an essential functionality of mobile applications. However, it remains challenging to capture the contextual experience in innovation research, since early-stage technologies have not reached maturity to be implemented in a real-life context. Moreover, users have difficulty in evaluating implicit interactions with context-aware interfaces since imagination of users is limited. Assuming that context impacts user experience, virtual reality (VR) provides an untapped potential for the domain of innovation research. The aim of this study (in progress) is to investigate the potential of user tests in virtual reality (here virtual retail store) for human-computer interaction to better match the needs of users and designers. Initially, the mock-up has been implemented in a retail store with its context-awareness being simulated using the Wizard of Oz methodology (N = 18). This approach is found to be time-consuming and not sufficient for evaluating radical context-aware innovations.
Keywords: user experience; context-awareness; implicit HCI; disruptive innovation; Wizard of Oz; virtual reality; retail; user innovation
1Introduction
77% of mobile device users enable location services when asked by an app, which indicates the increasing proliferation of tracking sensors (e.g., gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer) in mobile applications (In The Pocket, 2016). In literature, these applications are coined as "context-aware and self-adaptive technologies" that need to adjust to the user's situations, habits, and intentions, without interrupting and distracting the user (Evers et al., 2014). Dey and Abowd (1999) defined a context-aware system as a technology that "uses context to provide relevant information and/or services to the user, where relevancy depends on the user's task." This implies that context is either explicitly or implicitly indicated by the user, and always related to a user's goals. In addition to explicit HCI, e.g. telling the computer what it is expected to do, these mobile applications are mostly used while doing something else, which is implicit HCI. Implicit HCI is "an action performed by the user that is not primarily aimed to interact with a computerized system but which such a system understands as input" (Schmidt, 2000, p. 192). From a user-centric point of view, this conceptualization is also valuable for investigating contextual user experience.
The shift in these interfaces, and thus new human-computer interactions (HCI), points towards the need for new methodologies to explore the...