Considering values and cultural aspects in the evaluation of interactive systems prototypes

As interactive systems have left the context of offices and workplaces to pervade every aspect of people´s personal and social lives, evaluating these systems is becoming an increasingly complex challenge. Issues that range from emotional and affective aspects, sociability, and human values, to scalability, security, and performance, are now in play. This situation is very different from all designers and researchers have experienced before. In this paper we focus on the evaluation of interactive systems in the context of the third HCI paradigm, proposing an artifact to support designers in a culturally informed and value-oriented evaluation. To situate our discussion in a practical context, we present a case study where the artifact was used to evaluate seven prototypes of social applications for the Brazilian Interactive Digital Television.