Informing the Design of User Studies on Conceptual Interference Frameworks

The problem of interference is likely to be commonplace in deployed ubiquitous computing systems. A conceptual framework was proposed in [1] to help researchers address this problem. Evaluating conceptual frameworks such as this is a challenging task; one approach to do so is to design and conduct user studies of how researchers address interference using such frameworks. In this paper we provide insights on the design of such user studies with the help of a formative evaluation of the framework proposed in [1]. We created a scenario in which different components are deployed and interfere with each other, and asked researchers to identify, describe, and propose solutions to interference in this scenario. We observed two groups of researchers tackling the same problem of interference, one group using the interference framework and the other not using the framework. We build on this evaluation to inform the methodology and the research challenges of future user studies of conceptual interference frameworks.